I left the theatre disappointed, despite being entertained while watching the film. The original sin (greed) at the heart of the crime is wholly of a piece with the history of the Catholic Church. And yet, Wicks is treated as an outlier rather than a manifestation of the Church.
This movie is part of a profitable franchise that operates by parading its woefully underused talent in a story that won’t challenge anyone’s sensitivities. I keep watching because the ride is fun. Nothing much left when it’s over.
Thank you for letting me know I should skip this one. I watch movies for distraction and/or to see bad people get what's coming to them. I get enough sanewashing, christofascism, and limp excuses from and for enablers in 2025-2029 American life.
The ONLY thing good about that movie (which felt like it was 4 hours long), was Tom Waits singing "Come on Up to the House" in the last scene. Great great song.
Not to mention my observation is that there are not a lot of young white Catholic priests around, at least in this diocese. A lot of very old ones, though, and a lot of priest from other countries.
We determined the guilty part by the Law and Order rule: the guest star with the biggest name. It can also be determined by the character, like best friend of the victim/gardener/librarian whose presence in the script is otherwise puzzling.
Seems in bad taste to center your movie around the catholic fucking church of all institutions being "good, actually". Like I get that parts of it have been pretty good at resisting the current wave of fascism in the US. And the new pope says some good things pushing back against it. That's nice but should be a pretty easy call if you're a serious moral institution.
But we know the catholic church isn't a serious moral institution because they failed the easiest moral question possible and did so across decades. Movie aside (I like Johnson but didn't care much for the 2nd Knives Out and probably won't bother with this one now), it kind of makes me crazy that we continue to take the catholic church seriously. As a former catholic who was an alter boy as a kid and seemingly put in harm's way (not to mention the many actual victims) I actually find it pretty offensive.
I wish I was able to read this before wasting however much time (it felt forever) it took to watch the latest installment. I don't remember much of the 2nd one, either, to be honest. Thank dog hockey is off their break.
The movie would have been much more fun if it had merely offered the religious setting as backdrop for a closed door mystery. And it was a weird choice of a case for Blanc to get involved with, however he actually got involved, given his comments regarding religion and why he wasn't close to his mother in later life. And we all know why that was.
Well, and I couldn't get over the whole thing that evil priest's GRANDFATHER was a priest. Uh, Catholic priests don't get married but this was never explained -- or at least, I don't remember that it was. I mean, they talked a lot about how mother was a harlot yadda yadda but not how there even WAS a daughter . . .? I may have fallen asleep at that point, though.
Sounds like my kind of movie! (Although there are explanations, of course, for a Catholic priest being a father. It is not unheard of for a priest to leave the priesthood and get married, nor for a man to enter the priesthood after his wife has died. In fact I know of at least 2 former priests who married women who had been nuns when then met each other. And I once had a nice conversation at the singer Carly Simon's house with a former Franciscan seminarian who was, at the time I was speaking with him, Carly's husband. It's true! https://open.substack.com/pub/johnsundman/p/crawling-under-carly-simons-house?r=38b5x&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web )
I did not know that about Carly Simon! There was also a time (80s?) when Episcopal priests who were married were allowed to become Catholic priests but I don't remember all the circumstances. In the context of this movie, though, the grandfather was an active priest (not former) --this was an important plot point. Perhaps he had joined after his wife died??? Had been Anglican?? I think that I'm thinking too much about this.
I have seen & enjoyed the first Knives Out movie but not the other two. But given all this conversation I'm going to have to watch them soon. (My wife & I made the horrible mistake of watching Invitation to a Murder the other night & I could really use something with a bit more sophistication to wipe that experience from my mental slate. If you haven't seen that movie, don't bother. Ugh.)
But I do take Noah's point about the 'no true Christian' stuff. Christianity is what Christianity does, and there's an awful lot of it that is just horrible. To whatever extent this movie tries to sanitize Christianity, I disapprove in advance.
