Looking through the bent back tulips to see how the other half lives
The 2019 anti-mystery Knives Out has a game cast and an interestingly annoying structural conceit, buried (but not very deeply!) below some very dumb social satire and "extremely online" cultural touchstones. It is very much a "fix this one thing, and you've really got something here" proposition, but unfortunately, it was written and directed by Rian Johnson, who is plainly gripped by the misguided belief that he has something smart and cutting to say about the world, as opposed to being just one notch above Adam McKay in his aggravating smugness. So it's crushingly disappointing but not actually all that surprising that it sequel, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, doubles down on exactly the thing that almost ruined Knives Out, while pulling out an annoying structural conceit that isn't very interesting at all, and in so doing hauling itself up to a bleary-eyed 139-minute running time to cover about 85 minutes worth of story. Though to be fair, I only really noticed the running time after the structural conceit does its thing, and jams the brakes on what had been, up to that point, a pretty bouncily-paced comedy of manners that doesn't really pretend to be either a thriller or a murder mystery for any of it.
The conceit this time around: in May 2020, during the first few weeks of the COVID lockdowns - a hook that the film completely forgets about by the 20-minute mark, trotting out a magical COVID preventative for the specific purpose of removing the need to keep talking about it - a group of rich weirdos who lived their lives in front of cameras long before the pandemic made that normal all receive identical puzzle boxes. These weirdos include Gov. Claire Debella (Kathryn Hahn), a mercilessly cynical politician pandering shamelessly to left-liberal Democrats as she runs for the office of senator from Connecticut, Duke Cody (Dave Bautista), a heavily tattooed men's rights vlogger, Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson), a brainless lifestyle influencer prone to say terribly offensive things on social meda, and Lionel Toussaint (Leslie Odom, Jr.), who isn't actually super online at all, he's just a head scientist at a major tech company. The film never tries to explain why these four people are tight friends with each other, and doesn't even seem to notice that it might need to (it is, at a minimum, entirely impossible to imagine a real-world version of Claire allowing herself to associate with a real-world version of Duke, setting aside the fact that none of the four people seem to have remotely compatible personalities). But that's actually kind of okay, because they sequence where the four of them are introduced on a conference call trying to solve the puzzle boxes is legitimately great. It gives us a quick sense of their different ways of thinking about the world, quickly lets us see who will be brash and dumb versus who will be cunning and thoughtful and dumb, and allows Hudson to land several jokes on her way to being the film's wholly unexpected MVP, and not really by a small margin, from where I'm sitting. It uses cross-cutting in a beautiful way to create momentum and excitement, something we get frustratingly infrequently in modern cinema. Cinematographer Steve Yedlin, after having made Knives Out look just inexplicably awful and flat, I thought, now demonstrates a gift for differentiating spaces, helped out a lot by production designer Rick Heinrichs and set decorator Elli Griff, who make every space seem personal and distinctive to visually tell us who each of the characters are. And for the duration of this sequence, I felt very optimistic about Glass Onion being the improvement on its predecessor I'd been hoping for.
Meanwhile the brilliant consulting detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is extremely bored, spending all of his time soaking in a bath playing Among Us online with a cameoing Natasha Lyonne, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Stephen Sondheim (RIP), and Angela Lansbury (RIP). Incidentally, this is the point at which my aforementioned optimism was dragged out behind the woodshed and shot in the forehead, and I resigned myself to merely hoping that I would find Glass Onion even remotely tolerable. And I suppose it was "remotely" tolerable. Blanc ends up getting one of the same puzzle boxes that the four yahoos did, and finds the same thing they did: an invitation to a private island off the coast of Greece, where the biggest weirdo of them all, super-famous tech genius disruptor asshole Miles Bron (Edward Norton), who is essentially Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg all whizzed up together in a blender, has decided to fight the COVID blues by inviting his nearest and dearest friends to a murder mystery party. Blanc isn't one of those friends, and in fact Miles is somewhat confused that the detective even heard about the party, which immediately puts Blanc on high alert that Something Is Afoot.
