SEE HOW THEY RUN
Or how to have fun catching a killer
By armen pandola
Do you miss the ‘good movie?’ Not the ‘great movie’ or the ‘blockbuster movie’ or the ‘top-10-best-movie-ever movie,’ but just a ‘good movie.’ The kind you can sit down to watch and smile or even laugh out loud once in a while and just let it pour over you like hot fudge on a cold, cold dish of Breyers vanilla ice cream. Not some fancy dessert, but just a good ole delicious dessert?
Well, that’s See How They Run, a spoof of who-done-it plays and movies of the kind that Agatha Christie became rich and famous for - you know, Murder on the Orient Express kind of thing. This one is set in London, 1953, during the early run of Christie’s most famous play, The Mousetrap which is still running in London.
The plot is simple and is explained early-on by an obnoxious American movie director played with his usual aplomb by Adrian Brody - a bunch of people are stuck somewhere, say on a train or a remote country house when one of them, the most obnoxious, is murdered. Then a detective or inspector appears to solve the murder, but everyone seems to have a very good motive for killing the SOB.
In this case, the inspector is played by Sam Rockwell. Ok, it’s not just his accent that gives away his Americanness, it’s everything about him - Rockwell is the least likely actor to play a British Scotland Yard Inspector, yet, he pulls it off. Look, he’s Sam Rockwell, he can act. Luckily, he has a partner, a young policewoman assigned to him to learn the ropes, played to perfection by Saoirse Ronan and they make a fun couple to spend an evening with.
The rest of the cast dutifully play their varied parts - philandering producer, conceited actor, uncompromising, pretentious writer, bumbling Chief Inspector who gets a knighthood for just being, well, a bumbling CI - all are thrown into the pot and thoroughly mixed into a silly, but not all-together ridiculous plot.
Along the way to the inevitable finale which is foretold near the beginning of the movie by its first victim, there are puns and more puns - the more you know about who-done-it stories, the better you will like this movie - chases and wrong-turns and lots of fun - fun being the operative requirement for most of the dialogue and plot twists.
Give your local cinema a break and go see this one. Sadly, there were only about a dozen other people at the Saturday night show I went to see. And the whole movie theater had less patrons than a Friday night soccer match in Abilene, TX.
Director: Tom George
Writer: Mark Chappell
Stars: Sam Rockwell, Saorise Ronan, Kieran Hodgson, Pearl Chanda, Gregory Cox, Harris Dickinson, Maggie McCarthy
Rating:PG-13
Running Time: 1h 38m
Genres: Comedy, Mystery