2019 Rental Roundup 1: Knives Out, Avengers Endgame, Star Wars IX

Somehow, I have made a rental roundup post entirely out of movies I saw in the theater.

Knives Out

Screw it, we’ll start with the best of the bunch.

This naked attempt at spiritually remaking Clue boldly asks, can Dianiel Craig perform Kevin Spacey’s accent from House of Cards?

But seriously, folks, this movie was a fun ride.

As you might remember from the Birds of Prey review, Knives Out is told in a nonlinear manner with some key scenes repeatedly revisited from different points of view through the framing narritive of police interviews after a suspicious suicide. We get a colorful cast of characters in the family members of the deceased, each awful in their own way and with their own self-serving lies to tell about the night of the death.

While the movie is a mystery, it spends the first half slowly revealing what happened and how it was done. You’d think this would be bad for a mystery to spill the beans to the audience, but this ends up creating tension. The investigation continues in the second half, waiting to see if the inspector can be thrown off the trail, while the plot spills a few more beans unbeknownst to all with tactical precision.

The only mark against it would be one scene in which some of the characters are (inexpertly (by design)) debating contemporary political issues that are relevant to character motivations, but horribly date the movie.

This movie had a lot of great subtle touches that made me think sometimes that this is what you’d get if you dropped a long ton of sarcasm on Get Out. That being said, I’d be interested in seeing what a Peele-Johnson collaboration would churn out.

Verdict: Must-See (5/5). But I don’t know if it’s the kind of movie you could watch multiple times.

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Avengers: Endgame

For some reason I have a rough time going through the big Avengers movies. The individual ones I do fine with, but there’s just something about the all-in team-ups that just don’t rub me the right way.

Make no mistake, you’re going to be a little lost in this movie if you haven’t been paying attention to the greater MCU. Endgame isn’t just a direct sequel to Infinity War, but also Captain Marvel and Ant Man and the Wasp.

It also calls back to Avengers, Captain America, Captain America 2, Captain America 3, Thor: The Dark World, Guardians of the Galaxy, Iron Man 3 (this one confused a lot of people; I certainly had to be told), Doctor Strange and even the TV series Agent Carter.

But despite cramming all those threads together, I can at least say the pacing is much better in Endgame than in Infinity War (and the movie didn’t have to deal with the insufferable “No, really, there’s no second part to Infinity War, this is permanent!” half-baked marketing).

The movie does take the time to deal with the reality of losing half the world’s population and then some (collateral damage was accounted for by the snap, so being an airline pilot greatly increased your chances of surviving; animals and bugs were affected as well, but not plant life) and we even get to see the partially abandoned Earth in a reasonable amount of detail.

The movie also successfully played with my expectations by starting with an obvious fake out to throw me off the trail of the actual fake out (a faked-out fake out, no less), so points there.

We get a lot of mythology gags and sequel threads along the way. It also blows what must have been a few hundred million dollars on rehiring every cast member who has ever appeared in a Marvel movie so they can be shown for a minute along the way.

Verdict: Go for it (4/5). I mean, you’ve made it this far. Might as well finish it.

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Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker

I did go to the theater for this back in December, but I really didn’t want to give it the full review treatment. And the reason why is because it would sound an awful lot like the reviews for The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi.

Frankly, you didn’t need me to spend more than ⅓ of a post yelling “Why anything?” with one last go round with a disappointing mix of good characters and shit plot with yet another nonsensical countdown timer.

I didn’t like The Last Jedi, but it at least tried to be about something. This movie was nothing but throwing stuff at you until it was over. And sometimes they absolutely did throw cool stuff. But most of it was just utterly pointless.

I mean, at what point in Star Wars history did the backstory referenced in the opening crawl start sounding like a better movie than what followed? No later than here, for certain.

I still hold out hope for at least one self-contained movie with the new generation of characters letting them do their own thing (with a coherent plot), but that doesn’t seem to be the direction Disney wants to take things.

Verdict: Flat (2/5).