Perhaps there really is nothing more infuriating than a film that is so good in so many ways but just overall leaves one cold. The dreaded word known amongst my friends for when I find a film truly average is that of ‘fine’. When ‘fine’ is used, infamously I thought very little of it. Well despite ending up one of my most anticipated films of the year, with all the trappings, elements and cast that I love, See How They Run unfortunately ends up somewhere... Well, not ‘fine’. But not much better than that either, I’m afraid.
Tom George directs this murder mystery and despite a bit of an over-reliance on split screen and not in ways that actually enrich the experience, just in a way to over-crowd the screen I found, overall George makes the film an effective piece. George keeps the comedy at a nice level, keeps the ensemble rooted and working well together and directs action when called for very well, aswell as infusing elements of visual dynamism into more possibly static parts of the film. Mark Chappell’s screenplay is very well paced and is a very funny one indeed. I can’t say the same for his elements of drama, nor actually for the mystery at the heart of it which falls into a trope without the dreaded knowingness that punctuates all elements of the rest of film, and instead was just very guessable and left me very cold as a reveal. The cardinal sin of See How They Run however is ultimately it’s constant meta elements, that again, we have seen done before and seen done far better. Again, for crying out loud, can we not just be sincere? This is not a case such as with the Marvel-isation of all current blockbusters where I resent this film being a comedy, because that would be wrong, because this film is frequently very funny with only a few jokes here and there not working for me (outside the constant meta ones which never worked for me). Comparison is often a fruitless form of crititisism, but when one thinks of recent successful murder mysteries, they were what they were and they owned it. This film at its core can’t actually accept its period stuffiness I guess and so relies to a fault on commenting and even, yes, believe it, finally genuinely winking to the audience. My audience laughed as if they were being relieved of the duty of enjoying the actual mystery at hand. ‘If we comment on it and do it, then it’s witty and clever, not just us unwilling to accept our own genre tropes and faults’. It just makes me groan, it just makes me annoyed and frankly it made me enjoy this film so much less than I could have. Overall, this is why I was left cold.
With any grand murder mystery such as this, you of course need at the helm hopefully a sublime ensemble and cast of characters, well this is the films undoubted strongest element. Everybody is on top form in the ensemble and in creating a well-drawn mixture of real and fictional characters, Chappell’s script is at its best. Sam Rockwell and Saoirise Ronan are terrific, as is everybody else honestly, as our two leads as twists and turns send them on somewhat predictable paths before returning as a valiant force to fight the foes come the finale. There are no standouts from the ensemble, because frankly everybody’s great. Again, the films ensemble which ranks from some new faces to many classic figures of British TV and Cinema is a who’s who of brilliant character actors and leads to a very enjoyable collection of performances. Perhaps one could comment that a lack of a standout is a bad thing, however I would rather see it as a good thing. The combination of real and fictional characters makes for an intriguing if a little befuddled in concept aspect to the film, however in the case of Harris Dickinson and Shirley Henderson makes for some joyously knowing performances. David Oyelowo, Adrien Brody and Tim Key are some of the funnier turns for the more caricaturish drawn characters. With Ruth Wilson, Lucian Msamati and Reece Shearmisth all being their brilliant selves as normal and delivering slighter, quieter, dryer roles than the more over-the-top figures in the story. But all these characters balance nicely and make overall the ensemble work as well as it does.
Such a solid in parts and painfully average or annoying 7/10. Is the film actually annoying? With some of the constant meta elements, yes. But not in the overall sense, it’s more annoying because of how much this film could have been. It could have just been so, so much more than this film ended up. The film is repeatedly very funny and all of our characters are well-drawn and wonderfully well-acted, the direction too, although sometimes feeling overly gimmicky, works and keeps a great pace. But the screenplay itself has this horrid reliance on meta-textuality and self-referentiality that for me knocks out its potential from under itself.
SPOLIER P.S. (BUT NOT REALLY) Also, and this can’t be said without sounding like an arse, but I guessed the killer. Did I guess the motive? No. But I guessed the killer very early on, unfortunately early on. That undoubtedly coloured my view on the film, however I have guessed killers before, but the finale has then consisted of fun extended sequences with this killer, making re-watches often more fun than the initial watch. This has no such sequence. This is a film I will not be rewtaching for a very long time. Honestly, if ever.
- - Thomas Carruthers
0 Comments