Director: Rian Johnson
Cast: Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Jamie Lee Curtis
Have I Seen It Before?: Nope. As I write this, it feels like ages since I’ve been able to pull away from work in the middle of the day to catch a matinee. So many movies missed. Wither thou, Jojo Rabbit (2019)?
Did I like it?: It is such a singular pleasure to walk into a movie with almost no knowledge of what is about to unfold, aside from cast, genre, and director. I trust Rian Johnson implicitly. Looper (2012) looked so blissfully stupid when I saw the trailer and became one of the more satisfying time travel stories ever.
Johnson hasn’t steered me wrong, and I’m now convinced he can bring something fresh to any genre that he decides to tackle. He is certainly one of the most exciting filmmakers working today. Directors who take on the daunting task of churning out product in one of the largest franchises in the world might fall into doing so repeatedly. Directors with the level of taste necessary to bring a litany of original properties to the movie-watching public might turn up their noses at the idea of making the part 8 of anything. Johnson does both with aplomb.
Yes, The Last Jedi (2017) is a terrific film. Eat me. You think it’s a good film, too, but you’ve got some shit to work through. You know who you are.
Ahem. Anyway, about this movie…
And with that trust firmly in place, I could just sit back and let the mystery unfold around me. I wasn’t already writing a review in my head before the opening vanity cards unfurled. That is a luxury that the movie-theater-amenity-industrial-complex can’t touch. The cast is wall-to-wall stars, which is such a critical feature in a mystery. While watching any number of TV serials, I’ve had about an 85% success rating at figuring whodunit by just picking the actor who has a slightly higher profile than the other guest stars.
Here, the tagline really turned out to be true. Any of them could have done it. There was a solid stretch of the film where I even thought the victim (Christopher Plummer) was the mastermind. To illuminate any other element of the plot would take away the experience of watching the cast at work.
And what a cast it is. Everyone is doing eclectic work that is still somehow attached to their image as movie stars. Ana de Armas—the only performer with whom I had been unware—becomes a force to be reckoned with in films to come, while Daniel Craig proves that he might be the best pure actor to have ever donned the tuxedo of 007. Sean Connery and to some degree Pierce Brosnan went on to different roles after hanging up the Walther PPK, but never managed to step out of their screen persona in any real way. Craig steps out of anything suave to give us an eccentric that the other Bonds may have found unseemly. If Johnson makes good on his hints that this is not the last we’ve seen of Benoit Blanc, then I’m on board for a whole 9-movie saga about which people won’t be able to help complaining.
I will only be content with Johnson not directing Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) because in doing so he might have deprived us of the unique alchemy on display here.