After saving her town from a psychotic killer, Winnie Carruthers’ life is less than wonderful. When she wishes she’d never been born, she finds herself in a nightmare parallel universe where without her, things could be much, much worse.
There is no guessing what “It’s a Wonderful Knife” is about. It steals the plot and even the title from Frank Capra’s 1946 holiday favorite and makes no apologies for doing so. All it does is switch it from a family drama and turn it into a slasher flick. And that’s it.
Winnie Carruthers (Jane Widdop) lives in the idyllic town of Angel Falls with her family. Along with her best friend Cara (Hana Huggins), they attend a Christmas Eve party together, but when a masked psychotic killer starts killing the guests, including Cara, Winnie manages to turn the tables on the killer and electrocutes him. A year later, Winnie’s family and the rest of the town act like nothing ever happened, and when she feels overlooked and rendered needless by her own family, she wishes she had never been born.
Suddenly, her family and friends don’t recognize her anymore, and she learns that in this parallel universe, the killer was never caught and has been killing randomly for the past year, including her brother. With the help of a fellow school outcast, Bernie (Jess McLeod), the two girls join forces and comprehend that they must identify and outmaneuver the killer before he kills them.
If the movie didn’t borrow so heavily from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” it might have fared better. As it stands, pretty much every twist can be seen a mile away, and by the time the end credits begin to roll, you’re left with a film that could have been pretty nifty but winds up being pedestrianly unoriginal. The cast do well with their respective roles, and it’s great to see Justin Long back in the saddle again. Along with his performance in “Goosebumps” and now this, he, much like Matthew Broderick, seems to have an ageless face that keeps him looking younger and younger the older he becomes.
Here, he plays the town’s silver-tongued, sanctimonious mayor, Henry Waters, constantly treating with condescension everyone around him. We learn early on that he is the killer, erasing anybody who stands in the way of his future plans for Angel Falls, but once we move into the parallel universe, Henry has become the town’s wealthiest and most corrupt man, turning the town into a tumultuous dystopia where all the residents fall under his spell, doing anything he tells them to.
Sort of like when Biff, in “Back to the Future Part II,” used the Delorean to give his younger self the sports almanac, thereby turning Hill Valley into a cataclysmic nightmare, but here, Henry’s apparent mind control over the town’s residents comes out of nowhere and is never adequately explained. We get it; Winnie is in a parallel universe, where things don’t operate the same way they do in hers, but mind control is not something one can suddenly possess without explanation.
“It’s a Wonderful Knife” is conventional, and by the numbers, it follows a set pattern and never deviates, but when it tries to, the revelations are never jaw-dropping as you can already see what is about to transpire. Maybe enough people from this generation haven’t seen Frank Capra’s film, and if they haven’t, they may think this is one of the best cinematic endeavors in recent memory. But for those of us who have, it is far from it.
In Theaters Friday, November 10th
