See How They Run (2022)

See How They Run (2022)

2/10

 

Starring

Sam Rockwell

Saoirse Ronan

Adrien Brody

 

Directed by Tom George

 

It took a lot for me to finish this movie. Sometimes I think the critics are just having a go at us, telling us that a movie is good, only for us to watch it and wonder what’s so good about it. This supposed Mystery-Comedy about Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap ties itself to the death of the man picked to be the director of the movie adaptation, in this movie, not in real life.

For me, the movie fails to nail down a good enough reason why I should care about the turmoil caused by the death of this supposedly intelligent director. I say this not because I think the death of anyone is irrelevant, but when you make the character annoying (just to give everyone a reason to want him dead) and kill him off in the first ten minutes, then why should I care? You went all out to make him disliked, so why should I care if his character gets bumped off in the first ten minutes?

Then come the characters who are supposed to solve the case: Inspector Stoppard (Rockwell) and Constable Stalker (Ronan). Neither of them seemed capable enough to solve the case of a missing shoe in an enclosed room. They both looked out of their depth, and when the case ended, it just seemed like they stumbled their way to the end of the movie, tripping themselves up along the way.

I hardly saw any detective work that resembled what you’d expect in a murder mystery movie. They didn’t help me care about this movie either. The flashbacks of the dead character just made you not even care about what the others had going on or why they wanted him dead.

Then, as these movies go, the killer is always the one person you least suspect. But when that person decides to reveal themselves and their motive, even that couldn’t draw my sympathy. It was at this point that I believe the movie must have had someone else take over the writing because it delves into disaster hysteria. Agatha Christie was suddenly shown to be part of the characters, and what a bumbling buffoon of a character she was. She had no stake or presence in the movie from the start, only to show up at the end with nothing else to do but make things a little more unserious.

When the movie ends, it feels like you’ve just been released from some sort of prison, and your mind is finally allowed to ask, "What the heck was that?"