TIFF 2022 Film Review: Glass Onion
GLASS ONION IS A BIGGER KNIVES OUT IN ALMOST EVERY WAY
Detective Benoît Blanc is back in another intricate whodunit in Rian Johnson’s sprawling sequel, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. A new location, a new mystery, and a new cabal of suspicious, bumbling elites are at the center of yet another murder, and it’s up to the world-renowned gumshoe to solve the case. Glass Onion is frantic and far from the airtight elegance of its predecessor, but Johnson’s wit and craft remain electrifying. Frequently surprising, frequently uproarious, this is one mystery you won’t want revealed ahead of time. Minor spoilers ahead…
During the Q&A for Glass Onion’s world premiere, director Rian Johnson remarked: “It’s a fool’s game to try to outsmart an audience. I just want to take them on a ride.” But for someone so uninterested in pulling one over on us, Johnson is becoming remarkably adept at doing so. A sprawling, clever followup to 2019’s Knives Out, Glass Onion opens with a crackling introduction to our cast of uber-wealthy morons and misfits, all part of the entourage of arrogant billionaire mogul Miles Bron (Edward Norton): There’s a dim-witted and scandal-prone model (Kate Hudson), a nervous chemist on the verge of a scientific breakthrough (Leslie Odom, Jr.), a sly political operator (Kathryn Hahn), a gun-toting men’s rights YouTuber (Dave Bautista), and Bron’s jilted former business partner (Janelle Monáe). All sent identical wooden puzzle boxes, the group gathers on a frenetic Zoom call to try and open their respective mystery cubes, barreling through a series of riddles and contraptions to get to whatever prize lies within. Even laced with already-stale pandemic jokes and a sprinkling of Twitter-brained nonsense, the sequence is a masterclass of narrative economy, bridging character introductions and exposition with a fun - and uproarious - bout of communal problem-solving. It also serves as an engrossing distraction from the only member of the group not on the call, Janelle Monáe’s Cassandra “Andi” Brand, who simply proceeds to pulverize her box into splinters to get to what’s inside: an invitation to a murder mystery game on a private island hosted by Bron himself.
Glass Onion’s mile-a-minute opening gets straight to what makes Rian Johnson’s movies tick, conveying the filmmaker’s exacting, masterful maneuvering around the concept of rules: when to follow them and when to blow them to smithereens, just like Cassandra’s ill-fated puzzle box. The scene is a microcosm of Johnson’s filmography, which has always effortlessly blended convention with subversion. The ambitious noir pastiche of Brick, the time travel paradoxes of Looper, the mythos-upending shakeups of Star Wars: The Last Jedi: Johnson has always reveled in building intricate houses of cards, only to tear them down at the most affecting moments - opportune and inopportune. His particular brand of cinematic adroitness even bleeds into television with the high watermarks of Breaking Bad’s “Fly” and “Ozymandias.” Glass Onion is no different. Bigger and bolder in almost every way than its predecessor Knives Out, this island-bound sequel is nowhere near as airtight or elegant - you really can’t beat the propulsive bickering of the entitled malcontents that are the Thrombeys - but it is every bit as fun.
“…for someone so uninterested in pulling one over on us, [Rian] Johnson is becoming remarkably adept at doing so.”
And perhaps having the most fun of them all? Daniel Craig, returning with his Foghorn Leghorn Southern drawl as master detective Benoît Blanc, who has also been invited - inexplicably - to Bron’s whodunit extravaganza. This may only be his second outing as the perpetually befuddled, genius gumshoe, but Craig slips into crime-solving mode just as easily as he did with James Bond’s tuxedo. The first half of Glass Onion is a dizzying cascade; there’s so much work to be done setting up a murky excess of motives and a tangled web of intersecting backstories that Blanc - and the mystery at hand - seem to be suffocated. But it’s all by design; when the explosive other shoe drops, Craig comes alive to do his thing once again, sending the story - and its suspects - through a ringer of twists which blows the structure of Glass Onion completely in half. It’s frequently surprising and frequently funny, even if some of the jokes are little more than chuckle-worthy chin-scratchers. Is Benoît Blanc being absolutely awful at hit party game Among Us a good gag? Or will it age like milk? Only time will tell.
Glass Onion also maintains the “eat the rich” throughline established in Knives Out, but those who bristled against the thickly drawn lines between Marta and the Thrombeys might be pleasantly surprised here. I found Glass Onion’s politics to be just a little sharper and more subcutaneous, painting an insidious portrait of the wealthy elite and their parasite enablers, underlining their own selfish definitions of what it means - or doesn’t mean - to be a “disruptor.”
“This may only be his second outing as the perpetually befuddled, genius gumshoe, but Craig slips into crime-solving mode just as easily as he did with James Bond’s tuxedo.”
The cast is also having a blast playing up their entitled scumbag personas. Kate Hudson’s airhead Birdie Jay is a walking commentary on cancel culture, which sounds nigh insufferable, but it’s played strictly for gut-busting laughs made even funnier by her put-upon assistant (Jessica Henwick). Edward Norton is having the time of his life playing an amalgamation of real-life idiot billionaires, broadly answering the question of how someone so dumb could get so rich. But the one pulling out all the stops is Janelle Monáe, whose icy exterior eventually melts away into a fiery (in more than one way), passionate performance; Cassandra Brand houses the film’s biggest twist while handily grabbing the torch dropped by Ana de Armas’ Marta from Knives Out. Monáe and her easy, palpable chemistry with Craig give Glass Onion’s second half - which is unavoidably circuitous - an exciting buoyancy.
Rian Johnson thrives in mess. This is a sequel that is steelier and less elegant than its predecessor, but it also delivers a different breed of gratification in a dying genre, one that Johnson has distilled to a science. Like Bron’s puzzle box invitations and the title of the film itself, Glass Onion is a layered machine hiding a trove of interlocking rewards, immensely satisfying when the pieces reveal themselves, but even more so when it’s all blown to bits.
