Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery’ on Netflix, Proof That Rian Johnson Is The New Murder Mystery Master

Rian Johnson is officially the king of the 21st-century whodunit thanks to Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (now on Netflix), the hotly anticipated follow-up to 2019’s extraordinary Knives Out. The creative and commercial success of the first film inspired three crucial things: One, the greenlighting of two sequels and therefore the official franchising of the property. Two, the purchase of said property by Netflix. And three, the feeling that if Johnson is going to be steered away from making more Star Wars movies (The Last Jedi was great!), at least he’s making wildly entertaining ones like these. He brings back Daniel Craig the genteel, Southern-accented detective Benoit Blanc, surrounded by a new cast of characters, played by the likes of Edward Norton, Kathryn Hahn and Janelle Monae. The question here isn’t whether it’s good – it seems almost guaranteed to be, doesn’t it? – but how it compares to the first film.

GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: May, 2020. Peak covid times. A variety of weirdos – more on them in a minute – receive large wooden puzzle boxes via courier. Solve them and the myriad mini-puzzles within them, and they produce an invite to a murder-mystery weekend on the private Greek island of tech billionaire Miles Bron (Norton). And who should receive one but one Benoit Blanc, who we see playing Among Us in the tub, BECAUSE OF COURSE HE IS. He spends hours and hours in there – wine, shower cap, the whole thing, waiting out the pandemic. He’s not just humane – he’s human, too.

And so Blanc shows up on the sun-drenched Greek isle alongside the other invitees, the lone outsider among the formerly tight college friends who called themselves “the Disruptors”: Claire Debella (Hahn), governor of Connecticut, now running for senate. Lionel Toussaint (Leslie Odom Jr.), lead scientist at Bron’s corporation. Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson), famous fashion designer, and her personal assistant Peg (Jessica Henwick). Duke Cody (Dave Bautista), a men’s-rights crudwad and permanently-armed Twitch star, and his assistant-girlfriend Whiskey (Madelyn Cline). They’re all ready to let rip and have a great time, possibly because they’re all morons. And then there’s Andi (Monae). She’s pissed, but she’s here. She’s also notably not a moron. She was Bron’s business partner, screwed out of her rights to the company when she lost a lawsuit in which the other invitees all testified against her. And she’s still simmering over that.

Now, you’re probably wondering why a crack crime-solver like Blanc would be invited to a murder-mystery party that he probably could solve without leaving his bathtub. Bron wonders the same thing, because he didn’t invite the world-famous Blanc – it must be a joke, Bron deduces, and it’ll be revealed soon enough. So they go along with it. There’s a great bit where Blanc asks what the prize for winning the mystery is, and Bron laughs, as if his admiration for solving his little puzzle just wouldn’t be enough. Blanc wants to know if he’ll win, say, an iPad or something. An iPad!

See, Bron is a mega-ego. The dock to his island is a Banksy. He strums Paul McCartney’s guitar. There’s a Matisse in one of his bathrooms. He communicates solely via fax. Sitting at the pinnacle of his island compound is a structure known as the Glass Onion, a crystalline sphere where everyone can hang out and look at the Mona Lisa. Yes, the actual Mona Lisa. He rented it; the Louvre was closed because of Covid anyway, so why not? Every time the security device around the painting detects even the mildest threat, a glass shield slides into place with a thump. Also, marking the hour on the island is Bron’s Hourly Dong. It goes DONNNGGGG, seemingly from all directions at once. (Stay for the end credits to see who does the Dong.) Everyone hangs out at the pool then convenes to the Glass Onion for the sporting mystery game, but. Of course there’s a but. I mean, this movie needs some stakes, so someone’s going to die for real. It’s just inevitable. And also inevitably, Blanc is going to peer at a crime scene and utter, “Oh fffffffffffiddlesticks.”

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Glass Onion is even more blatantly The Last of Sheila than Knives Out.

Performance Worth Watching: For reasons I can’t disclose under penalty of execution via the Spoiler Police, Monae gives the centerpiece performance here, playing a character with more complexity than the OTT stereotypes the other principals play.

Memorable Dialogue: This decontextualized exchange:

Bron: It’s so dumb, it’s brilliant!

Blanc: NO! IT’S JUST DUMB!

Sex and Skin: Nothing worth getting all hot and bothered about.

Our Take: There’s a moment early in Glass Onion where a character recites the definition of a fugue – which is Johnson winking at us, because that’s precisely how his Knives Out screenplays are structured. They boast layers of intrigue and comic “melodies,” all stacked up and compounding upon each other, differing perspectives of the same scene each revealing more truth than the previous. He keeps us off-balance for two hours as he twists and manipulates with wily cleverness, all the while taking aim at political/social/moral targets that are so big and juicy and deserving of the satirical skewer, we can’t help but laugh. We’re putty in his hands.

However, it’s fractionally less satisfying than Knives Out, which left more room for simmering subtext. With Glass Onion, Johnson punches people on the schnozz: The Bautista character is an obnoxious douchesack with a holster on his speedo. The Hudson character is in a continuous cycle of doing and saying cluelessly offensive things, publicly apologizing and waiting quietly for the storm to blow over. Norton’s billionaire, not so secretly a grand-order idiot, projects enough unearned self-confidence to fill a thousand empty vessels. Hahn and Odom – well, they have significantly less to do, which is unfortunate, but without them, there wouldn’t be enough suspects.

And so Monae and Craig carry the picture, she as the pillar of righteous sincerity, he as the smartest person in the room, by light years. Johnson’s plotting isn’t quite as tight as in the previous outing, but the laughs are just as big and the schadenfreude is too frothy not to let it fizz delightfully on our lips. He even offers built-in drinking games: Drink every time you hear the Dong. Drink every time the Mona Lisa looks upon the shenanigans with vague bemusement. Just don’t drink every time you laugh.

Our Call: Glass Onion is as wildly entertaining as we expect it to be. STREAM IT and stream it HARD.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.