The Pitch: The
board game Clue. There's a movie in that, right?
A group of
strangers are invited to a dinner party under mysterious circumstances and have
to figure out who keeps killing everyone there.
The movie I kept
thinking about as I rewatched Clue for the first time in a decade was The
Princess Bride. Both that and Clue are 80's movies that genuinely
feel like they couldn've come out in any decade. They rely heavily on gimmicks
that do everything they can to undermine the central idea (fairy tale storybook
and a board game, respectively). However, The Princess Bride was met
with instant praise and Clue had a mixed response upon release. And it
does make sense. The Princess Bride has a much broader structure. It's
playing with the idea of a bedtime story. Clue is something very
specific. It's a board game with well known characters, objects, and rooms.
That's a lot constructs to work in. The biggest gimmick of all, the alternate
endings, is the perfect distillation of the idea. It's meta before that was a
thing that movies or shows tried to be. I understand why reviewers at the time
balked at the idea. It looks like the ultimate sell-out movie. I mean, making a
movie base on a board game is a punch line: a shorthand for lazy studio
thinking. The movie Clue embraces how ridiculous the idea is and makes
that the subtext of the movie. (You want a game? Fine, here it is!)
This isn't a
personal favorite of mine, but I totally get why some people love it. It's a
cast with the likes of Martin Mull, Eileen Brennan, Christopher Lloyd,
Madeline Kahn, Lesley Ann Warren, Michael McKean, and of course, Tim Curry, all
hamming it up. The story jerks everyone around just like it's a board game. I
love that it includes the alternate endings. Some movies leave an ambiguous
ending. This one literally gives you different options. If you think about it,
that's actually pretty hard to do from a screenplay standpoint; leaving enough
moments with different interpretations that accommodate completely different
endings.
Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend
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