The invitees to a tech billionaire’s private Grecian island receive a fantabulous puzzlebox near the start of Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. It whirs and it shifts and it constantly produces a new riddle or code that needs to be cracked in order to reveal the next riddle or code. The sort of contraptions involved could scarcely fit into the space of this box, especially given how the box ultimately transforms into a model of the titular structure that seems itself to take up the whole space. But that’s the genius of Miles Bron (Edward Norton), whose similarity to Elon Musk will escape exactly no one’s notice.
Most of these half-dozen members of a friend group known as The Disruptors use their combined intellect, separated around the globe and by the pandemic though they may be, to crack each phase of the puzzle – as delighted by the prospect of solving it as Miles was obviously delighted making it. One invitee, though, simply smashes it with a large mallet, fishing out her invitation through the rubble, rather than procuring it through the intended final Rube Goldbergian flourish.
These two approaches to puzzle solving operate as metaphors for the two types of audiences drawn to what will surely be one of Netflix’s most watched movies ever. (The movie debuted there last week after a one-week theatrical run in November.) People who get off on these whodunnits will want to keep track of clues as they go, placed there carefully by Johnson doing his own Miles Bron impersonation; when all is finally revealed, they’ll show either the intense exultation of the victorious, or the exquisite frustration of the hoodwinked. Then there are those who just want to smash through the mystery with a mallet. Glass Onion has ambitions to thrill the former, but those who just shut off their brain might actually feel more satisfied by the result.
Miles has been bringing the members of his friend group together annually for years, even though it’s 2020 and the world has gone into isolation. Disruptors don’t follow rules, though, and all the friends have made their way to Greece. They’re assured they won’t infect each other after receiving a dose of some cure-all medicinal spray, brazenly delivered to their tongue through a silver hand gun. These include a men’s rights activist (Dave Bautista), a former model and social media influencer (Kate Hudson), Bron’s leading engineer at his company Alpha (Leslie Odom Jr.), and the current governor of Connecticut (Kathryn Hahn).
The two guests they weren’t expecting were famed private investigator Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), and Andi Brand (Janelle Monae), the brainchild behind Alpha, who left the company when Miles took credit for her innovations. She at least received an invitation, though Miles didn’t think she would come. Blanc didn’t get invited, but he did come into possession of one of these puzzleboxes, leading to the suspicion that one of the other invited guests recycled their invitation to give to him. It’s appropriate as the weekend has been pitched as an attempt to solve Miles’ own “murder.” Naturally, a billionaire’s idea of a party game will turn real when someone dies, and when numerous other surprises are revealed.
One of the things you heard about Glass Onion when it had that one-week theatrical run was that it was full of all sorts of juicy spoilers that were so clever that they might almost be narratively ground-breaking. That’s vastly overselling what the Knives Out sequel is offering. It does play with structure a bit, as did the original, but if you’re expecting the very narrative to fold in on itself, it’ll be a long wait. Johnson is indeed a wunderkind of sorts, but this is a lot more of an extended hoisting of a man on his own petard than it is a reimagining of the core components of a whodunnit.
The movie may actually be at its best before it gets to any of the mystery. The absurd wealth that allows someone like Miles Bron to will new technologies into existence has a great showcase in the movie’s opening 30 minutes. The puzzlebox transitions directly into the compound on Miles’ Grecian island, with the massive transparent onion at its centre, its every haptic bracelet used to guide guests to their quarters feeling like a true detail for someone with a surplus of money and technical genius. This section also introduces us to a fun set of characters, even though they don’t feel like they’d have anything to do with each other in the real world.
Blanc’s first demonstration of his investigative prowess, though, starts to lead into a series of ever-more self-congratulatory gestures by Johnson that may not do much for the mallet crowd. Whodunnits rely on an investigator excitedly taking an audience through a series of clues that helped him reach his conclusions, but many of these have only a flimsy setup in the plot if any at all. You want everything to come together with the feeling like this was the only possible configuration, given the evidence, but Glass Onion just doesn’t come off that way.
Then again, the audiences who don’t care about the mystery, who just showed up for the design details, should find Glass Onion a tonne of fun. Craig remains a terrific ringmaster as he was the first time around, and the cast really digs into their parts, especially Norton as Bron. Johnson has sprinkled in some funny cameos, and the whole thing becomes a rich skewering of the “disruptor” mentality displayed by Bron and his friends. The target has shifted just a little from the original Knives Out, when we were using phrases like “the 1%” more regularly. Now it’s more like the 1/10 of 1% or even 1/100th of 1%, as Miles is a clear stand-in for Elon Musk – a resonance that has only grown since Musk bought Twitter and transformed into a genuine movie villain.
Both whodunnits and movies where rich people get theirs have been prevalent in 2022, which leaves Glass Onion feeling a little less distinct than it should. Still, Johnson continues to prove he’s a master of spectacle and craft. The movie looks terrific, even when it doesn’t have all the layers it thinks it has.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is currently streaming on Netflix.