Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap is still the longest running show in the West End. It opened in 1952 at the Ambassadors Theatre and barring one move to St. Martins’ next door has been a constant of the British theatrical scene ever since. I actually saw it in 2009 on holiday, my first ever West End show, and yes it is true that it still ends with the gimmick of asking the audience not to reveal the twist ending despite the seventy year history of the show.
I didn’t expect that The Mousetrap would be such a central feature of See How They Run, a murder mystery comedy directed by Tom George and with a fairly noteworthy ensemble cast led by Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan. The whole movie in fact revolves around that show in its’ original run, and draws from it and other Agatha Christie tropes for its’ plot, frequently winking at the audience in the same corny way the play does. Even the title seems like it could be lifted straight from one of her works -it has that 1940s playfulness to it. That’s very much the atmosphere that the movie tries to get across, a starkly different one from something like Knives Out, which it consciously is aware it’ll be compared to. However in this there’s a stagey awkwardness to the movie that works against it and makes it hard to really engage in. I mean it opens on a guy who hates murder mysteries lampshading clichés as they are enacted. That’s not the mood you want to begin your murder mystery with.
The film is probably too meta, and too impressed with its’ own perceived cleverness in how it utilizes the tropes of murder mystery, and especially of The Mousetrap, to inform the story. It centres on the murder of an obnoxious movie director, played by Adrien Brody, in London to see about turning The Mousetrap into a Hollywood feature -something which can’t be done until it closes its’ run in the West End (and why it still hasn’t been done, which this movie endeavours to get around). The entire company at the theatre is under suspicion, including lead actor Richard Attenborough (Harris Dickinson) as well as those involved in the movie development, producer John Woolf (Reece Shearsmith) and screenwriter Mervyn Cocker-Norris (David Oyelowo). Investigating the case are Scotland Yard police Inspector Stoppard (Rockwell) and the rookie Constable Stalker (Ronan).
This cast, which also includes Ruth Wilson as the theatre manager, Pearl Chanda as Sheila Sim, and Pippa Bennett-Warner as Woolf’s secretary and secret lover, there’s a number of strange choices and cases of clear miscasting -starting with Rockwell and his pretty dreadful British accent. His attempt at portraying a seasoned, weary London policeman vibe is a pretty dreadful misfire, and not just because it sounds like his dialect coaching amounted to just an attempt to impersonate a drunk Peter O’Toole. Rockwell can be a good comedian but he’s not suited to the kind of comedy he’s required to perform here -dry understated wit with a shabby physicality. His character seems intoxicated a lot of the time, and drunkenness is a tough thing to act for humour. Rockwell struggles here and also just can’t relay any enthusiasm or investment much. Which hurts the movie when he is supposed to be a driving force of plot. The one other American, actually playing an American, is Brody, and he’s not all that good either as basically a shallower version of one of his Wes Anderson characters -although I think the smug way his narration is written is more to blame for that. Oyelowo also feels very weird in this as the pompous gay screenwriter whose got few personality traits beyond those. It is a part written very plainly, as admittedly most of the parts in this movie are, but Oyelowo just doesn’t add anything. What is there he plays poorly and to a stock archetype, something he ought to have graduated from by now. And then there’s Dickinson playing Attenborough, a person he looks nothing like, to a very pale impersonation that’s just good enough to highlight how badly he fits as this figure.
By contrast, Ronan is quietly delightful in a light comic part of a kind she doesn’t get to play much anymore. If there’s any kind of heart to be found in the movie it is with her and her earnest dedication. The relationship between the two cops is where George endeavours to find some character drama -and in better hands it would be tangible. There are definitely hints towards an endearing dynamic between the grubby, deflated Stoppard and the plucky determined Stalker, especially where the latter begins to suspect the former of guilt in the crime over an old marginal motivation. But alas it doesn’t translate to much -character is not on the mind of this movie, which reduces most of the others to stereotypes that could be found in any Agatha Christie story. I’d commend the commitment to form if it wasn’t so dull.
The mystery itself is also not terribly engaging. While set up in an orderly fashion, introducing Brody’s character at a party scene where organically each motivation is acutely set up (something that Glass Onion also does well), the script fails to engineer much of any momentum in the course of investigating, and is only too proud to have characters lampshade the context or narrative choices -or in the case of Cocker-Norris the technical choices, decrying lazy flashback devices just as one is used in the telling of his story. As to the devices of the mystery, the major red herring is far too obviously a misdirect as to have any weight and while the clues are there to indicate where the murderer is coming from, their actual identity ultimately means nothing. And as the narrative converges on Agatha Christie’s own home for a blisteringly contrived parallel to the play, the dinner theatre quality of the whole production shows its’ face more and more. There could be a camp charm to this, but whatever was there gets lost, and in all its’ attempts at quirks it feels drab.
See How They Run is a tribute to a very specific show with a very specific legacy, much as it draws on the Agatha Christie ephemera of tropes for its’ influences. But in addition to then limiting the films’ scope, it isn’t clever or curious enough in that identity to ever be more than passively interesting. And it tries much too hard to extol a cool cynicism about its’ format without ever having the gall to actually be cynical. Or to reinterpret the genre, which is something that Agatha Christie was constantly doing. This is just a dim shadow.
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