While there are plenty of great murder mystery movies out there, 2019’s Daniel Craig vehicle Knives Out is one of the best of the last decade. Daniel Craig’s long screen career has seen the actor star in a diverse array of projects. 1998’s masterpiece Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon provided the actor with his breakout role, but it was 2004’s one-two punch of Layer Cake and Enduring Love that truly cemented his status as a star.
Although Craig enjoyed a supporting role in the earlier blockbuster Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, it was his 2004 success that saw him cast as James Bond in 2006’s reboot Casino Royale. Craig’s James Bond movies dragged the campy spy franchise into the 21st century with a gritty, dark re-imagining of 007. Thus, it came as something of a shock when Craig’s next move was to take on the leading role in a series of comedic murder mysteries.
Fortunately, this gamble paid off. Director Rian Johnson’s Knives Out movies soon became some of Craig’s most widely beloved projects, and many called his scene-stealing Southern detective Benoit Blanc an even better creation than Craig’s take on Bond. However, while 2022’s Glass Onion and 2025’s Wake Up Dead Man both had their charms, the sad reality is that neither of these sequels truly lived up to the potential of 2019’s Knives Out, a near-perfect murder mystery that remains a highlight in the genre’s recent history.
2019’s Knives Out Is A Murder Mystery Masterpiece
On the face of it, Knives Out could have been an insultingly straightforward Agatha Christie pastiche. When a fabulously wealthy crime novelist is found dead, every member of his extended, dysfunctional family is a suspect. Whether the culprit is his spendthrift daughter, his resentful eldest son, his playboy grandson, or his seemingly sweet maid is up to the viewer to decide. The arrival of Craig’s quirky, outspoken detective, whose strange personality masks an almost superhuman eye for detail, is another nostalgic nod to Christie’s well-worn Poirot formula.
However, Knives Out wrong-foots viewers immediately when, before viewers have a chance to guess the killer and their motives, the entire story is revealed. Ana de Armas’ saintly maid Marta accidentally killed her employer with a lethal dose of morphine and, in an attempt to ensure she wasn’t imprisoned for his death, the author slit his throat to allay the suspicions of investigators. It takes Craig’s super detective no time at all to surmise this complicated chain of events, meaning viewers are left with no idea where Johnson’s murder mystery can go after Act One comes to a close.
This ingenious twist on the familiar murder mystery formula makes the movie a masterpiece, as Johnson continues to utilize the family’s colorful characters as puzzle pieces in an increasingly complicated game of deceit. With a starry cast that includes Chris Evans, Toni Collette, Jamie Lee Curtis, LaKeith Stanfield, and Christopher Plummer, among others, Knives Out has no shortage of compelling characters. However, since viewers seemingly know who killed the victim and how, the audience doesn’t suspect them of foul play despite their obvious motives.
Knives Out Deconstructs The Murder Mystery Genre (And Puts It Back Together)
Thus, Knives Out functions as a unique sort of reverse whodunit wherein working out what the mystery actually is proves as important as discovering the culprit. This is where the later Knives Out movies fall short, as it would be a tall order for any director to reinvent the genre’s blueprint more than once. Both Glass Onion and Wake Up Dead Man use convoluted plot mechanics to reveal that they are more than mere murder mysteries, but these almost inevitably feel more forced and clumsy than the original movie’s ingeniously simple twist on the formula.
Johnson’s attempts to revisit the world of Knives Out are both fun, and Craig remains a hoot throughout the entire trilogy. However, even though both sequels have some inspired scenes, their shared central issue is an inability to replicate the sheer novelty value of the original 2019 movie’s narrative structure. Knives Out is a murder mystery where viewers seemingly know who the killer is from the start, and neither Glass Onion nor Wake Up Dead Man has a storyline this simple and intriguing.
Johnson’s debut movie, Brick, which transplants a classic hardboiled noir story to a high school setting, explains just why Knives Out became such a standalone instant classic. Although Brick boasts a string of superb central performances and a genuinely compelling mystery story at its core (one that arguably even makes more sense than any of the Knives Out movies), that’s not the reason the movie propelled Johnson to the A-list. Instead, it is the simplicity of its premise, that of a noir movie in high school, played completely straight, that makes Brick sing.
Neither Of Knives Out Sequels Could Replicate The Original Movie’s Perfect Story
Like Knives Out, Brick’s reputation as a cult classic would almost certainly have suffered if Johnson had tried to make a sequel to the movie in the 21 years that followed. While Johnson’s later Peacock series Poker Face consistently came up with fresh remixes of the Columbo setup, the shorter runtime of TV episodes ensured that this streaming series rarely got trapped in the narrative quagmires that sank Glass Onion and Wake Up Dead Man.
It is telling that the character comedy of the Knives Out sequels works about as well as the 2019 original’s cutting satire, and the casts of all three movies are unimpeachable. Thus, it really is the murder mystery plotting specifically that lets down the later installments, and this is largely because the narrative innovation of Knives Out was the sort of clever trick that could only work once.
Netflix’s Next Agatha Christie Mystery Shows Knives Out How It’s Done
Netflix’s star-studded Agatha Christie adaptation brings a classic murder mystery to life, with a key difference from the Knives Out movies.
Daniel Craig’s take on Blanc means that all three Knives Out movies are worth a watch, and even the weakest outing in the series, Glass Onion, merits a repeat viewing thanks to its funny dialogue. However, Johnson’s ability to refresh the tired, over-familiar tropes of the murder mystery genre petered out after 2019’s original Knives Out, meaning that neither of the movie’s two sequels was able to truly replicate its success.
- Release Date
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November 27, 2019
- Runtime
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131 minutes
- Producers
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Ram Bergman
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