Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022) Director Rian Johnson
“It’s all in plain sight.”
An eminently ridiculous and overly indulgent follow-up to Knives Out, Rian Johnson’s political satire in Glass Onion takes place during March 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. It offers a welcome mockery of the red-pilled manosphere IDW clowns online (think Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, Matt Walsh, Andrew Tate, Bret Weinstein, Tucker Carlson, Steven Crowder, Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, Stefan Molyneux and so many others who now sadly dominate the political discourse online) as well as our generation’s larger-than-life, self-aggrandizing tech billionaires whose companies have allowed for these mind-numbing, attention-hungry personalities to be algorithmically elevated to the detriment of reasonable discourse. Glass Onion presents a well-trod satire of vapid, hollow, a-moral celebrity culture. And while some vaguely interesting ideas are touched upon in Glass Onion, unfortunately nothing really seems to make sense by the end, and the film strikes me as little more than another example of all the superficial nonsense it hopes to satirize.
This long, drab murder mystery (the first hour seems to drone on) features a group of “Disruptors” who are invited to a billionaire tech guru’s private island off the coast of Greece courtesy of Miles Bron (Edward Norton), an eccentric technology company executive, founder of Alpha (a stand-in for Meta, Google, Tesla, Oracle, or Palantir etc). The group of invitees includes Connecticut Governor Claire Debella (Kathryn Hahn), Scientist Lionel Toussaint (Leslie Odom Jr.), Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson), her assistant Peg (Jessica Henwick), Duke (Dave Bautista) and his girlfriend Whiskey (Madelyn Cline), and Cassandra “Andi” Brand (Janelle Monae). Additionally, the famous private investigator Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) sits in his bath, bored at home hoping for a new case when he, too, is unexpectedly invited to join the “Disruptors” on Bron’s private island.
There are a few interesting plot twists I suppose –such as an identical twin sister, a secret plot to ruin a character’s reputation, a volatile new energy substance known as “klear,” and an unexpected murder –but nothing really is as it seems in Glass Onion. Like Miles Bron’s elaborate glass structure dubbed his “glass onion” (named after The Beatles song), the movie is covered in layers of untruth which must be peeled back over time. But with that being said, I found Glass Onion to be a completely indulgent mess of a movie –this was a real disappointment for me especially following its impressive predecessor Knives Out. There are a variety of unresolved loose ends at the end of the film –for example, who was Bron’s friend Derol? And why was he even included in the movie? Why didn’t Miles kick Benoit Blanc out of his party immediately since he was not invited? I could go on and dive into a panoply of other problems with the film but it’s just not worthwhile –to quote Benoit Blanc, “it’s just dumb.”
I might have preferred a different reveal for the murderer. But I found this one to be somewhat cleverer than Knives Out, even if more complicated. Thank you for your review.