Whatever that is, it's clearly got something to do with Andi Brand (Janelle Monáe), who was also introduced in that opening montage, but instead of tackling Miles's complicate nest of puzzles leading to puzzles, she simply broke the thing open with a sledgehammer. And whatever went on between her and Miles in the past, it has caused all of the other partygoers to be just shocked that she was brave enough, or tasteless enough, or foolish enough to show up at this event, though Miles seems earnestly pleased that she showed up. And that is as far as a plot synopsis of Glass Onion can take us, in part because there is no more plot until roughly the 60-minute mark, which is the very earliest moment that anything at all resembling a "mystery" establishes itself. Everything until that point consists of sitting back to watch the ensemble swan about letting us see what kind of people they are, while Blanc sits on the sidelines clucking moralistically. The most evident takeaway from this hour is that if anybody in Rian Johnson's family truly loves him, they need to mangle all of his fingers with a pair of vice grips rather than ever allow him back on Twitter, because this is one of the most hideously online-poisoned films I have seen in my miserable life. The cast is generally very strong: of the seven leads (nine if we count Madelyn Cline as Duke's much-younger girlfriend and Jessica Henwick as Birdie's patient, overworked assistant), none of them is actively bad, though Odom makes almost no impact thanks to having by far the most thinly-conceived character. But they are fighting a losing battle with the sketchy caricatures of Types We (Sophisticated Urban Liberals) Like To Mock that exclusively make up the cast outside of Blanc and Andi, the latter of whom is very deliberately being written as an empty center with inexplicable behaviors wrapped around it, insofar as "so what's up with her?" is the only actual mystery in this murder mystery. Bautista, especially, is plunging as deep into Duke as it is possible to plunge, confirming in the process that he is secretly one of our most reliable character actors right now, but no matter how much layering and complexity one adds to Duke, Duke will never be more than a one-joke buffoon.
Anyway, it's an opening hour that is undoubtedly to somebody's taste, but is also undoubtedly not to mine; it's also the best part of the movie. Not to give anything about what happens away, but there's a point where Glass Onion hits a plot development at which point it in fact is a murder mystery, leading to the second-best sequence in the movie after the puzzle box opening montage (a productively chaotic "everybody running in a tizzy when the lights go off" sequence). And then it makes a great big structural decision that I frankly think sucks: much like the big pivot that Knives Out made at the 30-minute mark, it allows us to see that we have been watching the film from the wrong perspective this whole time, but whereas Knives Out allows us to reattach ourselves to the movie from a new perspective, Glass Onion firmly commits to locking us outside of the movie. And then, for forty uninterrupted minutes, it recaps. I frankly think it's a deadly move on all fronts: the momentum snaps and never gets restarted, and it becomes very clear that the literal only thing Johnson's script could think of to do in order to keep us from proceeding down an unerringly straight path from "I bet it's Person X" to "oh, it sure did turn out to be Person X" is to flat-out lie to us about what's even happening. Because, on top of everything else, this is an extremely obvious "mystery"; I don't even know that it introduces a red herring at all, let alone does so with enough conviction to make the most obvious solution feel slightly less certain.
I mean, it's obvious that this is the case because Glass Onion isn't actually trying to be a murder mystery, but rather a social satire. But that just takes us back to the unfortunate reality that it is an unsatisfactory murder mystery, but a fucking terrible social satire, and so it's trading one failure for another.