If you do read my essay about when I crawled under Carly Simon's house & was rewarded with a front row seat to a private concert at her house, please let me know what you think of it.
Huh, I find your point a little muddled. Are we supposed to only like movies that show Christianity as hopelessly and irredeemably evil? Or is that only the Catholic Church that is supposed to be hopelessely and irredeemably evil? Sure, it's a bit of a feel good film, where redeeming the corrupt institution is, well, surprisingly easy. And the corrpution turns out to be local and limited. But in an era when many of our institutions are deeply and badly corrupted, wanting to believe they can be saved hardly seems the worst belief to be promoting. And sure, showing them as redeemed in the length of any Hollywood film will be a bit facile, we aren't getting out of this mess in any narrative that can be told completely in a few hours. Maybe you want us to simply tear the institutions down completely and start fresh? There are several well documented historical incidences of that going very badly and none that I know of that went all that well.
so, I don't think we need to always show institutions are bad or whatever. But if you're going to criticize christofascism, then I think it's important to actually prioritize victims and get the analysis of the harm right, rather than doing backflips to assure us that the church is good really. Because there are a lot of historical incidents where the impulse to defend the church over all also went really badly, right?
If Christians are mostly focused on defending the church, they aren't focused on helping people harmed by the church. That's bullshit, and helps no one.
I'd point to Belen as a film that actually gives a shit about the church's victims, and which provides a real analysis of the church's evils and harms (hint: it actually talked about abortion.) It's not especially facile either.
I think that focusing on saving institutions, or insisting that the feel good thing is saving institutions, when those institutions are actively engaged in torture, murder, harassment, and the destruction of our democracy, is pretty fucked up. We want to save people, not corrupt institutions. We need an honest appraisal of harms done and of how the church is promoting those harms, not this feel good bullshit, imo.
The thing is, the church is actually doing a range of good things right now; the new pope is very pro immigrant and is standing up to Trump is powerful and important ways. Various clergy have put themselves on the line and been physically assaulted by ICE officials. I’d be all for a film that got into the specifics there and showed a real debate in the church about immigration, or LGBT issues (it’s sheer cowardice that Blanc being gay is completely erased here.) But that’s not what this film does, and I think that sucks.
Interesting points. Oddly your comment is being highlighted in red by this site for me, it makes it feel angry, which I hope it isn't. I think we need institutions and so need to think about saving them. Our democracy, which is one of the things you highlight as at risk, is after all just a layered agglomeration of several institutions. Saving institutions certainly does include being critical of the harms they are currently causing. Never heard of Belen, will have to check that out. I did enjoy the movie a lot more than you did but so it goes.
We are a secular society, David Fisher—no matter what the KKKhrister Reich wants you to think.
The United States was founded by people of differing religious beliefs who came to the perfectly sensible realization that One Religion Over All, other than the civic religion of Respect for What The Constitution Stands For (rather than playing semantic games to make it do what you in your petty Right-Wing Way WANT it to stand for!), was what drove them out of their respective countries, and turned Europe into a centuries-old battleground.
So accepting any and all religions, including Having No Religion At All, was the best way to avoid the waves of Holy Wars sweeping across their ancestors' homelands, and create a prosperous, rules-based order that accepts all religions, and elevates NO one religion....
"Maybe you want us to simply tear the institutions down completely and start fresh? There are several well documented historical incidences of that going very badly and none that I know of that went all that well."
The Protestant Reformation would like a word with you.
