See How They Run
Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan are on the case in See How They Run.
I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.
When the body of Leo Köpernick (Adrien Brody) is found on the set of The Mousetrap, it’s not part of the play. Köpernick, a brash Hollywood director, was set to adapt Agatha Christie’s play for the silver screen when someone caved in his skull.
The suspects are plentiful.
Was it the dramatic playwright with a grudge? Was it the producer? Was it a scorned leading lady? Was it the detective investigating the murder?
Leo Köpernick knows whodunit, and he’s not impressed.
Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) would love to get to the bottom of the mystery, but he’s been saddled with the world’s most over-eager assistant, Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan). Can the two investigators find out what happened before another body drops? Or is it curtains for this production of The Mousetrap?
Look, if you’re gonna start a movie with narration from a murdered body, you better be making Sunset Boulevard. But See How They Run isn’t a film noir, it isn’t even really a whodunit. This is a movie that wants to poke fun at the genre of whodunits but doesn’t quite accomplish it. Director Tom George makes his feature debut with a slick, beautiful-looking film that could have been a great little mystery if anyone had bothered to develop it.
And there’s plenty to develop. George sets the film during the initial smash theatrical run of Christie’s The Mousetrap and the suspects include the stars of the play Richard Attenborough (Harris Dickinson) and Sheila Sim (Pearl Chanda). While Dickinson does a pretty good impression of Attenborough’s voice (if you’re wondering who that is, he’s the guy who played John Hammond in Jurassic Park and his brother is the guy that does all the nature documentaries on the BBC), there’s really so little to either character that it feels like a waste. The film barely scratches on the history of the play, and why it was so important (The Mousetrap is generally given credit for the structure of this type of mystery), it’s more concerned with laughing at the structure of the genre.
George is so busy trying to point out how the sausage is made, that he seems to have forgotten to make the sausage itself. The movie is filled with little jabs, from Brody’s smug narration lampooning the genre in the opening narration to the cast of characters that seem to have been picked by flipping through Christie novels at random and selecting names.
The result can be fun but ultimately isn’t satisfying. It’s not serious enough to be a gripping mystery and it’s not funny enough to be a parody. Clearly inspired by the success of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, See How They Run hopes to use meta commentary to turn the genre on its head. But instead of offering us a group of connected suspicious characters, we seem stuck with silly archetypes that don’t interact nearly enough to build a real sense of who they are or if they could be murderers. The result isn’t Knives Out so much as Clue, if everyone’s comic timing was just slightly off.
For a film so flippant about a by-the-numbers mystery, it’s odd that no one bothered to craft something a little more…mysterious.
It isn’t a whodunit, so much as a who cares — as the biggest mystery of the film might be introducing Agatha Christie (Shirley Henderson), and then utterly wasting her in two minutes of screentime. This is a woman who had an encyclopedic knowledge of poison, desperately hated her most successful character (Poirot – maybe she saw those Kenneth Branagh movies?), and disappeared at the height of her fame for 11 days without anyone ever figuring out definitively where she went. All of this would be ripe for parody or satire, but it’s wasted in an admittedly funny, but rushed gag.
While the mystery is bare bones, George did take the time to craft two incredibly likable investigators. Rockwell’s inspector is a drunk who’s still smarter than most people in the room. He sways into scenes, picking apart problems, even as his own pile up. Rockwell has an excellent foil in Ronan, whose daffy Constable Stalker is so eager to prove herself that she takes everything literally. Ronan, who usually does more dramatic work, would have been an ideal lead for a 30s screwball comedy, with her wide eyes and pitch-perfect delivery. She thrashes through her scenes like a modern Carole Lombard.
When Stalker and Stoppard are searching for clues, the movie makes its greatest strides. But even though this mystery lacks panache, there’s enough charm here to keep your attention. I’d love to see another team-up between Stoppard and Stalker, where they get a juicy mystery to solve.
Verdict: A fun comedy that will remain entertaining if you stream it in a few weeks.
See How They Run is rated PG-13 and is available in theaters.
