[SATIRE] Movie Review: Knives Out

Long stretches of slapstick comedy can't save this disastrous and embarrassing newest entry into the Knives Out movie franchise

See Notes for image credits

By Ruminato Film Critic Wesley Williams Jennings Bryan Hutchinson XIV

When your kids and grandkids grow up, one of the first things they’ll ask you is, “Who ruined the ‘Knives Out’ movie franchise?

The answer, of course, will be director Mel Gibson, whose production company, Roadkill Enterprises, took over the successful franchise and has issued a reboot so horrifyingly tasteless that you’ll need a shower after watching it.

Remember, this is the guy who thought it would be a good idea to bludgeon the ultimate Peacemaker and graphically depict his torture to unsuspecting Christians in the body horror flick, “The Passion of Christ,” which was well received by fundamentalist Christians (who love a good cross burning, among other dances in the dark) but pretty much reviled everywhere else.

Gibson has rebooted “Knives Out” and made it his own. Out is Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc, and in is Kid Rock as Blanc’s son Benny.

Note: This satirical review concerns an alternative timeline. Nobody would have made a movie like this in such a timeline, but here we are, living it.

The result is a Bizarro kind of world where politicians have become such scumbags that the President of the United States is a co-leader of a massive billion-dollar child sex trafficking empire, and the FBI director and Defense Secretary can’t stay sober.

Gibson’s disdain for politics is understandable, given that the profession doesn’t attract our best and brightest. Still, this movie goes too far by attempting to convince us of a premise so ludicrous that it borders on insult.

The U.S. President in the film is Donald Trump, of all people, but the writers never mention how he avoids the federal penitentiary, where, in our timeline, he began serving multiple concurrent sentences for various sex and white collar crimes in 2017, shortly after his preposterous presidential run.

In “Knives Out,” he becomes president, mostly with the help of another disgraced character from our world, Joe Scarborough, who, instead of being fired from MSNBC for interviewing Trump 40 times in 2015 during Trump’s highly lampooned (and mercifully brief) 2015 presidential run in the Republican primary, becomes a celebrity host with a massive following.

In “Knives Out,” Scarborough and Trump each achieve the pinnacle of success in no small measure by bouncing terrible ideas off each other on live television with the same acerbic and confrontational style we witnessed in our timeline (but in our timeline, we were smart enough to ignore and/or mock the whole mess).

Instead of going to prison, in “Knives Out,” Trump becomes a sort of Reality TV president.

The preposterous backdrop to the plot gets worse. Once president, he oversees a million deaths from a mutation of the SARS virus, which, in our timeline, of course, was quickly contained (Ebola might at least have been more believable).

The president is portrayed as a professional and dangerous con man, but one sometimes gets the sense that the film’s director, Gibson, approves.

As president, the “Knives Out” Trump tears apart science programs and posts weird diatribes all through the night on a renegade version of Twitter his minions create, threatens to leave NATO, and uses the armed forces to go on a bizarre regime-changing binge designed to steal oil from other countries and create insider trading opportunities for his grifting friends and family.

At one point during the middle of a raging pandemic, Gibson has him urging people to inject Lysol into their veins to defeat the virus, demonstrating just how unserious the film is. It’s almost as if the movie was written by South Park’s creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, but, sadly, that is not the case.

Later, during a presidential debate, the cartoonish president claims that immigrants are eating neighborhood cats and dogs. The film can’t decide if it’s a comedy or a mystery. As a result, it becomes a cinematic travesty.

We witness this absurd historical background through the eyes of Scarborough, who is seen in a bar lamenting his relationship with Trump as the world burns.

But Scarborough isn’t waxing melancholy over Trump’s disastrous presidential term. Instead, he’s apoplectic over the fact that Trump has won a second term after Joe Biden serves a quiet and uneventful four years in the wake of halting Trump’s re-election bid.

It’s a ridiculous premise, of course, but the film’s writers apparently thought they needed the device to solve the mystery at the heart of the movie — several murders at Mar-a-Lago. In the film, Mar-a-Lago serves as a palace for a thoroughly debased and aging President Trump, who serves his second term in scenes that could have been lifted out of “Weekend at Bernie’s.”