Huh? I guess this is supposed to be the claim that the Protestant Reformation was an unmitigated success? Not buying it. The immediate aftermath of that reformation was mass death in a huge series of religious wars in Europe lasting well over a century. And it's not at all clear that Protestant denominations do less harm even in the modern world than Catholicism. Certainly in US politics, my general impression is that protestant churches do as much or more harm than Catholicism. Also in Indiana and Texas politics, to point to two places I've lived recently. So what exactly was your point? I admit that I like some aspects of the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Reformation better than I like the aftermath of the Russian or Chinese revolutions, but I'm not terribly convinced my biases are fully justified. And suspect Noah would critique at least some of the reasons for those biases...
what does "a success" mean to you? We just ignore several generations of blood shed and call the protestant reformation a success because you want us to? There is a ton of corruption in Protestant churches these days, is that better than having the corruption centralized in the Catholic church? The French Revolution can also be called a success, it ended the French monarchy, eventually after a lot of bloodshed. You can even argue for the Russian revoution, though it's harder, since it's genuinely hard to view Putin as a huge improvement on the the tsar's. China is a lot more ambiguous, but they are currently the leading innovator in science and technology on the planet, so maybe I should be making a case that the Chinese revolution and the cultural revolution that followed were also "a success". humbug.
"people are generally less interested in standing in solidarity with Christianity’s victims than they are in rushing to forgive Christianity and Christians for the lies, violence, harassment, theft, murder, and worse that are perpetuated in Christianity’s name."
Self-righteousness is one hell of a drug, and the clergy are major dealers.
No Catholic I've ever met could quote The Beatitudes. Speaking as an ex-Catholic ;^)
OTOH, there's those Catholic bishops in Chicago facing off against ICE...
"As an atheist Jew currently watching christofascists terrorize my communities and destroy my country, it is difficult for me to recommend a film that puts so much energy into convincing me that the heart of the Church is innocent and that, whoever else dies, the cross must be saved."
Mysteries generally deal with social criticism by approaching it obliquely rather than head-on, because an oblique approach is more likely to sink in and stick than a head-on approach which just stiffens people's resolve Not to Listen.
I do wonder if Johnson's original script was more openly critical of Christianity or religion in general, only Netflix went, "Whoa there, Rian! You want to get crucified again, like you did for suggesting Luke Skywalker lost his religion in THE LAST JEDI? Maybe you should include a 'Not All Christians' character, like a lovably foul-mouthed bishop or something...."
Or maybe Netflix didn't even have to bother. Johnson could be gunshy after the roasting he took for THE LAST JEDI—or his wife, film historian Karina Longworth (of the YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS podcast), might have suggested to him that classic Hollywood often got their point across despite having to appease The KKKhrister Right (in the form of Joseph I. Breen of the Production Code Administration, the REAL villain of "the Hays Office"!). That people at the time were angry that Breen had castrated movies...seems to be something she's less inclined to tackle, from the few episodes of her podcast I've listened to (I seem to have developed an allergy to elevator music playing incessantly under people talking, which she continues to do given the last time I listened).
Or...maybe he just went "Fascistic Religious Types—now that's some, I say THAT'S SOME GOOD! window-dressing for this murder mystery!", and that was as far as it went for him.
PS: "Tergiversation"—nice one, Noah! I consider myself a fairly literate sort, and I never heard that word before today. Looking it up, it means (so saith Vocabulary.com) "falsification by means of vague or ambiguous language"....
Haven’t seen this iteration yet but hope it doesn’t take itself too seriously as the others have been so much easy fun satirizing the wealthy, tech elites, amoral people in general…bad people will find anything to justify their evil or tool to implement it be it religion( self professed practitioners of Judaism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam are all guilty of this) political ideology (GOP, monarchists, communists, fascists…), “human progress” (Elon musks insane single minded focus of populating other planets at the expense of millions of human lives) I tend to think that “Christians” have been so successful at weaponizing religion as a fluke of history and not because of Christian theology-which has no more violence, misogyny, or bigotry in its foundational texts than any other religion so I’m not bothered by the movie taking Christianity seriously any more than I would any other religion even w the present threat of Christian nationalism
I don’t think christianity is any worse than anything else…and I’m not against taking it seriously! I think the problem for me is that it claims to be addressing Christian abuses but is more interested in absolving the church of them.
Solid review.
I left the theatre disappointed, despite being entertained while watching the film. The original sin (greed) at the heart of the crime is wholly of a piece with the history of the Catholic Church. And yet, Wicks is treated as an outlier rather than a manifestation of the Church.
