Rian Johnson might be the most likable filmmaker on Earth. You could hate every single film he’s ever made, but I’d defy you to hate the man himself. There’s an ineffable buoyancy to his work, a boundless, uncynical enthusiasm. He never panders, never insults his audience’s intelligence nor wastes their time. Every picture he makes is a fence swing.
This being said, Johnson’s oeuvre has, up to this point, fallen neatly into two categories: the ones you love despite their flaws (“Looper,” “Brick,” “The Last Jedi”), and the ones you try to love but the flaws win out (also “The Last Jedi,” “The Brothers Bloom”). I’m going to walk you briefly through his movies up to this point, then I’ll get to what I thought of his new one.
Rian’s scripts have a tendency to trip over their own feet. Like Christopher Nolan, he enjoys complexity, but also like Nolan, that complexity can become a crutch in the late second act when the writer isn’t sure where they want to go. “Brick” leans into this, wearing its inscrutable nature like a badge of honor. It’s a fun movie, but effective only as a lark and a tone poem. Its million dollar hook (high school murder mystery where everyone talks like they’re in a 20s noir) runs off with the picture.
His follow-up, “The Brothers Bloom,” was a dry-run for “Knives Out.” It belongs to the “con man” genre, a siren that lures many talented filmmakers in, but shipwrecks most of them in overthought nonsense. Johnson gamely tried to build a new mousetrap, and although the filmmaking is extraordinary (for pure photographic composition it’s his best movie), the story never sinks in. An old writing professor of mine used to ask us if we’d care if our characters got hit by a truck on the next page. For “Bloom,” the answer was “no.”
“Looper” is where things got really interesting. A time-traveling hitman thriller with a concept too clever by half, it had an absurd plot, some wonky special effects, and more than its fair share of trope. And yet, for a while, it was his best movie, because the characters clicked. Emily Blunt and Joseph Gordon-Levitt had a deeply affecting doomed romance. Jeff Daniels brought weary pathos to one of the villains (he has a dialog scene with JGL early on that’s still the best scene Johnson’s written). Bruce Willis was the perfect distance between sincere and psychotic. The movie had feels. That’s why people loved it. The webs of plot were still there, sure, but no one remembers that stuff when they leave the theater, and it felt like Rian was learning that.
And then, of course, we have “The Last Jedi” is probably the most controversial movie of the last thirty years. Even the prequel trilogy wasn’t this hotly contested (maybe because there weren’t many good arguments in its defense). He’ll never admit it, but read between the lines and it’s pretty clear that JJ Abrams hated it so much that he came back to “Star Wars” to right the ship for the final entry. I’m not going to go down the rabbit hole of “is TLJ good” right now, but I WILL say that the things people hate about it aren’t really flaws, they’re choices. And if you ask me, they were valid choices, backed by logic and more or less necessitated by the plot hand-off that “The Force Awakens” provided.
(NOTE: You always have to criticize a writer or director on a movie this big with some caveats. Remember that for all you know, they were forced to make choices they did not want to. These movies are massive kitchens with a lot of cooks.)
TLJ is probably more infuriating to those poor souls who hadn’t been following Johnson’s career to that point. If, like me, you’d been watching since “Brick,” nothing that transpired on that screen was a surprise. Nor was I the slightest bit unprepared for the storm of conflicting emotions I had leaving the theater. I LOVED so much of it so powerfully, but there were stretches (the casino planet, the underwritten character of Rose) that I disliked with almost equal passion. This is a feeling I’m well familiar with by now. I greeted it with a warm, familiar smile. It’s the Rian Johnson special.
Or at least… it was. Until “Knives Out” happened.
“Knives Out” is (functionally) perfect. It’s Rian Johnson’s masterpiece, his best work by a mile, and one of the best times I’ve had at a movie all year. It’s the moment when his extraordinary talent finally outruns his bad habits. I said above that his movies had two categories, well now there’s a third: masterpieces. This is one.
It’s very hard to write about a movie when there’s nothing really wrong with it. I don’t… I mean… he took an idea and executed it as perfectly as I could’ve hoped for. He made something fun, funny, exciting, scary, unpredictable (although you’ll have an idea where it’s going). It’s just a delight. Sure, it’s deeply indebted to Agatha Christie, but not slavishly so. The story takes some structural turns that are not pro forma for a murder mystery, and they all work beautifully.
I can’t say for sure, but it looked like the whole cast was just having fun for this whole thing. Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Daniel Craig, Laiketh Stanfield, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette, they’re all just biting into this thing. Everyone here, including Johnson, made their bones on big-budget, high-stress, massive-stakes tentpole franchise stuff. “Knives Out” feels like all these supremely talented people taking a day off, relaxing and having fun. Getting back to the basics.
See “Knives Out.” Just see it. I’m ordering you to see it. If you don’t like it, you and I are different people. And you’re wrong.