🎭 See How They Run (2022)

A whodunit that whodidn’t


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🎬 Let’s start by showing y’all the trailers shall we?

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📖 Non-Spoiler Plot Overview

London, 1950s. The West End theater scene is buzzing with The Mousetrap. Everything’s dramatic, champagne glasses clink, backstage egos clash—then boom, a murder happens. Adrien Brody’s sleazy director Leo Köpernick gets offed, setting the stage for a clever satire murder mystery.

Except this “satire” is about as subtle as being smacked with the playbill. The movie hands the case to Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell), a detective who looks like he’d rather crawl into a bottle, and Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan), who has the energy of a cartoon rookie cop dialed up to moronic. And here’s the core problem: the minute these two enter the story, your brain screams, “Who hired these idiots?”

This should be a witty riff on Christie-style mysteries. Instead, it’s a slog where the only mystery is how this script got greenlit.


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👥 Character Rundown

Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell): Detective “I don’t give a damn.” He’s bitter, jaded, drunk, and honestly comes off like even the actor doesn’t want to be there. His entire vibe screams “paycheck role.” He’s so indifferent you start to wonder if he’d even care if the killer confessed right in front of him.

Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan): At first, her overeager rookie energy is kind of cute… for maybe five minutes. Then you realize that’s all she is. She’s basically Inspector Bimbo. She sees a locked door? She rams her head into it. She sees a random bystander? Arrest them, they must be guilty! The gag is she’s dimwitted, but the joke gets thin real quick.

Leo Köpernick (Adrien Brody): The victim. Cocky, sleazy, sarcastic — and ironically, the most entertaining person in the entire film. Naturally, he’s killed off in the first ten minutes, because God forbid we enjoy ourselves.


Everyone else is just filler. Side characters float in, crack weak jokes, and then disappear.


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⏳ Pacing / Episode Flow

For a film under two hours, it drags like a three-hour lecture on wallpaper paste. The middle sags, the comedy misfires, and by the time the ending limps into view, you’re so checked out you could’ve left 20 minutes earlier and not missed anything important.


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✅ Pros

The costumes and period setting are on point. It looks 1950s enough.

Adrien Brody is fun to watch… for the whopping ten minutes he’s alive.

Saoirse Ronan is clearly giving effort, even if the script turns her into Inspector Dimwit.



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❌ Cons

Sam Rockwell’s Stoppard is so miserable and detached, he makes Clouseau look competent.

No chemistry between the leads. They aren’t a quirky duo; they’re two mismatched puzzle pieces that don’t fit.

The satire isn’t clever. It’s satire with the training wheels still on.

And the big one: the detectives do nothing. They don’t solve the case. The movie literally solves it for them.

The ending is an insult. The villain gets outed by sheer stupidity and then dies. Case closed. What a joke.



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💭 Final Thoughts

What was supposed to be a clever satire ends up being a whodunit where the whodunit doesn’t matter, because the detectives are completely useless. You don’t root for them, because they don’t do anything. They stumble around, get drunk, or play dumb, and then the script just decides to hand over the solution on a silver platter.

It’s supposed to be a comedy too, but I never laughed. Not once. Instead, I just groaned. If satire means “don’t even bother solving your own mystery,” then congratulations, movie — you nailed it.


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⭐ Rating

4/10 — A nothing-burger. Looks nice, sounds clever in pitch meetings, but in execution it’s limp, unfunny, and empty.


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⚠️ Spoiler Warning

Alright, let’s rip this apart properly. Spoilers ahead.


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🔎 Spoilers

The murder victim? Leo Köpernick (Adrien Brody). Naturally, he’s the one character with any real charisma. Once he’s gone, the film loses all pulse.

Now here’s the kicker: Rockwell and Ronan’s characters don’t solve a damn thing. They don’t uncover clues, they don’t make connections, they don’t outsmart anyone. They just… exist. Stoppard mopes, Stalker bungles, and somehow we’re supposed to believe these two are in charge of a murder investigation.

The killer ends up being Dennis, the screenwriter. Why did he kill Köpernick? Because he wanted to protect Agatha Christie’s work from being turned into a Hollywood adaptation. Noble cause, dumb execution. And how do our detectives figure this out? Oh wait — they don’t. Dennis literally lures everyone into a house, confesses, and then gets himself killed. Boom, mystery solved. Not by wit, not by deduction, but by the villain being an idiot.

And that’s the insult. The big payoff of a murder mystery is supposed to be that our detectives crack it. Here? The movie solves itself. You sit there like, “So I wasted two hours watching Inspector Alcoholic and Constable Dimwit bumble around, only for the script to go ‘eh, I’ll just tell you who did it.’”

That ending is lazy. The villain dies, the detectives shrug, roll credits. It’s like the filmmakers themselves got bored and hit the fast-forward button.


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📝 Critics’ & Fans’ Consensus

Here’s the funny part: it’s not just me ranting. Critics and fans basically had the same reaction. Reviews were filled with lines like “unfunny satire,” “a murder mystery where the detectives don’t do any detecting,” and “a clever premise wasted.” Audiences walked out saying, wait, that was it? The movie figured out the killer, not the detectives? That’s the common take.

The whole film fails at its one job: delivering a satisfying mystery. Without that, you’re left with a limp parody that’s too boring to be clever, too smug to be charming, and too lazy to be memorable.