superrific
Master of the ZZLverse
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I just watched it last night. I'm not a "murder mystery" person so I don't take any special interest in the whole clue-unraveling, solve-it-yourself aspect of the film. If that's your jam, I have nothing to say. As a movie, I felt it was fairly poor, though not without redeeming features:
The Good:
1. Josh O'Connor. Actually, everything about that character was good. The character was written well. The acting was pitch-perfect. The actor allowed the character's depth to pour onto the screen, which is an achievement given that everyone else is a shallow caricature.
2. The setting. Rian Johnson does use the gothic cathedral backdrop to great effect. No question there, even if he did rip off a scene from Dracula. But . . .
3. There was one other acting performance that was excellent but to say it ruins the ending.
The Not-Good.
4. Rian Johnson said that he grew up Evangelical but he used Catholicism because of the aesthetic effect, that the churches of his childhood looked like "Pottery Barns." I agree with the aesthetic choice, but he probably should have updated the script. Nothing about the church feels Catholic at all, starting from the fact that a) it was founded by a rich guy; who b) was the priest until he died; and c) passed the priest position to his descendants; and d) seemingly operated completely outside the Catholic hierarchy. That is the profile of a non-denominational evangelical church. Everything about the church, other than its cathedral (origins mysterious), is modern-day Calvinist.
5. I guess one problem with murder mysteries is that the characters can never be well drawn, since the whole point is to obscure their real motivations. So maybe this is a genre complaint . . . but the characters are incredibly weak.
6. The casting of Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc has always puzzled me. The character is written as some sort of New Orleans patrician who solves mysteries almost as a hobby, so why the hell would you get a British guy to play the role? At least in the first movie, Craig tried to play Blanc as a character instead of as a dialogue delivery device, but in this film, he's terrible. Blanc has lost all distinctiveness, and nothing about him is relevant to the movie at all. You could have plugged in any rando detective and the movie would have been the same. Bad look for the so-called leading man.
7. The MAGA angle is far too strong and on-the-nose. Normally, I'd be in favor of using a format like this to explore the ramifications of a political movement, but there's absolutely nothing sly or clever about this, in part because there is nothing sly or clever about MAGA. But it's a dead dead dead horse. All the time spent watching Brolin do ordinary MAGA stuff and pretend it's some sort of biting commentary could have been used to explore why Wicks was the person he was. He could have been an interesting character; instead, he's a cult-of-personality.
I guess Rian Johnson has always preferred over-explanation to subtlety or wit. He makes movies the way I post on message boards-- which, to be clear, is not how I would make movies.
8. This is really a minor point, but how the fuck did the young priest mount the new cross by himself?
