"Knives Out" and "Ready or Not"

Thematically, these movies are two peas in a pod. They're both about families of terrible rich people who find their privilege threatened, and spend much of the movie trying to dispatch a female outsider who they view as a threat. One happens to be a murder mystery, and the other a pulpy horror film.

Rian Johnson's "Knives Out" is a delightful rarity - a modern day whodunnit with a big cast and a big house that plays out like an old Agatha Christie mystery crossed with a Hitchcock thriller. There is a sleuth, of course, Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), who is hired to investigate the death of mystery novelist Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), who leaves behind a large family of rich assholes, and one nervous young nurse, Marta (Ana De Armas), who knows more than she's letting on. The ensemble includes Don Johnson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Chris Evans, Katherine Langford, and Toni Collette as members of the Thrombey family, plus Lakeith Stanfield and Noah Segan as police officers.

The plotting is sometimes a little too convoluted, and not all of the humor worked for me, but this is the most consistently enjoyable film that Rian Johnson has made yet. What he got right are the dialogue and characters, colorful and larger than life, with an ensemble that has a fantastic time clashing and playing off of each other. Craig is having a ball as a bloviating southern gentleman sleuth with a Foghorn Leghorn accent. Evans treads a very thin line between malevolent smarmy dick and redeemable smarmy dick. Plummer and de Armas manage to give the story a little heart, and thus real stakes. And at first I thought Stanfield was being wasted as the exasperated straight man to Blanc's antics - but he kept consistently getting the biggest laughs.

Through them, Johnson pokes a little fun at current American politics - but not too much. Mostly, he's calling out the ugly hypocrisies and cruelties of the Thrombey clan while happily playing with all the familiar pieces of a murder mystery. Elements like unreliable testimony, secret messages, disguises, and mistaken identity all get trotted out, some to be subverted, some to be given a twist. There's even a "stupidest car chase ever." The tone is light and snarky, and the movie never stops being fun. And good for Rian Johnson - he needed a win like this after the whole "Star Wars" mess.

Now, let's jump genres over to "Ready or Not," which sees another well-to-do clan, the Le Domas family, assembling for an important event. Lovely Grace (Samara Weaving) has just married long estranged son Alex (Mark O'Brien). Tradition dictates that she has to play a game with the family the night after the wedding, the specific game to be decided by drawing cards. Of course, Grace picks the wrong card, and find herself trying to escape the whole murderous lot of them in a sadistic game of hide and seek. Lots of blood and gore result, but there are also a lot of laughs, as the Le Domases are mostly a gang of spoiled, incompetent reprobates who have no idea what they're doing.

Adam Brody, Henry Czerny, and Andie MacDowell lead the rest of the ensemble, as Alex's brother, father, and mother respectively. Nobody does much real heavy lifting, as the film is built around its scare and action sequences, but they get in their juicy little moments of nastiness and villainy. Samara Weaving, however, is definitely making a play for stardom. She's easy to root for, and really sells all the physicality and cringiness and disgust of the body horror. Also, she has an amazing set of lungs. The film flirts with becoming a total cartoon, especially the splatterific ending, but there's enough substance in the performances and the social satire to keep it a notch above your average gorefest. I especially like the film's jabs at "innocent" kids.

"Ready or Not" was directed by the team of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, and scripted by relative newcomers Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy. There are a lot of little awkward moments, and bits of story that seem to be missing - there's clearly more going on with the butler (John Ralston) that what we see - but all in all "Ready or Not" is a fun, murderous romp. Its messages and ideas are handled much more bluntly than "Knives Out," but then everything else is too, and that's the point.
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