The "All Star Cast" of "Knives Out" (NO SPOILERS)

Definitely no spoilers for "Knives Out" -- because its a whodunit -- and I don't want to drop a hint about whodunit. Or when or how or why.

I think I'll take a run at a topic that always interests me "at the movies": the vagaries of stardom. "Knives Out" has an "all star cast" of suspects(and its detective) and yet...how all star are these stars? How do they measure on whatever scale of stardom we have these days.

Two of the stars SHOULD be considered big ones: Daniel Craig(aka Our Current James Bond) and Chris Evans(aka Captain America...a Marvel hero of the highest level.)

But are they? Craig has a distinctively "border-line ugly" look that has been linked to both Charles Bronson and Steve McQueen(or a mix thereof) of "type," and yet, like Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan and most certainly Timothy Dalton, Craig hasn't really managed to get stardom "away from Bond." (Connery most certainly DID.)

Still, I think Craig has managed to avoid Roger Moore's "too cute" lack of star quality, and he's done better than Timothy Dalton. Craig is about equal to Brosnan in "hanging on" for a star career that MIGHT lead to greater bankability. NOTE: This is the second time in several years that Craig has elected to go for a character with a Southern accent - the other time was as a crook in Logan Lucky, here he is the "Louisiana Hercule Poirot" and...as with many British actors ...Southern accents suit him.

Chris Evans has a Bond-like problem: what kind of bankable star is he when he is NOT Captain America? He's got another quandary: there are SEVERAL "Chris" stars out there these days -- Chris Pratt may be the biggest(he's got Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy and Spileberg's Jurassic World series as franchises), but there's also Chris Pine. He's also got the cautionary tale of the long forgotten Chris O'Donnell(Robin with Batman.)

In his favor, Evans in "Knives Out" gets to play a weird-looking fellow -- his handsomeness is congealed in rich-kid insolence and a sort of non-handsome creepiness -- you can see the "character man" lurking within this cutie pie and, I dunno...maybe some sort of star career awaits.

Evans is cast as the son of Jamie Lee Curtis and Don Johnson -- who are throwbacks to decades past , of course.

In this film(all recent films?) Jamie Lee Curtis has decided to let her age show -- I think she's 60ish now. White hair, short haircut, unflattering glasses...she's playing a no-nonsense business woman here, a tough gal. (Daughter of stars Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, she has aged to look more like Curtis than Leigh!) And Handsome Don Johnson is her dissolute husband -- the pretty boy who married rugged wealth.

Don Johnson. He goes on my list of "movie stars who didn't happen." Michael Madsen is there. Kurt Russell is ALMOST there -- though Kurt's stayed bankable as an Old Man Character Star.

Don Johnson was incredibly pretty when he ruled on "Miami Vice" in the 80's. Johnson lost shots to play the Kevin Costner role in The Untouchables and the Mel Gibson role in Lethal Weapon and had to watch them become superstars while his TV career fizzled -- and then re-grouped(on TV again -- as Nash Bridges.) Interestingly, today both Costner and Gibson have faded -- superstars no more -- but Don Johnson's career has RISEN -- he looks great in HIS 60's and QT used him to great effect a few years back as a suave but menacing slave owner in Django Unchained(for my money, he was more commanding than Leo DiCaprio in that movie in a similar part.)

Don Johnson's shot at superstardom is past him -- but he may be able to join Jeff Bridges and Kurt Russell as a "bankable old guy character star." He looks great, he doesn't look so pretty, and he's FUNNY. (Note in passing: those old "Miami Vice" episodes had pretty lousy, over-serious, over-wrought, over-posing scripts, even with the notable Michael Mann at the helm. Looking back, that series did Johnson no favors.)

Toni Collette -- an interesting character actress with a very interesting face. It looks like a bit of a "mock turtle" face, somewhat sad and overlong and reptilian. Its a sympathetic face, too -- remember her as Alfrec Hitchcock's assistant Peggy Robertson in "Hitchcock" a few years back?(The movie about the making of Psycho.) Here the Austrialian actress affects a snobbish-airhead-hippie type accent and gets great comic mileage out of it.

Chris Evans, Don Johnson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Toni Collette -- they are all playing family members(by birth or by marriage) of 85-year old Old Man Christopher Plummer, whose death(suicide or murder?) brings them all together for a reading of the will and some serious back-biting.