‘Knives Out’ review: Daniel Craig and cast have a blast

Director Rian Johnson’s first film since “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” has no Death Star, but it has plenty of death and stars.

Toni Collette. Daniel Craig. Chris Evans. Jamie Lee Curtis. Poisonings. Arson. Stabbings. Slashed throats. This whodunit is an A-list-turned-slay list party.

Meet the Thrombeys, an uber-rich flock of black sheep all mooching off their recently deceased pop, a famous mystery novelist named Harlan (Christopher Plummer). His official cause of death is suicide, but an anonymous tipster summons a famous detective, Benoit Blanc (Craig), believing the truth to be far more sinister.

In Harlan’s enormous, lodge-like manse, Blanc and two policemen get cracking. Everybody is a suspect, since all his freeloading kids want a payday.

The fun in “Knives Out” is watching an ensemble of super-serious actors getting to misbehave. Like a cheerleader gone goth after a bad breakup, Craig is rebelling as an unhinged investigator, speaking in a Creole drawl and making gestures bigger than “Baby Shark.” Craig needed something silly right now: His nonstop whining about playing James Bond had come to define him. For the first time in years, he looks happy to be acting.

It’s that counterintuitive casting that makes this movie so naughty. Collette plays a Goop-y lifestyle entrepreneur just one year after the freaky “Hereditary”; Curtis washes out the taste of “Halloween” with her dry, power suit-wearing Linda; terrifying Michael Shannon is a fidgety paper-pusher. Katherine Langford, from the teen suicide show “13 Reasons Why,” vapes and bickers with her alt-right cousin. Give me 13 reasons why not.

The one likable, normal-ish person amid all the wealthy whackjobs is Harlan’s nurse, Marta, played by Ana de Armas in her biggest role to date. As his caretaker, she’s a prime suspect. De Armas beautifully grounds this blimp of eccentrics, but I found her main gag to be cheap: She pukes whenever she lies. Still, Marta being here adds in some commentary about class and immigration, which isn’t preachy or overbearing.

Even though it’s in the style of Agatha Christie, Johnson has written and directed a uniquely American whodunit (see: puking). The Thrombeys will remind you more of the upper-crust clans on “Succession” or “Arrested Development” than Miss Marple and the citizens of St. Mary Mead. It’s a breath of fresh air for a genre caked in dust. I’ll gladly take more Benoit Blanc over Kenneth Branagh’s upcoming “Death on the Nile.”