Peeling away the lack of mystery in The Glass Onion
Netflix paid Rian Johnson more than $100m for a sequel to his whodunit ‘Knives Out’. An all-star cast and sumptuous setting seem to fit the genre, so why does the film lack any genuine intrigue?
Rian Johnson, best known for subverting expectations with his Star Wars movie ‘The Last Jedi’, seems to be back in favour with his latest movie. The director has been paid handsomely by streaming giant Netflix (apparently in the region of $200m) to make new instalments of a surprise hit from earlier in his career. Unfortunately it looks like we’re getting follow-ups to the worst crime thriller in Johnson’s filmography.
To give Johnson his dues, he does write and direct all his own work. He even managed this on ‘The Last Jedi’, defying Disney’s usually strict oversight and going off on his own to produce a distinctive vision. We’ll leave arguments over the divisive sci-fi film to others — enough has already been said about that film — but we can all acknowledge that writing and directing your own scripts is something of a novelty these days.
Johnsons first feature-length film was a rather unassuming detective film set in a high school. ‘Brick’ starred Joseph Gordon-Levitt and played with the noir genre famous for gumshoe private investigators lured by femme fatales to devastating effect. Its a brilliant film, arguably the directors best, and if Netflix had forked out for a sequel to that 2005 effort we might have got something worth watching over the Christmas period.
Following his debut Johnson made ‘The Bothers Bloom’, a caper comedy that fell flat at the box office. It also squandered a great cast but someone, somewhere liked it enough to give the director a bigger budget to make his first foray into sci-fi. Five years before the release of his Star Wars film Johnson made ‘Looper’, a clever time-travel thriller that saw Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing a hitman tasked with killing a future version of himself. Bruce Willis added some gravitas and the critical reception was mainly positive.
In the well-documented aftermath of ‘The Last Jedi’, Johnson seemed to retreat from the limelight only to unleash ‘Knives Out’ on an unsuspecting public. The film borrowed heavily from Agatha Christie novels placing a large group of suspects in a confined space as a peculiarly-accented detective tries to uncover who committed the murder we see in the first act of the story.
Its a decent film that resonated with audiences, who either aren’t aware of the precursors in the genre or don’t care about the derivative nature of what we saw on screen as long as Chris Evans looked hot in a jumper and Daniel Craig put on a borderline offensive Southern drawl.
Its this film that Netflix have bought into and Johnson has done as most rational people would do and leapt at the chance to bring Craig’s Benoit Blanc back as the gentleman detective for a new adventure… for a considerable amount of money obviously.
Just like the first film we get a list of big name actors (although arguably none of the A-list calibre of Evans) in another nod to classics of the genre. The best known whodunits from the past always feature large casts of well-known faces and we event get a hint of another staple from popular detective series when Blanc is lured to an exotic location for what is initially a holiday.
You do wonder if the cast are kept distinctly B-list (or below) because the money would probably be coming out of the lump sum Netflix paid Johnson upfront for the movie… Craig had to be b(r)ought back, and probably wasn’t all that cheap, so why not save some cash by pretending Kate Hudson and Edward Norton are still relevant in 2022?
Some of the casting choices also seem to be deliberately aimed at pleasing the vocal corner of ‘film twitter’ who support everything Johnson says and does with a fervour that is usually seen with crypto bros defending Elon Musk.
MINOR SPOILERS BELOW
This is all a long preamble to the main issue with the film. And if you haven’t guessed yet, long preambles with poorly thought out conclusions are in keeping with this franchise.
Ultimately you don’t care about the murder mystery at the heart of the film because there isn’t any mystery (and you could argue that ‘The Glass Onion’ struggles on the murder front too). We’ll avoid going into major spoilers, but its safe to say that even though there is some interest in the first half of the film as to how these unlikable characters will be caught out, the second half wants you to stop caring about anything other than a forced action-laden close.
We get that Johnson likes to subvert expectations (a phrase he used repeatedly when defending his decision to turn once noble Jedi Luke Skywalker into a cowardly hermit in his take on Star Wars) but here he’s really outdone himself. Netflix almost certainly didn’t pay for a film where the main protagonist is left out of the crucial parts of the narrative. Self-indulgent — and underwhelming — cameos don’t make up for missing story beats either.
The structure of the film is deflating. There’s a tired apparent resurrection of a character that is utterly confusing rendering everyone on screen who can’t spot the fake out as an utter simpleton. It also treats the viewer as a passive observer where you are given no chance to unravel the ‘mystery’ as it relies on a virtual impossibility. Even if two people look alike, they will never be able to convince a large group of acquaintances that they are one and the same person.
The best detective mysteries like those in Sherlock or Colombo present you with enough clues to have a go yourself. Even if the eventual solution is full of details only someone on the ground could pick up, at least some evidence is shown to you. No matter how many times twitter aficionados of Johnsons work will try to tell you that this is the work of a genius, it doesn’t live up to the hype. Spotting tiny details in the background and clipping it with proclamations that “only this director could do such a smart thing” is only highlighting the lack of film knowledge most modern audiences display.
We caught one person apparently praising Johnson for using more than one camera to shoot a scene…
The Glass Onion instead opts to deliberately wrongfoot you by making up an entirely separate version of events that depend on a quirk you have no chance of getting. Worse still, Benoit Blanc is complicit in this masquerade which in turn undermines any trust we have in him or his powers of deduction. He is arguably as culpable of causing the death of a major character as anyone else due to his nonsensical master plan that puts everyone in danger.
With the mystery gone, the only option is to suddenly shift gears, turn on the slow-motion feature on the cameras and go a climax that wouldn’t look out of place in a John Woo movie from the 1990s.
Its a flat denouement and as you realise there is at least one more instalment in this franchise to come, the truth will hit you harder than any movie reveal… the real payoff was the preposterous amount Netflix handed over to Rian Johnson for this mediocrity.
This case of daylight robbery needs investigating in the final part of this trilogy!