The role of Trump is played by an AI avatar in the form of an orange-colored, sludge-like character covered by bruised and oily skin. Like a mischievous, odious subterranean creature, he makes occasional public appearances, where he frequently falls asleep, even in televised meetings in the Oval Office.

The writers cook up one ludicrous plotline after another, including a presidential cabinet full of psychos who hold a powwow in the Situation Room trying to figure out how to save the presidency of a marble-mouthed lunatic who can’t put two sentences together, as the world comes crashing down on the pedophile empire he’s running with financier Jeffrey Epstein.

That part, of course, is not shocking to anyone who watched the wretched trials televised during Hillary Clinton’s presidency in our timeline. Under the ruthless interrogations of Attorney General Kamala Harris, Americans were glued to their televisions while Epstein’s and Trump’s worlds came crashing down.

But in the “Knives Out” world, Trump is never fully found out until he’s in office. Once the nature of his crimes becomes known during his second term, his hapless team tries to rescue his presidency with an assortment of Wag the Dog scenarios that defy even momentary belief.

Once the first murder takes place, the list of people with motives is long. Benny Blanc gathers the suspects in a large, gold-plated room at Mar-a-Lago. Whereas in our timeline, all that remains of Mar-a-Lago is a brackish retaining pond on the former property of the disgraced New York huckster, in “Knives Out,” it’s a palatial child trafficking hub.

The first victim is the vice president, JD Vance, who, like in our timeline, is the author of a widely panned book called Hillybilly Elegy. Vance falls prey as part of the fallout from leaks about the Situation Room meeting to the New York Times.

The role of Vance is handled by one of the film’s few non-AI actors, Nate Bargatze, in a comedic role that echoes elements of his Saturday Night Live portrayal of General George Washington crossing the Delaware and waxing poetic about the inanities of the English language.

Unless you’ve had the misfortune of reading Hillybilly Elegy, you probably haven’t heard of Vance, but in “Knives Out,” he’s a feeble-minded power broker wannabe who hangs out with immoral tech bros and D-list movie actors. Almost every suggestion he makes is dutifully ignored by those around him, who only tolerate his presence because they think they have to.

In one admittedly hilarious scene that is introduced as a flashback, when Vance descends upon a donut shop during a campaign stop, workers behind the counter scatter and disappear (a server stranded on the other side of the counter performs a John Candy-like dive over the counter to escape), leaving Vance to tell an empty room that he appreciates their hard work and asking, “Is the camera rolling?”

The Situation Room meetings are led by Trump’s Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. Meryl Streep was somehow talked into this role, and of course, she does a fabulous job as the only redeeming quality of the film, even though it sometimes feels like she’s reprising her role as the President in the sharp satire, “Don’t Look Up.”

Blanc gathers the attendees from the Situation Room meetings together at Mar-a-Lago, where he declares all of them suspects in Vance’s murder. But instead of solving the murder, Blanc has to cope with several more, as one Cabinet official after another is picked off after being accused of leaking the Situation Room meeting to the press in a mysterious tape that appears and then disappears like a smoking Mission Impossible cassette tape.

I realize that reviewers are not supposed to give away movie endings, but I can’t help myself. This film doesn’t deserve a kinder fate. The movie ends with Wiles holding a long knife and grinning ear to ear while a character that looks exactly like Nosferatu looks on.

Thanks for reading!

Notes

IMDB Image Alt Text:

Fake IMDB graphic featuring the name of the movie, “Knives Out,” and Trump falling asleep in a meeting. The blurb for the movie says:

A zany crew of half-witted white men must find a way to protect the reputation of an American president accused of pedophilia who is governing while in a continuously vegetative state.

When a perpetually drunk Indian-American FBI director tries to take control of the situation, it’s knives out in this politically explosive murder mystery.

The review scores are bad. The Hollywood Reporter is quoted as saying, “The mystery is that it was made..”

Image credits: IMDB image created by the author. “Knives Out” logo is public domain by FLC001, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons