Writer/director Rian Johnson certainly hasn’t lost his fiendishly macabre touch.
Although it runs a bit too long, this third entry in the Knives Out series is another gleeful descent into depraved behavior, with a stellar cast dropped into the middle of a twisty whodunit. Orchestrating its slow unraveling, as before, is Daniel Craig’s idiosyncratic private detective, Benoit Blanc.
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| Under the watchful gaze of Police Chief Scott (Mila Kunis) and Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O'Connor, right), Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) examines an unexpected clue. |
But we don’t meet Blanc until the second act. Employing his usual penchant for non-linear storytelling, Johnson first introduces us to ex-boxer turned devout young priest Jud Duplenticy (John O’Connor), who regards himself as “young, dumb and full of Christ.” He narrates earlier events while writing … what? A witness statement? A confession? A memoir?
Duplenticy lives with the burden of having killed a fellow fighter during his boxing days, the shame of which drove him into the priesthood. But his temper still gets away from him at times, most recently resulting in a “reprimand” that finds him sent to Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, in upstate New York’s Chimney Rock (shades of Stephen King!).
He’s assigned to assist firebrand Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), who rules this tiny parish with a blend of charismatic smarm and thundering, shock-and-awe sermons. In short, he’s a sadistic bully … and proud of it.
The primary members of his flock — those who tolerate or cater to Wicks’ whims, or (worse yet) believe in his God-given powers — include:
• staunchly faithful church-goer Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close);
• tightly wound lawyer Vera Draven (Kerry Washington);
• town doctor Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner);
• bestselling author Lee Ross (Andrew Scott);
• aspiring politician Cy Draven (Daryl McCormack);
• wheelchair-bound concert cellist Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeney); and
• circumspect groundskeeper Samson Holt (Thomas Haden Church).
he created and chaperoned with artist Luciano Lima and writers Fred Van Lente and Andrew Foley. The basic premise is so beguiling, that it's amazing nobody else thought of it first: What if, instead of repeatedly bothering post-WWII Earth, extraterrestrials had arrived 100 years earlier?
; the aliens in this tale are brutish, nasty and Up To No Good. They think nothing of kidnapping hapless Earthers and then studying them at great length. 
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) obviously recognizes the power of Craig's noteworthy feature; the camera certainly cuts to the man's eyes often enough. Maybe too often: It's one of a few "movie star hiccups" that occasionally pulls us out of the otherwise fascinating story being told in this WWII drama. 
last spring, I remain fascinated by the number of compelling "new" stories — not really new at all, of course; merely unheralded until now — that continue to emerge from that most horrible time in German/European history. 
of the same title, eschew the usual cliché of Jews as complacent victims waiting in ghettos and death camps, to focus instead on a group of resourceful Eastern European civilians who fought back: courageously, cleverly and for the duration of the war. 
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, has been making the rounds even as this newest Bond adventure explodes on screens across the world. 
, though, the much-welcomed series reboot isn't limited merely to the actor whom naysayers once foolishly dismissed as "the blond Bond"; scripters Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade have built another ground-level thriller as far removed from the cartoon megalomania of (for example) 
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as could be imagined. 
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