See How They Run (2022) By the time this wink-wink, sly little homage to Agatha Christie winds down, you might find yourself still smiling a bit......but left wondering, "That's it? That's all there is?"
I don't mind a movie that wallows in its own perceived cleverness.....(a quality that director Wes Anderson built his entire career on).....but I do mind such a film when surrenders to simple farce and leans too heavily on the frantic behavior of its quirky characters to do the heavy lifting for it.
And that's what leaves my final impression of "See How They Run" as nothing more than.....modestly amusing.....from time to time.
The meta trope here involves "The Mousetrap", Dame Aggie's stage play murder mystery that managed to run continuously for decades and decades......to the point where the play itself (which never was any great shakes, to be honest) became as much a Brit institution as the Tower Of London and Big Ben.
We join the stage production in its prime, mid 1950's London, where it stars none other than Dickie Attenborough (yes, that one). A wiseass Hollywood producer Leo Kapnurnick (Adrian Brody) plans to make a "Mousetrap" movie version (which, incredibly, never actually happened in real life). But plans go awry when Leo's found dead, clobbered by a pair of skis.
Enter our reliable, relentless Scotland Yard investigative team.....the bubbly young Constable Stalker (Saoiarse Ronan, the film's always delightful MVP) and her weary deadpanned-in-the-extreme Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell).
Through most of the film, Ronan and Rockwell perform like a precision, British comedy team. Constable Stalker, to her own embarrassment, favors terrible inappropriate jokes and puns, which Stoppard takes in his stride and sometimes even finds funny.
And you can almost hear screenwriter Mark Chappel patting himself on the back for engineering the film's central gimmick......turning the "Mousetrap" stage play into a virtually identical murder mystery.....thereby turning the play's actors into the same kind of suspects they perform on stage......
To dial up the cleverness factor even more, the cast all end up at Agatha Christie's country estate......whose main drawing room looks just like the single set location of "The Mousetrap". With the usual pile of reveals and explanations (but not the end of "The Mousetrap", if you're worried), the murder mystery ensemble of actors frantically carry on like the characters they portray on stage......until the murder's unmasked.
In description, that sounds like the movie swung for the fences....but not really. Not much wit is left by that time, except for the half-hearted attempts to duplicate that elusive tinker-toy, snow globe quality of a West Anderson film like "The French Dispatch" or "The Grand Budapest Hotel".
I'm generously handing out 3 stars (***), mainly for Saoirse Ronan's motormouthed, very funny portrayal of a formidable young girl the perfectly balances against Rockwell's deft underplaying.......
Fun to be had here, for sure, but could've been way better.
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