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SEE HOW THEY RUN (2022,GBR)

Kenneth Branagh is trying his best to revive the work of Agatha Christie in his recent screen adaptations of works such as “Murder on the Orient Express” or “Death on the Nile”. And those expensive and glamorous Hollywood movies were incredibly boring to me because the whodunit subgenre is specific in that once you’ve read or watched a certain story, there’s no point in reading or watching it again. Everything is known in advance then, and following the play of the premise, when a person looks at one whodunit, he has seen everything, this crime comedy, or rather a parody, which takes place in London in 1953, goes as well.

But the problem with “See How They Run” is that a few years earlier, Rian Johnson recorded a much funnier parody of the same genre, “Knives Out”, and this play on the same theme was therefore quite tiring for me. I was annoyed by the completely caricatured characters and the extremely exaggerated situations, and the only one who somewhat saves this film is the standard excellent Sam Rockwell as a detective whose task is to find the killer. And his Inspector Stoppard is actually a true caricature of Poirot, a guy rather uninterested in the investigation who is terribly annoyed by the irritating and hardworking young policewoman Stalker (Saorsie Ronan) who is assigned as his assistant.

“See How They Run” was also the first film made by Tom George, the director of the extraordinary British mockumentary series “This Country”, a brilliant parody whose two actors also appear there. From beginning to end, we have this complete parody of the motives and details of the classic whodunit, and to make the situation more interesting, the whole story begins with a murder after the jubilee hundredth performance of Agatha Christie’s play “The Mousetrap” in London’s West End. The rather arrogant and brash Hollywood director Leo Köpernick (Adrien Brody) also arrived there, who wants to make a film version of the famous crime story, and it is he who will be killed by someone in the dressing room after the show.

And that’s where the inspector and his irritating assistant enter the scene, and as usual, everyone is a suspect. Among them is the young Richard Attenborough (Harris Dickinson), who in reality played the inspector from “The Mousetrap”, Mervyn Cocker – Norris (David Ayelowo), the screenwriter in charge of the adaptation of the play who constantly quarreled with the director, the producer John Woolf and the director of the theater Petula Spencer (Ruth Wilson). All of them and many others are suspects, and in addition to “See How They Run” parodying that chewed-up whodunit, this film solidly pokes fun at the slightly pompous old British theater of the time. Unfortunately, this movie didn’t impress me nearly as much as, say, the much, much better “Knives Out”.

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