A Surprisingly clever mystery that's not AS political as it seems

Rating: 8/10 (27 January 2020)

It's safe to assume that Rian Johnson polarizes people. He's a pretty decent writer who unfortunately can bog his script with some bad ideas. The ending of Looper and certain elements of The Last Jedi come to mind. However, his writing proves to be strong when everything works. And Knives Out works.
A revival of the whodunit genre, Knives Out brings back some of the classic tropes of the murder mystery with a script that leaves little unused. A lot of elements, albeit not all, serve a purpose and come back to play an important part. Overall, I hope to see a franchise revolving around Benoit Blanc's cases.
Blanc (Daniel Craig) is brought in to solve the murder of a family patriarch (Christopher Plummer). The suspects include his children (Jamie Lee Curtis, Toni Collette, Chris Evans, and Michael Shannon), their loved ones (Don Johnson, Katherine Wilford) and the caretaker Marta (Ana de Alvas). The family members have their motives, but only one person is guilty of murder.
The script takes the tropes of British mystery genres and gives them an American setting: the wealthy family members, an inheritance, the butler/maid, the rebellious children, and the gentleman detective. Daniel Craig really enjoys playing this role, and I wouldn't want to see anyone else play this. The movie does lag a bit in the middle, but you start to see everything come together in a way that really surprised me. A lot of pieces serve as obvious symbolism or even return as a Chekhov's gun, but that's the fun of the whodunit: you want to see how every piece is played. The game of Go, the knives, even the dialogue serve a purpose.
So there's a caveat that needs to be addressed and others will find in this film: the movie makes some heavy political jabs. A character's son is described as an "alt-right troll" and a nazi; another character's daughter is an SJW; there's a scene where everyone is arguing about Trump and illegal immigration. I, too, am getting tired of woke cinema lecturing Americans about how to vote. Hollywood has been deep in the Democrats' coffers and has made it clear that Andrew Breitbart was right - politics IS downstream from culture. Yet, the political tones aren't really as deep as some here have made it. At least, I didn't get a sense of lecturing from this film. The argument exists because Marta's mom is undocumented, and it foreshadows how the family will come after her near the end. But even the liberal characters, lifestyle guru Joni and her daughter, aren't shown as sympathetic characters. The former acts virtuous with her diatribes about "locking children in cages", but even she will throw someone under the bus for money. The alt-right grandson and granddaughter show no real signs of these labels; if no one said anything, you wouldn't really know. And you understand that the victim's intentions weren't political at all. It would be one thing if Joni was depicted as the voice of reason or in the right as Rose was supposed to be, but she wasn't. And this needs to be highlighted.
I've seen woke cinema - The Intern, BlacKkKlansman, Captain Marvel, The Last Jedi. Even the new Little Women makes woke statements. But if the phrase "go woke, go broke" works 8 times out of 10, Knives Out is in the lucky 20%. Just know that just because it throws politics around doesn't necessarily mean it's political.