This movie is part of a profitable franchise that operates by parading its woefully underused talent in a story that won’t challenge anyone’s sensitivities. I keep watching because the ride is fun. Nothing much left when it’s over.
Thank you for letting me know I should skip this one. I watch movies for distraction and/or to see bad people get what's coming to them. I get enough sanewashing, christofascism, and limp excuses from and for enablers in 2025-2029 American life.
The ONLY thing good about that movie (which felt like it was 4 hours long), was Tom Waits singing "Come on Up to the House" in the last scene. Great great song.
My wife said that movie felt like torture.
Not to mention my observation is that there are not a lot of young white Catholic priests around, at least in this diocese. A lot of very old ones, though, and a lot of priest from other countries.
We determined the guilty part by the Law and Order rule: the guest star with the biggest name. It can also be determined by the character, like best friend of the victim/gardener/librarian whose presence in the script is otherwise puzzling.
Seems in bad taste to center your movie around the catholic fucking church of all institutions being "good, actually". Like I get that parts of it have been pretty good at resisting the current wave of fascism in the US. And the new pope says some good things pushing back against it. That's nice but should be a pretty easy call if you're a serious moral institution.
But we know the catholic church isn't a serious moral institution because they failed the easiest moral question possible and did so across decades. Movie aside (I like Johnson but didn't care much for the 2nd Knives Out and probably won't bother with this one now), it kind of makes me crazy that we continue to take the catholic church seriously. As a former catholic who was an alter boy as a kid and seemingly put in harm's way (not to mention the many actual victims) I actually find it pretty offensive.
I wish I was able to read this before wasting however much time (it felt forever) it took to watch the latest installment. I don't remember much of the 2nd one, either, to be honest. Thank dog hockey is off their break.
The movie would have been much more fun if it had merely offered the religious setting as backdrop for a closed door mystery. And it was a weird choice of a case for Blanc to get involved with, however he actually got involved, given his comments regarding religion and why he wasn't close to his mother in later life. And we all know why that was.
Point of information: Mass is not celebrated on Good Friday.
thank you!
Writer/Director's error. Noah is innocent.
"tergiversate" however, calls for an arrest warrant...
No; I think it's just a service; I'll tweak!
Well, and I couldn't get over the whole thing that evil priest's GRANDFATHER was a priest. Uh, Catholic priests don't get married but this was never explained -- or at least, I don't remember that it was. I mean, they talked a lot about how mother was a harlot yadda yadda but not how there even WAS a daughter . . .? I may have fallen asleep at that point, though.
Sounds like my kind of movie! (Although there are explanations, of course, for a Catholic priest being a father. It is not unheard of for a priest to leave the priesthood and get married, nor for a man to enter the priesthood after his wife has died. In fact I know of at least 2 former priests who married women who had been nuns when then met each other. And I once had a nice conversation at the singer Carly Simon's house with a former Franciscan seminarian who was, at the time I was speaking with him, Carly's husband. It's true! https://open.substack.com/pub/johnsundman/p/crawling-under-carly-simons-house?r=38b5x&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web )
I did not know that about Carly Simon! There was also a time (80s?) when Episcopal priests who were married were allowed to become Catholic priests but I don't remember all the circumstances. In the context of this movie, though, the grandfather was an active priest (not former) --this was an important plot point. Perhaps he had joined after his wife died??? Had been Anglican?? I think that I'm thinking too much about this.
I have seen & enjoyed the first Knives Out movie but not the other two. But given all this conversation I'm going to have to watch them soon. (My wife & I made the horrible mistake of watching Invitation to a Murder the other night & I could really use something with a bit more sophistication to wipe that experience from my mental slate. If you haven't seen that movie, don't bother. Ugh.)
But I do take Noah's point about the 'no true Christian' stuff. Christianity is what Christianity does, and there's an awful lot of it that is just horrible. To whatever extent this movie tries to sanitize Christianity, I disapprove in advance.
