Not bad but certainly overrated

Rating: 5/10 (9 March 2020)

Add me to the list of people who went into this with high expectations (after having read so much praise about it) and came out of it utterly disappointed.
In terms of production value, it's not a bad movie -- good cinematography, genre-appropriate production design, suitable music, big-name cast (though heavily underused) and so on.
But what matters most in this genre is a good story, a clever crime and cues that give viewers something to think about throughout the film, and a resolution that puts all the pieces of the puzzle together and provides a satisfactory conclusion. Sadly, the opposite happens here.
The story doesn't know what it wants to do and feels like four different drafts of a script were mashed into one. It begins like the classic whodunnit where you have a whole group/family of suspects, all of them with motives, and you need to figure out who's lying and why -- except that after the introduction of all the family members, most of them get tossed aside and will only be cardboard characters without much significance for the rest of the movie.
Instead, the second part now shifts the focus to the young nurse who found the deceased family patriarch (who happened to be a famous author of, you guessed it, crime novels). And we get to spend about 45 minutes only with the nurse's part of the story -- and the mystery behind the death is revealed. It was all just an accident with some switched medication, but in his dying moments, the patriarch decides to make it look like a suicide in order to protect his beloved nurse friend because she's an immigrant and her mother could get deported and so on and on.
At this point, a viewer with high expectations is thinking "okay, no, it can't be this simple? The nurse is probably playing a long con and has only pretended to accidentally switch the medication... or maybe the crime author is playing a game with her and just faking it all because, after all, we've never seen a closeup of the dead body, nor the funeral, nor his actual death..."
Sadly, this is not where the movie is going. Instead, the third part of this script mashup begins and the one remaining family member who hasn't been ruled out completely by this point conveniently shows up and becomes part of the story -- and he's such an ass in such a non-subtle way that a viewer with high expectations is praying to the crime story gods that Rian Johnson will have something better up his sleeve than what he's telegraphing in this part of the story -- but, nope. It turns out, this ass whom we've barely seen throughout the first half of the movie did indeed want the family patriarch dead and had a hand in this not-so-accidental switch of medication.
Which leads us to the final part of the script, in which Rian Johnson desperately tries bring this mess to a good conclusion -- and fails. By now, everything is way too convoluted: It was an accident that turned into a fake suicide that turned out to have been an attempted murder that eventually led to a real murder of the family's housemaid who had figured out the real murderer (who had actually only attempted the murder) and therefore invited him into a deserted laundromat (because that's definitely where you want to meet alone with a killer!) where he wanted to kill her but he once again messed up and didn't properly kill her so she was still alive when the nurse arrived in order to meet with someone blackmailing her about the crime she hadn't committed, and she saves the housemaid's life but as a consequence has to turn herself in for a crime she didn't commit only for the detective to suddenly figure it all out and the not-yet-an-actual-killer giving them a detailed confession right before the housemaid dies in the hospital so that we now have a real murder and a real confession from an actual killer.... or something.
If you thought this last paragraph was impossible to follow along and annoyingly written, then congrats, that's like how I felt when the detective gave his endless monologue at the end of the movie explaining the whole crime.
Long story short: This movie isn't well written. It's not the entertaining detective story/whodunnit mystery that it wants to be. At its core, it's yet another story about a patriarch changing his last will and getting killed by a disgruntled heir. But this simple plot is buried under a convoluted mess of coincidences and side-plots that don't really matter much in the end.
The biggest mystery of "Knives Out" is why so many people praised it and why it's even getting a sequel. When that comes out, I'll be watching something else.