The latest Knives Out movie, Wake Up Dead Man, is now streaming on Netflix, but that’s not the only mystery flick streaming right now.
Prime Video has plenty of them, and Watch With Us is here to recommend two of the very best — and one that’s so bad, it’s enjoyable.
The Agatha Christie chiller A Haunting in Venice and the neo-noir thriller Out of Time skillfully generate entertaining suspense, while the ’90s relic Hackers will make you wonder how people surfed the web with dial-up modems.
‘A Haunting In Venice’ (2023)
Master detective Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh) has solved plenty of unsolvable cases, but even he’s stumped by his latest mystery. When spiritual medium Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh) is killed at a séance in an old Venetian palazzo on Halloween night, everyone suspects the supernatural — except Poirot, who doesn’t believe in such things. But who killed her and why? Was it Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly), a grieving mother who staged the séance to communicate with her dead daughter? Or was it Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), a mystery novelist with a bad case of writer’s block and a rapidly diminishing bank account?
A Haunting in Venice’s big flaw is its ending, which splits the difference on whether or not this case involves a regular murderer or something more otherworldly. But like most of Christie’s stories, the fun is the journey, not the destination, and it’s a hoot to watch Branagh interrogate suspects like Fey and Jamie Dornan while a storm rages outside. As the film’s director, Branagh isn’t afraid to crank the camp to 11, so expect a lot of Dutch angles and conveniently timed lightning bolts.
A Haunting in Venice is streaming on Prime Video.
‘Out of Time’ (2003)
Denzel Washington is now known as one of the greatest actors alive, but in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he starred in a series of action movies and thrillers that seemed to exist solely for him to pay his mortgage. That’s not the case with Out of Time, an excellent crime thriller from director Carl Franklin that takes full advantage of Washington’s star presence and underutilized sex appeal.
Washington stars as Matt Whitlock, a respected Florida police officer having an affair with Ann (Eva Mendes), who is stuck in an abusive marriage to washed-up football quarterback Chris (Dean Cain). When Ann is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Matt encourages her to undergo a radical treatment that costs almost half a million dollars. Lacking the funds to save her life, Matt helps her out by stealing cash from work and giving it to her without anyone else knowing. But when both Ann and Chris perish in a mysterious fire, Matt suspects he’s been played, and he’s running out of time to prove it.
Out of Time is a modern update on classic film noirs like Double Indemnity and Out of the Past, only sexier and more violent. Washington and Mendes have great onscreen chemistry, and they really sell a premise that, on paper, could’ve been too far-fetched to believe — that Matt would be willing to risk everything for this woman. The plot is twisty in all the right ways, with an ending that’s unpredictable and satisfying. The only downside is that Washington hasn’t made a movie like this since it was released.
Out of Time is streaming on Prime Video.
‘Hackers’ (1995)
I don’t know about you, but I get a kick out of watching movies from the ’80s and ’90s that deal with technology that’s now hopelessly outdated. They’re bizarre artifacts from a lost time, and they’re frequently hilarious in their depiction of this all-powerful, somewhat spooky invention called the internet.
A favorite of mine is Hackers, an admittedly cheesy and not-that-great 1995 thriller about a reformed teenage hacker, Dade “Zero Cool” Murphy (Jonny Lee Miller), who moves to a new city, enrolls in a new high school and befriends a group of — you guessed it — hackers. In his quest to prove to his new buddies that he’s as good as his reputation suggests, Dade hacks into a mineral company’s database and inadvertently uncovers a conspiracy to sink an oil tanker to cover up a money laundering scheme. The bad guys don’t want their plan exposed, so they frame Dade, who already has a criminal history. Can his new hacker friends save him from a lifetime in jail?
Hackers’ plot is both very simple and too complicated — I’m still trying to figure out how sinking a ship will distract everyone from millions being stolen from the company’s bank accounts. But that’s beside the point of enjoying Hackers, which is all flash and surface-level pleasures. From its MTV-style editing that tries so hard to be kinetic and “hip” to a young Angelina Jolie proving that even a star can sell hokum like this, Hackers has a weird, naive charm that makes it more watchable now than it was when it was first released. If you ever feel nostalgic for the opening sounds of Microsoft Windows 95, then hack into Hackers right now.
Hackers is streaming on Prime Video.
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