At the very least, it looks pretty fantastic, which is a lot more than I'd have ever said for Knives Out; Heinrichs leans hard into glassiness, per the title, and that results in some very striking and sleek-looking interiors, exactly the sort of thing a smug nouveau riche Silicon Valley asshole would think is cunningly tasteful when it is merely sterile and inhumane. And Yedlin has a much better time coping with the bright lighting this film asks for and encourages, compared to the smoky gloom of the first movie. Also, I am tempted to say that on a person-by-person basis, the cast here is better, though I think Craig has gone unfortunately broad, and Monáe completely falls apart in the second half, where the script asks her to perform a trick that is entirely outside of her wheelhouse. At any rate, it's closer to being a lateral move from Knives Out than a clear step down; it is also, sadly, a lateral move that reveals to me that one Knives Out was the exact number I had any appetite for.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
The conceit this time around: in May 2020, during the first few weeks of the COVID lockdowns - a hook that the film completely forgets about by the 20-minute mark, trotting out a magical COVID preventative for the specific purpose of removing the need to keep talking about it - a group of rich weirdos who lived their lives in front of cameras long before the pandemic made that normal all receive identical puzzle boxes. These weirdos include Gov. Claire Debella (Kathryn Hahn), a mercilessly cynical politician pandering shamelessly to left-liberal Democrats as she runs for the office of senator from Connecticut, Duke Cody (Dave Bautista), a heavily tattooed men's rights vlogger, Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson), a brainless lifestyle influencer prone to say terribly offensive things on social meda, and Lionel Toussaint (Leslie Odom, Jr.), who isn't actually super online at all, he's just a head scientist at a major tech company. The film never tries to explain why these four people are tight friends with each other, and doesn't even seem to notice that it might need to (it is, at a minimum, entirely impossible to imagine a real-world version of Claire allowing herself to associate with a real-world version of Duke, setting aside the fact that none of the four people seem to have remotely compatible personalities). But that's actually kind of okay, because they sequence where the four of them are introduced on a conference call trying to solve the puzzle boxes is legitimately great. It gives us a quick sense of their different ways of thinking about the world, quickly lets us see who will be brash and dumb versus who will be cunning and thoughtful and dumb, and allows Hudson to land several jokes on her way to being the film's wholly unexpected MVP, and not really by a small margin, from where I'm sitting. It uses cross-cutting in a beautiful way to create momentum and excitement, something we get frustratingly infrequently in modern cinema. Cinematographer Steve Yedlin, after having made Knives Out look just inexplicably awful and flat, I thought, now demonstrates a gift for differentiating spaces, helped out a lot by production designer Rick Heinrichs and set decorator Elli Griff, who make every space seem personal and distinctive to visually tell us who each of the characters are. And for the duration of this sequence, I felt very optimistic about Glass Onion being the improvement on its predecessor I'd been hoping for.
Meanwhile the brilliant consulting detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is extremely bored, spending all of his time soaking in a bath playing Among Us online with a cameoing Natasha Lyonne, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Stephen Sondheim (RIP), and Angela Lansbury (RIP). Incidentally, this is the point at which my aforementioned optimism was dragged out behind the woodshed and shot in the forehead, and I resigned myself to merely hoping that I would find Glass Onion even remotely tolerable. And I suppose it was "remotely" tolerable. Blanc ends up getting one of the same puzzle boxes that the four yahoos did, and finds the same thing they did: an invitation to a private island off the coast of Greece, where the biggest weirdo of them all, super-famous tech genius disruptor asshole Miles Bron (Edward Norton), who is essentially Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg all whizzed up together in a blender, has decided to fight the COVID blues by inviting his nearest and dearest friends to a murder mystery party. Blanc isn't one of those friends, and in fact Miles is somewhat confused that the detective even heard about the party, which immediately puts Blanc on high alert that Something Is Afoot.
