After most crime shows, watching an Agatha Christie adaptation, a Miss Marple or a Hercule Poirot, is like zipping along a 3-lane expressway, then heading down an off-ramp and joining bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Rian Johnson's "Knives Out" is a take on those sedate works, especially the movie length Hercule Poirot's (the Suchet's can actually lower your metabolism to about that of the Canadian Wood Frog in winter). You definitely need to be in the mood for them. "Knives Out" captures the style, but actually adds more energy than the classic Agatha adaptation. Looks like we are getting a series as well, another has already been made and a third planned.

Actors seem drawn to accents like they are drawn to Richard III with his hump and limp. Albert Finney was almost unintelligible in "Murder on the Orient Express", fortunately Peter Ustinov stepped in and gave us a couple of nuanced interpretations, "Death on the Nile" and "Murder under the Sun" before he and we tired of it. David Suchet gave us something between Finney and Ustinov but doubled down on the walk. Kenneth Branagh revived Poirot, but doubled down on the moustache. Rian Johnson has given us a modern setting and a new detective, Benoit Blanc, an American, played by an Englishman. However Daniel Craig growls out a Southern accent almost as impenetrable as Finney's Belgian one.

Somewhere I read that Rian Johnson briefly considered having Daniel Craig play Benoit Blanc with a different accent in each film without explanation. Maybe the next one would have hommaged Fu Manchu.

Set in a musty old mansion, like many an Agatha Christie, there is the risk of an oversupply of quirky characters. Mind you, Christopher Plummer steals the show as old man Thrombey, but he always did. However it's dangerous to cram in too many eccentrics especially when your main guy is so mannered; otherwise it becomes parody like "Murder By Death".

We even get a bit of social messaging that wouldn't be out of place at the Academy Awards. However by the middle, the elements fall into place, there is humour, we are involved and the whole thing comes together.

"Knives Out" is long, but repays our endurance. Going forward, getting away from the stately homes to an exotic location always benefitted Poirot, it should do the same for Blanc.