Death of a Unicorn

 As far as premises go, casting unicorns as the monsters for your creature feature is a decent one. Writer/director Alex Scharfman has no faith in the power of silly creatures wreaking havoc, though, so he clumsily back-fills the film around the cryptid attack with all sorts of unnecessary, clumsy and extremely derivative scaffolding.

 Elliot Kintner (Paul Rudd) and his somewhat estranged daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega) are summoned to the remote retreat of the Leopolds, a family that owns a powerful big pharma / biotech company; The scions wish to meet Elliot before making him the figurehead of the company, as the patriarch (Richard E. Grant), is dying of cancer.

 On their way through a huge private nature reserve, though, the Kintners run over... well, a unicorn. At first worried that he'll get in trouble for killing a mythical animal, he quickly finds that the Leopolds are instead overjoyed when they discover that the mythical healing properties of a unicorn's horn are very, very factual. So they set out to fabricate cures based on every part of the equine corpse's body, trying to exploit it to the utmost - and all the while Ridley (the virtuous maiden) observes from the sidelines in dismay.

 And then (as foreshadowed by a particularly graceless bit of research/exposition on the famous unicorn tapestries) things get violent when a pair of unimpressed unicorn parents arrive at the compound to retrieve the corpse of their offspring. And these are not your forebear's unicorns; These ones have fangs and sharp spurs besides that nasty-looking horn.

Visual cliché ahoy!

 Death of a Unicorn very obviously takes Knives Out as a template and tries to do what it did for murder mysteries to creature features instead. But it does so in an extremely witless, blunt manner that all but kills its feeble attempts at relevance; The Leopolds (Richard E. Grant, Téa Leoni and Will Poulter) are deeply cartoony, one-note 'ugly' rich people whose every utterance is there to reinforce that they are selfish, callous, entitled, and grossly evil. There's no nuance nor any of the wit that made Rian Jonson's set of douchebags such a delightful bunch of villains to root against; This is hollow satire, pandering crap that offers up effigies so that people (rightfully) angry at the one percent can point at them and say 'yeah, these sure are horrible people' just before they get treated to some comeuppance at the end of an alicorn.

 There are also attempts at melodrama and a shit-ass redemption arc as Elliot spinelessly kowtows to the Leopolds throughout the movie, putting his already strained relationship to his principled daughter at even greater risk before having a half-arsed crisis of conscience. It all leads to a deeply unearned, corny ending that all but oozes cheap sentimentality.

 If only all this crap was in the service of good carnage and decent action... but the movie flubs that too. There are some decent unicorn attacks and some effective stalking, but the creature design is unimpressive and the film's budget is unable secure the CGI needed to bring its creatures to life in a convincing manner; The monsters, like the satire and the drama, are thoroughly unconvincing. It might have been redeemed by good visual storytelling, but Scharfman's direction is workmanlike and unexciting.

 At least the acting is good, which is a pretty much a given with this cast. Unfortunately the roles everyone's been given are extremely... well, basic. Quickly, think the first role you might imagine any of these given actors playing. That's basically what you're going to get; Elfman plays a principled, eye-rolling, perceptive teen. Poulter an entitled, callous dipshit. Richard E. Grant is a ruthless megalomaniac given to making grandiloquent statements... Even Rudd, who gets to be spineless and wishy-washy for most of the movie, is playing entirely to his everyman type. Poulter at least gets some funny lines - the jokes themselves aren't great, but they're rendered funny by his motormouth delivery and gusto. Barry's Anthony Carrigan also gets a few laughs as the sole rational being in the compound besides ridley; they're cheap laughs, but I'll take them.

 More than anything else, Death of a Unicorn is disappointingly mediocre, an uninspired mess of safe choices, toothless satire and lame comedy and horror. A catchy premise, as proven by all those shorts extended to feature length or the attempts to make horror out of newly copyright-free Disney characters, does not a good movie make.