written and directed by
Rian Johnson
Last time I talked about a heavyweight contender for some serious awards, namely Netflix's new adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front. The movie I'm about to review now still has quite a bit of awards potential, even though it is a significantly more commercial endeavor, so this review still counts as "awards season ramblings."
I am speaking, of course, of The Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, an all-new murder mystery starring Benoit Blanc from writer-director Rian Johnson, who singlehandedly revived the whodunit genre with the original Knives Out film in 2019, in which Benoit Blanc, the Southern sleuth played by Daniel Craig, made his debut.
In the film, tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton), decides to host a murder-mystery themed party for his friends on his private island in Greece. These include Governor Claire Debella (Kathryn Hahn), scientist Lionel Toussaint (Leslie Odom, Jr.), model-turned-fashion designer Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson) and internet personality Duke Cody (Dave Bautista). All of them receive their invitations packaged in mysterious boxes that require puzzle solving to open, but more importantly, all of them have reason to want Bron dead. Also invited to the party is Bron's former business partner Andi Brand (Janelle Monae), with whom Bron has had a bitter falling out. It all seems like a recipe for disaster, but notably, someone else shows up at the party, too: the seasoned sleuth Benoit Blanc. The game is afoot.
It's a joy to see performers really sink their teeth into their roles, and this movie is a sterling example of that. Daniel Craig has admitted to dialing his Southern drawl up to 11 since the last movie, which is ironically enough, one of the very few off-putting things about this film, but apart from that I could feel the energy every single actor brought to their role.
(Mild spoiler alert) I also appreciated how Johnson continues to put his own stamp on the whodunit, though he does cheat in the slightest by introducing a new set of facts deep into the narrative instead of giving the audience the pleasure of piecing together the mystery using facts that were presented at the very outset. He did it in Knives Out and he does it again here. That aside the movie is still supremely entertaining, with the emphasis more firmly on the humor in the script rather than the traditional tension attendant to a whodunit.
This brings me to my one real gripe, which doesn't have anything to do with the quality of the film: this was a movie that deserved to be seen in theaters. As films like Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar: the Way of Water and even Bullet Train have shown, there is life in movie theaters outside of Marvel and Star Wars movies. In its very brief theatrical preview release in only 696 theaters, The Glass Onion was able to rake in the rather handsome sum of $13 million. With numbers like that I feel it's fair to say that a full-blown wide theatrical release could have easily matched the $312 million global take of Knives Out and given Netflix even better momentum for eventually launching the movie on streaming. I'll join the chorus of many people who have already said this: Netflix is NOT a substitute for the theatrical movie experience; it's only a substitute for cable television or physical media. It can also provide a venue for movies that otherwise wouldn't find its audience, like All Quiet on the Western Front. In contrast to that German-language, ultra-bleak war movie, Glass Onion could have quite easily flourished in theaters, had Netflix not castrated it.
9/10
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