[ad_1]
See How They Run (PG13)
98 minutes, opens on Thursday
3 stars
The story: London’s West End, 1953. A murder most foul is committed backstage during a reception celebrating the 100th performance of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. Whodunit?
See How They Run is not only a movie about a homicide set within a play about a homicide, but it is also about the 1945 manslaughter that inspired this long-running stage production.
It is very meta.
British director Tom George is not as clever as he thinks. But his retro murder mystery, a feature debut, is certainly a diverting trifle that both pays homage to and spoofs the hoary genre tropes.
The victim is Adrien Brody’s crass Hollywood film-maker, in town to negotiate adapting The Mousetrap.
“It’s always the most unlikable character that gets killed first,” he explains in a self-aware post-death narration.
Everyone in the dramatis personae has a motive for wanting him dead. There is a young Richard Attenborough (Harris Dickinson), star of the original show, and the fun is in picking out such real-life personalities from their fictional counterparts like the pompous screenwriter (David Oyelowo).
Even more fun is the classic odd-couple partnership of Sam Rockwell’s jaded, alcoholic Scotland Yard detective Inspector Stoppard and Saoirse Ronan’s eager chatterbox constable. The name Stoppard references playwright Tom Stoppard, who parodied The Mousetrap in The Real Inspector Hound (1968), while Ronan is funny and endearing as a wide-eyed rookie starstruck by the assembled showbiz glitterati.
The two coppers are put on the case. They go sleuthing, gathering finally with the suspects at a country manor amid a snowstorm as if they were in an Agatha Christie story – which they are, sort of. The corpses pile up, as do the theatre in-jokes.
Hot take: Agatha Christie would be amused.
Smile (M18)
[ad_2]
Source link