Why was this so hyped?

Rating: Null/10 (21 April 2020)

I don't get all the love for this movie. I mean it certainly starts off well enough, introducing a big cast of great actors playing what look to be some pretty interesting characters, but unfortunately all these potential-filled characters fade into the background pretty quickly and the majority of the film is just the adventures of Ana De Armas and Chris Evans in what has to be one of the worst murder mysteries I've ever seen.
That's huge mistake #1: Pushing the majority of the cast to the side, which not only deprives the audience of all those interesting characters, but also has the side effect of making it very obvious that all these sidelined characters are in fact not suspects at all.
Huge mistake #2: The movie then shows us explicitly exactly how Christopher Plummer's character died. The mystery is ruined before it even really starts because we know already know almost everything there is to know very early on except for which member of the family somehow caused this incident, but then...
Huge mistake #3: After De Armas is revealed to be the scapegoat protagonist, all of the suspects are quickly pushed aside like I said before...all except Chris Evans, the black sheep of the family who out of nowhere decides he's going to be nice and help her prove her innocence! GEE! I WONDER WHY HE WOULD DO THAT? WHO COULD THE KILLER BE I WONDER? Since these two are now almost the sole focus of the rest of the movie they are now the only two possibilities SO GEE WHICH ONE OF THEM COULD IT BE? HMMM
Huge mistake #4: The finale. After we learn that the "killer" is in fact the one painfully obvious suspect we're treated to a ridiculously contrived explanation for how the things we already know happened happened. It's so unnecessarily convoluted and changes almost nothing about what we already know happened to the victim. It's just a small, pointless piece of emotional manipulation to make us feel extra sympathy for someone who was already the sympathetic wrongly-accused-of-murder protagonist. It just feels like an empty non-twist.
I give Johnson a little credit for the stylish setup and interesting cast of characters, both of which had a lot of potential, but not credit much since it's all completely wasted on a generic, predictable, bargain bin mystery with no real substance. This is a 5 or 6 out of 10 at best.