See How They Run Review - A Cool Crime Caper Comedy

thegamer.com:

See How They Run feels like a movie we should enjoy while we still can. Movies of this size, made with moderate budgets hoping for moderate returns, are fading away, especially without the backing of a moderate director. The death of the DVD market and our current incessant need to turn everything into a franchise means standalone ‘double-A’ movies, for want of a better term, seem on the demise. That’s especially telling with See How They Run, which feels like the salt shaker that came with the house when Disney bought Fox to get its hands on X-Men and the Fantastic 4. If See How They Run is the end of an era though, at least it’s bowing out in style.

The movie positions itself as both a remake of and a homage to The Mousetrap. Agatha Christie’s long-running stage play is to be adapted into a movie, but the unpleasant would-be director (played by Adrien Brody) is killed and left on stage in a macabre display. It then falls to Sam Rockwell’s grizzled detective and Saoirse Ronan’s eager rookie cop to untangle the web within. It does a clever enough job of both reinventing the play’s plot and tip-toeing around potential spoilers, which is a well worn tradition with The Mousetrap. The plot and caper itself however is probably the weakest part of the flick, which is never great for a murder mystery, but then I don’t particularly care for The Mousetrap so your mileage may vary. I enjoyed See How They Run significantly more than the play precisely because it brings other elements to the table beyond the whodunnit, while The Mousetrap relies almost entirely on its twist and premise.

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One of these extra elements is the aforementioned dynamic between Rockwell and Ronan. Though