See How They Run Movie Review

See How They Run (2022)

Rent See How They Run on Amazon Video (paid link)
Written by: Mark Chappell
Directed by: Tom George
Starring: Sam Rockwell, Saoirse Ronan, Adrien Brody, Ruth Wilson, Reece Shearsmith, Harris Dickinson, David Oyelowo
Rated: PG-13
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Plot
In the West End of 1950s London, plans for a movie version of a smash-hit play come to an abrupt halt after a pivotal member of the crew is murdered.

Verdict
This has a lot of fun with the genre, poking fun at the typical tropes. The dialog is often very clever and the story structure manages to incorporate aspects from the play depicted. While I really like the tone, the movie never seems as engaging as it should be. That's probably because Rockwell and Ronan are fun characters, but the supporting characters aren't nearly as entertaining. The movie's ideas are stronger than the end result. Despite that this is a fun concept.
Watch it.

Review
The Agatha Christie based play The Mousetrap was the longest running play in London, starting in 1952 and ending in 2020 due to the Covid pandemic.

From the start this movie has fun with the voice over introduction and then pokes fun at detective tropes. There's a bit of camp with the '50s theater scene. I like the use of split screen as it adds to the energy of the movie and a bit of a joke itself with the one-eighty shot, reverse shot.

Saoirse Ronan, Sam Rockwell play Stalker, Stoppard

This is a whodunit about a whodunit. Ronan is great as the over-eager Stalker, a foil for the world weary detective Stoppard (Sam Rockwell). The dialog can be really clever, though this has a reserved British sense of humor. The play is the center of this movie's plot, and it also serves to inform the structure of the movie in a way most plot points don't.

Despite the fun tone, the movie doesn't seem very interesting. I had fun watching Rockwell and Ronan, but aside from Brody the other characters aren't as well developed. Some of the ideas in the movie are sharp, but what happens in between those ideas isn't always enough to carry the movie. In many whodunit movies, you have strong feelings about who the murderer is. This movie doesn't present any strong theories. The intermediate steps are just to fill time until we get to this movie's big finish.

Adrien Brody plays Leo Köpernick

It is a movie that I wanted to watch again as we got closer to the end and questions were answered. The movie tells us the clues were there the whole time. Were they?

This wraps up with the movie mimicking the featured play. The idea for how this ends works better than the actual execution. It's a dense script with a lot of in-jokes. With the way it's structured, a second watch might be more rewarding than the first.