Wish I could’ve seen this one in the theaters. Thought about Brick and (especially) The Brothers Bloom with this one—Johnson loves to simultaneously play within a genre while simultaneously pushing at its limits. One of Bloom’s themes is the con built into performance, and movies—a whodunit provides a fun playground to do that. I’ve had a lot of fun between this, See How They Run, and tv’s Bad Sisters all using the whodunit in different ways.
The El*n jokes have been paid off in full by the events at Twitter over the last [checks notes] 2 (!) months. The cameos were fun but honestly it was the Magnolia gag that did it for me.
Also the movie looks great, kudos to the people who know how to light/shoot/edit these days.