Another loud klang from the death knell for American movies

Rating: 1/10 (27 December 2019)

First of all: who is responsible for letting this mess drag on for a totally unnecessary 130 minutes? They need to be fired for incompetence.
So we have a gathering at a large country estate of a wealthy family celebrating the 80th birthday of its patriarch and source of income to all. He is discovered dead with his throat slashed the next morning. Enter the police and a private detective. Every family member and household servant is a suspect.
Does this sound a bit predictable? Haven't we seen endless variations on this formula before? Except that here it starts to sag not long after the entrance of the police and - especially - once the private detective opens his mouth, it never recovers.
While there is fine work (as always) from the great Christopher Plummer, almost everyone else seems out of place or uncomfortable with their roles.
Chris Evans is an embarrassment and needs to stick to being a comic book character. He is clearly capable of nothing more.
What totally kills this piece of fluff is the unimaginable casting of Daniel Craig (who is not aging well; he certainly can afford some work on his now-drooping eyes) as Benoit Blanc, the world-renowned private detective, profiled in The New Yorker. With that name, you'd expect someone eccentric, a bit humorous, and perhaps with a French accent.
But no. Craig sounds like Lindsay Graham trying to speak with a British accent, but an octave lower His endless repeats of the facts of the alleged murder are nauseating and so distracting that I spent one entire scene trying to identify the soprano singing an aria from "La traviata" in the background. I just had to tune him out.
And then I checked the time again and found that the big reveal - typical in such a formulaic movie - of the family being gathered for the final evidence to be presented and the murderer named occurs some 20 minutes before it actually collapses and dies.
With the other American movies mentioned this year for possible Oscar nominations or the actual Golden Globe nominations, I have officially lost all interest and trust in films from that country. The best English-language films I saw this year are from Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, and they will likely be shut out of competitions in favour of the empty twilight endeavours of the likes of Tarantino and, more so, Scorsese.
My biggest takeaway from this garbage is that I have to get Anna Netrebko's album of Verdi arias!