‘Glass Onion’: Daniel Craig’s Supersleuth Returns for Another Screw-the-Rich Mystery

The good people at Netflix would prefer that reviewers, critics, pundits, wags, culture vultures and other assorted ne’er-do-wells who write about movies on the internet not spoil any of the many twists and turns of Glass Onion, the much-anticipated sequel to Rian Johnson’s 2019 tribute/throwback to whodunnits Knives Out. It’s a sentiment that the filmmaker himself shares, given that so much of the fun of these A-list mysteries revolve around misdirection, deduction, the art of the reveal. Someone who traffics in constructing homages to, say, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap — or simply elaborate detective stories that rely on clockwork precision and a cause-meets-effect dynamic like a giant board game of Mousetrap — doesn’t want anybody ruining the fun any more than magicians want folks yelling out how they do their tricks. (Johnson would also love it if you see the movie in a theater, which is why the decision to give this a one-week theatrical run starting on November 23rd, roughly a month before it becomes the strict property of Netflix’s streaming service, shouldn’t be ignored. You owe to yourself to see this with a crowd if it’s indeed playing near you.)

There’s now such a fine line between what does or doesn’t constitute a spoiler — where the line between serious keep-it-shhh plot points and basic information begins and ends — that it’s tough to discuss these types of corporate entertainments without accidentally hitting tripwires. You feel like the powers that be would be perfectly content for folks to just run heavily redacted reviews with nothing but superlatives on display. So pardon us if we tread extra carefully. Like the object of the title, it’s a delicate thing that relies on handling with care, lest you accidentally shatter the whole thing.

A billionaire tech guru named Miles Bron (Edward Norton, full d-bagging it with gusto) is organizing his annual reunion with his old college pals. The guests include Claire (Kathyrn Hahn), the current governor of Connecticut teeing up a bigger, more toxic political campaign; Lionel (Leslie Odom Jr.), a scientific engineer who works for Bron’s company Alpha; Birdie (Kate Hudson), a model-slash-social influencer with an unexpectedly successful fashion line and an unfortunate penchant for tweeting out racial slurs; Duke (Dave Bautista), the hulking host of a popular YouTube channel dedicated to bitchin’ cars, conspiracy theories and the problem with being a guy in today’s woke society, not necessarily in that order; and Andi (Janelle Monae), the host’s old business partner who fell out with him after being screwed over. Everyone is surprised to see her show up, Miles most of all.

They have all received huge, elaborate puzzle boxes that double as invites to Bron’s private Greek island for what he says will be a slightly different affair than their usual get-togethers. This time, he’s arranged an elaborate murder-mystery weekend wherein the assembled guests will be forced to solve his untimely demise. A few extra folks are also in attendance, such as Birdy’s beleaguered assistant (Jessica Henwick) and Duke’s young girlfriend (Madelyn Cline). Oh, and Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), the Southern gentleman and greatest sleuth on earth. Funny thing is, Miles didn’t invite Blanc; someone apparently sent the famous detective their reassembled invite, with the hopes that he’d accept and show up for some unknown reason. The bad news is that when a Sherlock-level deductive genius shows up to your murder-mystery party, the game is over a helluva lot quicker than you’d planned. The good news is that when real corpses do start popping up, Blanc is the first person you want on the case. The first person, or possibly the last.

That’s as far as we can go without hitting a few landmines. It’s fair to say that everyone has understandable reasons for wanting to off the host, and Blanc has his work cut out for him. So does Johnson, for that matter, who never met a genre convention he didn’t love tweaking. It helps that the writer-director genuinely loves whodunits and knows what makes for a satisfying mystery, while also having a puckish facility for being unafraid to break a few rules to thwart expectations.

As with Knives Out, this franchise extension takes a classic set-up (remote getaway, exotic locale, assembled guests, dead body, a metric ton of motives) and throws Craig’s idiosyncratic goof of a sleuth into the fray, though he somehow seems dwarfed by the proceedings this time around. Part of the fun of the original was not just seeing the actor create such an indelible character from spare crime-lit parts and offbeat choices — rarely has a star made the most out of being handed a Blanc check — but watching how he used his quirky, Sondheim-singing detective to enliven everything and keeps all of the various moving parts in motion. That he was also a great foil for Johnson’s digs at Trump era inequalities and moral decay among the aristocrats only sweetened the deal. Here, Craig gets a few bits of choice physical comedy and delivers the denouements with the requisite amount of “J’accuse!” righteousness. But whereas Knives Out simply wouldn’t have worked without Blanc at the center, the sequel comes close to making his heavily-accented hackshaw feel superfluous. You could drop any two-bit, half-baked investigator into this tale of horrible rich folks acting horribly and it would still be equally beautiful and curiously shrugworthy.

There’s a good deal of fun in Glass Onion too, along with some sharp throwaway lines and the joy of watching actors dig into parts in which the option of going over the top has already been built in. Norton’s billionaire-bro draws from many tainted wells in terms of influence, though the name Miles Bron will likely bring to mind one loathsome IRL one in particular. If you somehow forgot how wonderfully Kate Hudson can play daffy and vapid, this movie will remind you of her screwball skills; if you somehow needed more proof after Hidden Figures and Moonlight that triple-threat Janelle Monae is a genuinely versatile actor, well, here you go. (Real question: Why does Leslie Odom Jr. keep getting cast in major roles yet is somehow never given enough to do? Between this and the Murder on the Orient Express remake and The Many Saints of Newark, it’s hard not to feel that this extraordinary talent is being chronically underused when it comes to bigger ensemble pieces.) There are famous paintings and fake-outs and the thrill of not only watching beautiful, funny people traipse around sunny pools and extravagant mansions, but the pleasure of watching the people who call these modern-day pyramids home get roasted.

Yet the shock of the new that came from watching the resurrection of the old in that first Blanc adventure has faded a bit, and the class-warfare rage that Johnson adds to this one feels more like a designer suit thrown over a mannequin than it did a few years back. (It’s an odd coincidence that both this sequel and The Menu are opening within a few weeks of each other, given that they’re both genre exercises with axes to grind against the One-percent and rub a lot of gorgeous consumerism back in your face.) The movie has a slight case of the diminishing-return blues.

Which brings us back to those event invites we mentioned earlier. Bron has designed them to be chic mystery boxes — a series of clever, cryptic clues that involve stereograms, chess games, knowledge of classical music and astrology, the Morse code, the Fibonacci sequence and several other brain games. The attendees band together over a phone call to eventually figure out the many steps of opening it. One simply smashes the item with a hammer, because action is character.

Once they get to the center, having finally unlocked everything to get the box to bloom forth like a onion, they find a small card with RSVP details perched in the middle of everything. The joke is partially about the extreme lengths that the sender will go to in order to turn something simple into something complicated yet impressive, and partially about how anticlimactic it is once they master all of the mysteries inside it. It’s hard not to compare Glass Onion to one of those invites. All of the fun comes from banding together to play the various puzzles and mind-teaser trials that are packed one on top of the other. And then when you finally get to the conclusion of it, you’re left thinking how empty the end result of it all is.

From Rolling Stone US.