If you do read my essay about when I crawled under Carly Simon's house & was rewarded with a front row seat to a private concert at her house, please let me know what you think of it.
Huh, I find your point a little muddled. Are we supposed to only like movies that show Christianity as hopelessly and irredeemably evil? Or is that only the Catholic Church that is supposed to be hopelessely and irredeemably evil? Sure, it's a bit of a feel good film, where redeeming the corrupt institution is, well, surprisingly easy. And the corrpution turns out to be local and limited. But in an era when many of our institutions are deeply and badly corrupted, wanting to believe they can be saved hardly seems the worst belief to be promoting. And sure, showing them as redeemed in the length of any Hollywood film will be a bit facile, we aren't getting out of this mess in any narrative that can be told completely in a few hours. Maybe you want us to simply tear the institutions down completely and start fresh? There are several well documented historical incidences of that going very badly and none that I know of that went all that well.
so, I don't think we need to always show institutions are bad or whatever. But if you're going to criticize christofascism, then I think it's important to actually prioritize victims and get the analysis of the harm right, rather than doing backflips to assure us that the church is good really. Because there are a lot of historical incidents where the impulse to defend the church over all also went really badly, right?
If Christians are mostly focused on defending the church, they aren't focused on helping people harmed by the church. That's bullshit, and helps no one.
I'd point to Belen as a film that actually gives a shit about the church's victims, and which provides a real analysis of the church's evils and harms (hint: it actually talked about abortion.) It's not especially facile either.
I think that focusing on saving institutions, or insisting that the feel good thing is saving institutions, when those institutions are actively engaged in torture, murder, harassment, and the destruction of our democracy, is pretty fucked up. We want to save people, not corrupt institutions. We need an honest appraisal of harms done and of how the church is promoting those harms, not this feel good bullshit, imo.
The thing is, the church is actually doing a range of good things right now; the new pope is very pro immigrant and is standing up to Trump is powerful and important ways. Various clergy have put themselves on the line and been physically assaulted by ICE officials. I’d be all for a film that got into the specifics there and showed a real debate in the church about immigration, or LGBT issues (it’s sheer cowardice that Blanc being gay is completely erased here.) But that’s not what this film does, and I think that sucks.
Interesting points. Oddly your comment is being highlighted in red by this site for me, it makes it feel angry, which I hope it isn't. I think we need institutions and so need to think about saving them. Our democracy, which is one of the things you highlight as at risk, is after all just a layered agglomeration of several institutions. Saving institutions certainly does include being critical of the harms they are currently causing. Never heard of Belen, will have to check that out. I did enjoy the movie a lot more than you did but so it goes.
We are a secular society, David Fisher—no matter what the KKKhrister Reich wants you to think.
The United States was founded by people of differing religious beliefs who came to the perfectly sensible realization that One Religion Over All, other than the civic religion of Respect for What The Constitution Stands For (rather than playing semantic games to make it do what you in your petty Right-Wing Way WANT it to stand for!), was what drove them out of their respective countries, and turned Europe into a centuries-old battleground.
So accepting any and all religions, including Having No Religion At All, was the best way to avoid the waves of Holy Wars sweeping across their ancestors' homelands, and create a prosperous, rules-based order that accepts all religions, and elevates NO one religion....
"Maybe you want us to simply tear the institutions down completely and start fresh? There are several well documented historical incidences of that going very badly and none that I know of that went all that well."
The Protestant Reformation would like a word with you.
Huh? I guess this is supposed to be the claim that the Protestant Reformation was an unmitigated success? Not buying it. The immediate aftermath of that reformation was mass death in a huge series of religious wars in Europe lasting well over a century. And it's not at all clear that Protestant denominations do less harm even in the modern world than Catholicism. Certainly in US politics, my general impression is that protestant churches do as much or more harm than Catholicism. Also in Indiana and Texas politics, to point to two places I've lived recently. So what exactly was your point? I admit that I like some aspects of the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Reformation better than I like the aftermath of the Russian or Chinese revolutions, but I'm not terribly convinced my biases are fully justified. And suspect Noah would critique at least some of the reasons for those biases...
