Shocking twist: 'A Kind of Murder' is blah
Magnolia
Appealing exclusively to people who play board games for the enjoyment of setting up the pieces, “A Kind of Murder” is less cat-and-mouse than cat-and-mirror. The movie just sits there, proud to look pretty, not really doing anything.
In other words, no one will mistake this adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel (“The Blunderer”) for “Strangers on a Train” or “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” It’s not even 2014’s little-seen and less-remembered “The Two Faces of January.” Rather, “A Kind of Murder,” set in 1960s New York, attempts to challenge your expectations about murder mysteries by removing all fun and surprise and replacing it with hilariously obvious casting decisions and production design.
Patrick “I am not a reliable onscreen romantic partner” Wilson (“Little Children,” “Hard Candy,” “Zipper”) stars as Walter Stackhouse, a successful architect whose patience with his wife Clara’s (Jessica Biel of “The Sinner”) mental illness dissipates right around the time he meets the younger and quite available singer Ellie Briess (Haley Bennett of “The Girl on the Train”). He also happens to be an aspiring writer of short stories, which leads him to conspicuously collect newspaper clippings of deaths and disappearances and fixate on Marty Kimmel (Eddie Marsan of “The World’s End”), a bookstore owner being very badly investigated for his wife’s murder.
If you think this setup will create some kind of whodunit when another female character ends up dead, you would be mistaken. “A Kind of Murder” returns to scene after scene of a detective (a terrible Vincent Kartheiser) who’s sure both Marty and Walter are guilty and has a grand total of zero reversals up its sleeve. The goal seems to be to blur the lines between wishing someone dead and actually killing them, which holds up neither in theory nor, er, execution. The moral complexity here is like a cartoon tunnel painted on a wall.
Perhaps the light but overrated “Knives Out” will have people scrolling their streaming devices in search of more mysteries to unravel. This one comes pre-raveled.
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