Knives Out is entirely built around a pretty clever twist that comes early own. Once that's out, it slowly putters out of ideas until dragging itself back to the mansion where all is revealed ... to be an average episode of Murder She Wrote.

Editing, cinematography and acting is all top notch throughout. But bent on delivering its one twist and nothing more, the story has left the characters without fleshing any of them out. Everyone is such a paper-thin stereotype that quite a while it feels inevitable they'd eventually turn out to be something more but instead they all end up being just as completely one-dimensional as they first appeared. Poorly written characters also ruin heavy-handed attempts to say something useful about immigration and privilege.