Politicized Whodunit

Rating: 6/10 (27 November 2019)

In this politicized whodunit a wealthy family patriarch is found dead in his room. What looks like nothing more than a suicide has an air of foul play once private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) starts digging into it.
This movie is comparable to the likes of Clue or Murder on the Orient Express. At the center is a very astute Sherlock Holmes-like detective and in his midst are many potential suspects.
I wanted to like the movie more because it was funny and it was clever. The politicization was a bit off-putting but that wasn't what I took the most exception with. I had a problem with the main character, or at least the development of the main character.
Sharing much of the screen time with Daniel Craig was Ana De Armas playing Marta Cabrera, the nurse of the deceased patriarch, Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer). We learned through intermittent exposition that she was the nurse and friend of Harlan Thrombey. We also learned that she was the purest character in the movie and it irked me.
While the Thrombey family was primarily self-centered a-holes Marta was so angelic that she couldn't even tell a lie without vomiting. That brought about some laughs, but when combined with her overall character it made her sickeningly saintly. When Harlan predictably left his entire estate to her I kept wondering when she would reveal her true colors because no one is this pure of heart.
As a matter of principle, I didn't have a problem with Harlan leaving his wealth to his nurse. There have been movies like that in which an unlikely but deserving character inherits the wealth. But the manner in which Marta was made the heir was too raw and undeveloped. There was not enough backstory and character development between the two of them to make that action a readily acceptable action. We only got a five minute scene in order to see the close relationship between Harlan and Marta, which is not nearly enough. With the absence of several scenes to show their closeness and Harlan's distance from his own family, the willing of his wealth to her was rather flat. It came off as odd or eccentric as opposed to well thought out and intentional. It was thrust in there so abruptly that I was sure Marta was playing all of them.
In fact, I would have liked the movie even more if the hardworking, overlooked, and underestimated Latina was playing a role just to get rich. It would've fit far more than the hardworking nurse with a heart of gold that got an inheritance because a wealthy old man took a liking to her.
I'm not eliminating the possibility that Marta did play Harlan and the entire family. There was a hint of such a scheme at two points I can remember.
At one point there was a scene in which Harlan told Marta that he did what she told him and cut them all off. It was a brief exchange but it could have been a hint that Marta was pulling the strings.
Then there was the end when she was sipping from the mug which read, "My House, My Rules, My Coffee"-- it could have been her smug, "I just played all of you" moment. But it was hard to tell.
As murder mysteries go, this was decent. You come to expect the unexpected so I wasn't blown away. The cast was great, if only the flawless character wasn't so flawless.