Review: ‘Glass Onion’ Does Not Feel as Refreshing as ‘Knives Out’ Due to Structural Issues (No Spoilers)
Daniel Craig (Benoit Blanc) in Netflix’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, currently streaming on Netflix after a short but successful week-long theatrical release last month, is the sequel-of-sorts to 2019’s Knives Out. In the spirit of Agatha Christie’s novels, only one character is moving on from the previous story, the detective at the center (of the doughnut): Benoit Blanc.
(This review does NOT contain spoilers for Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.)
Rian Johnson wrote and directed the new film, which, except for the character of Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), is an entirely original picture — and the year couldn’t be more appropriate. Between Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar: The Way of Water, and now Glass Onion, among others, 2022 has been populated and dominated by sequels that managed to build upon what the previous installments set up, yet feel completely original in their own right. The biggest problem with Glass Onion, though, is that it doesn’t feel as refreshing as Knives Out.
Set on a remote Greek island in the early days of the summer of 2020, Rian Johnson’s latest murder mystery sees tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) assemble his group of close friends for a fun weekend. They include Kathryn Hahn’s Connecticut governor Claire Debella, Leslie Odom Jr.’s Lionel Toussaint, a cutting-edge scientist, Dave Bautista’s Duke Cody, a renowned Twitch influencer with rather edgy views (who brings along his sidekick girlfriend, Whiskey, played by Madelyn Cline), Kate Hudson’s Birdie Jay, a fashionista past her career peak (together with her assistant, Peg, played by Jessica Henwick), and Bron’s former business partner, Janelle Monáe’s Andi Brand, who nobody expected to see there and ends up being the heart of the movie. The first mystery the movie presents, though, is the unexpected appearance of world-renowned detective Benoit Blanc.
Daniel Craig (Benoit Blanc), Kate Hudson (Birdie Jay), Leslie Odom Jr. (Lionel Toussaint), Madelyn Cline (Whiskey), and Dave Bautista (Duke Cody) in Netflix’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.
It almost pains me to write that I did not love Glass Onion, a movie I’ve been looking forward to for a long time as one of the world’s biggest Rian Johnson fans. It is almost even worse to see that I may be one of the few people on the planet that feels this way. But while The Way of Water or Maverick managed to reinvent their respective original films in new and exciting ways, Glass Onion‘s script structure feels like a repetition of the greatest hits of Knives Out while failing to feel as refreshing and enchanting as its predecessor. It is quite difficult to express why without getting into spoilers, so I’ll do my best with the cards I’m dealt with.
Murder mystery stories are essentially magic tricks. The screenwriter gets on stage and pulls one on the audience — the viewers try to figure out how he did it, but in this case, the magician will eventually explain the trick. Traditional whodunits spend the majority of their time pulling the magic trick, and at the very end, they tie every loose end when the detective explains it all. Knives Out tried to reinvent the wheel when it featured plenty of twists along the way, but instead of having twists inside the big trick itself, Johnson fooled the audience by giving several possible explanations that kept overlapping each other so that, in the end, we gave up trying to figure out what was happening and went along for the ride.
Jessica Henwick (Peg), Daniel Craig (Benoit Blanc), and Janelle Monáe (Andi Brand) in Netflix’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.
It was a variation of the traditional structure that granted him an Oscar nomination for his screenplay. The key term here is structure, the foundations on which every film is built and on which they rely in order to work. Glass Onion‘s, though, feels like a cheap copy of Knives Out‘s, with a few differences introduced that just didn’t work for me. For a good chunk of the movie, the intrigue is not very compelling, and the film rests on the shoulders of its entertaining characters and their dynamics. When the mystery starts to ramp up, Rian Johnson decided to start to unravel the magic trick, only the movie hadn’t earned the moment yet. At this point, the story still has a few more twists and turns up its sleeve, but most of them felt underwhelming and came off as easy narrative workarounds to bring home larger themes that the script wanted to convey.
Much like the doughnut in the first movie, the Glass Onion serves as a useful metaphor for Benoit Blanc when explaining the crime to the ensemble. He describes it as a densely layered object where you can see right through what’s going on. It’s a call not to over-read stuff or look for hidden interpretations, as the truth is usually in plain sight. Well, unfortunately, the metaphor turned on the movie itself for me, because after a certain point, not very far into the movie, it was very clear what was happening. Perhaps I hadn’t been able to peel back every single layer of the onion, but I could see the very center. Perhaps this is exactly what Rian Johnson wanted to achieve, to make fun of the murder mystery genre by telling people not to over-interpret what’s right in front of them, but that was at the cost of a satisfying experience.
Edward Norton (Miles Bron), Madelyn Cline (Whiskey), and Daniel Craig (Benoit Blanc) in Netflix’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.
On the plus side of the script’s uneven structure, Johnson does use the classic setup-payoff trope of the murder mystery genre to its fullest potential. Ideas that seem to be thrown around for no reason later find a bigger purpose, forcing the viewer to pay close attention to what’s going on. This is also a great reason to go back and watch it, to try to uncover everything that Johnson first set up. On the downside, though, once Blanc starts pulling down the curtain, we start to revisit the entire film, and Johnson begins to tell us what Blanc is referencing, instead of allowing us to figure everything out on a rewatch. It works at times, when the references were too subtle, but other times, it felt forced and rather unfulfilling.
This review may sound entirely negative, but that wasn’t my experience with the film. It is, for the most part, an entertaining watch during the Christmas break with the family. A solid movie that could have been much better. The cast had a blast filming it, and that comes off the screen. Johnson’s directing and framing are quite masterful, especially in the large group scenes, which this movie has plenty of. On a thumbs-up/thumbs-down scale, it would be an unenthusiastic thumbs-up. I just wish that whenever Johnson starts putting together the next Benoit Blanc mystery, he tries to reinvent the structure of the script once again, instead of implementing a few variations that hurt the story instead of helping it.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is currently available to watch on Netflix.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