Whatever that is, it's clearly got something to do with Andi Brand (Janelle Monáe), who was also introduced in that opening montage, but instead of tackling Miles's complicate nest of puzzles leading to puzzles, she simply broke the thing open with a sledgehammer. And whatever went on between her and Miles in the past, it has caused all of the other partygoers to be just shocked that she was brave enough, or tasteless enough, or foolish enough to show up at this event, though Miles seems earnestly pleased that she showed up. And that is as far as a plot synopsis of Glass Onion can take us, in part because there is no more plot until roughly the 60-minute mark, which is the very earliest moment that anything at all resembling a "mystery" establishes itself. Everything until that point consists of sitting back to watch the ensemble swan about letting us see what kind of people they are, while Blanc sits on the sidelines clucking moralistically. The most evident takeaway from this hour is that if anybody in Rian Johnson's family truly loves him, they need to mangle all of his fingers with a pair of vice grips rather than ever allow him back on Twitter, because this is one of the most hideously online-poisoned films I have seen in my miserable life. The cast is generally very strong: of the seven leads (nine if we count Madelyn Cline as Duke's much-younger girlfriend and Jessica Henwick as Birdie's patient, overworked assistant), none of them is actively bad, though Odom makes almost no impact thanks to having by far the most thinly-conceived character. But they are fighting a losing battle with the sketchy caricatures of Types We (Sophisticated Urban Liberals) Like To Mock that exclusively make up the cast outside of Blanc and Andi, the latter of whom is very deliberately being written as an empty center with inexplicable behaviors wrapped around it, insofar as "so what's up with her?" is the only actual mystery in this murder mystery. Bautista, especially, is plunging as deep into Duke as it is possible to plunge, confirming in the process that he is secretly one of our most reliable character actors right now, but no matter how much layering and complexity one adds to Duke, Duke will never be more than a one-joke buffoon.
Anyway, it's an opening hour that is undoubtedly to somebody's taste, but is also undoubtedly not to mine; it's also the best part of the movie. Not to give anything about what happens away, but there's a point where Glass Onion hits a plot development at which point it in fact is a murder mystery, leading to the second-best sequence in the movie after the puzzle box opening montage (a productively chaotic "everybody running in a tizzy when the lights go off" sequence). And then it makes a great big structural decision that I frankly think sucks: much like the big pivot that Knives Out made at the 30-minute mark, it allows us to see that we have been watching the film from the wrong perspective this whole time, but whereas Knives Out allows us to reattach ourselves to the movie from a new perspective, Glass Onion firmly commits to locking us outside of the movie. And then, for forty uninterrupted minutes, it recaps. I frankly think it's a deadly move on all fronts: the momentum snaps and never gets restarted, and it becomes very clear that the literal only thing Johnson's script could think of to do in order to keep us from proceeding down an unerringly straight path from "I bet it's Person X" to "oh, it sure did turn out to be Person X" is to flat-out lie to us about what's even happening. Because, on top of everything else, this is an extremely obvious "mystery"; I don't even know that it introduces a red herring at all, let alone does so with enough conviction to make the most obvious solution feel slightly less certain.
I mean, it's obvious that this is the case because Glass Onion isn't actually trying to be a murder mystery, but rather a social satire. But that just takes us back to the unfortunate reality that it is an unsatisfactory murder mystery, but a fucking terrible social satire, and so it's trading one failure for another.
At the very least, it looks pretty fantastic, which is a lot more than I'd have ever said for Knives Out; Heinrichs leans hard into glassiness, per the title, and that results in some very striking and sleek-looking interiors, exactly the sort of thing a smug nouveau riche Silicon Valley asshole would think is cunningly tasteful when it is merely sterile and inhumane. And Yedlin has a much better time coping with the bright lighting this film asks for and encourages, compared to the smoky gloom of the first movie. Also, I am tempted to say that on a person-by-person basis, the cast here is better, though I think Craig has gone unfortunately broad, and Monáe completely falls apart in the second half, where the script asks her to perform a trick that is entirely outside of her wheelhouse. At any rate, it's closer to being a lateral move from Knives Out than a clear step down; it is also, sadly, a lateral move that reveals to me that one Knives Out was the exact number I had any appetite for.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Categories: comedies, fun with structure, mysteries, needless sequels, netflix originals, oscarbait, satire