My point was the Protestant Reformation was a success, albeit not without a lot of bloodshed.
And the Roman Catholic Church of the time was incredibly corrupt.
what does "a success" mean to you? We just ignore several generations of blood shed and call the protestant reformation a success because you want us to? There is a ton of corruption in Protestant churches these days, is that better than having the corruption centralized in the Catholic church? The French Revolution can also be called a success, it ended the French monarchy, eventually after a lot of bloodshed. You can even argue for the Russian revoution, though it's harder, since it's genuinely hard to view Putin as a huge improvement on the the tsar's. China is a lot more ambiguous, but they are currently the leading innovator in science and technology on the planet, so maybe I should be making a case that the Chinese revolution and the cultural revolution that followed were also "a success". humbug.
Money quote:
"people are generally less interested in standing in solidarity with Christianity’s victims than they are in rushing to forgive Christianity and Christians for the lies, violence, harassment, theft, murder, and worse that are perpetuated in Christianity’s name."
Self-righteousness is one hell of a drug, and the clergy are major dealers.
No Catholic I've ever met could quote The Beatitudes. Speaking as an ex-Catholic ;^)
OTOH, there's those Catholic bishops in Chicago facing off against ICE...
"As an atheist Jew currently watching christofascists terrorize my communities and destroy my country, it is difficult for me to recommend a film that puts so much energy into convincing me that the heart of the Church is innocent and that, whoever else dies, the cross must be saved."
Mysteries generally deal with social criticism by approaching it obliquely rather than head-on, because an oblique approach is more likely to sink in and stick than a head-on approach which just stiffens people's resolve Not to Listen.
I do wonder if Johnson's original script was more openly critical of Christianity or religion in general, only Netflix went, "Whoa there, Rian! You want to get crucified again, like you did for suggesting Luke Skywalker lost his religion in THE LAST JEDI? Maybe you should include a 'Not All Christians' character, like a lovably foul-mouthed bishop or something...."
Or maybe Netflix didn't even have to bother. Johnson could be gunshy after the roasting he took for THE LAST JEDI—or his wife, film historian Karina Longworth (of the YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS podcast), might have suggested to him that classic Hollywood often got their point across despite having to appease The KKKhrister Right (in the form of Joseph I. Breen of the Production Code Administration, the REAL villain of "the Hays Office"!). That people at the time were angry that Breen had castrated movies...seems to be something she's less inclined to tackle, from the few episodes of her podcast I've listened to (I seem to have developed an allergy to elevator music playing incessantly under people talking, which she continues to do given the last time I listened).
Or...maybe he just went "Fascistic Religious Types—now that's some, I say THAT'S SOME GOOD! window-dressing for this murder mystery!", and that was as far as it went for him.
PS: "Tergiversation"—nice one, Noah! I consider myself a fairly literate sort, and I never heard that word before today. Looking it up, it means (so saith Vocabulary.com) "falsification by means of vague or ambiguous language"....
Haven’t seen this iteration yet but hope it doesn’t take itself too seriously as the others have been so much easy fun satirizing the wealthy, tech elites, amoral people in general…bad people will find anything to justify their evil or tool to implement it be it religion( self professed practitioners of Judaism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam are all guilty of this) political ideology (GOP, monarchists, communists, fascists…), “human progress” (Elon musks insane single minded focus of populating other planets at the expense of millions of human lives) I tend to think that “Christians” have been so successful at weaponizing religion as a fluke of history and not because of Christian theology-which has no more violence, misogyny, or bigotry in its foundational texts than any other religion so I’m not bothered by the movie taking Christianity seriously any more than I would any other religion even w the present threat of Christian nationalism
I don’t think christianity is any worse than anything else…and I’m not against taking it seriously! I think the problem for me is that it claims to be addressing Christian abuses but is more interested in absolving the church of them.