Glass Onion

dir: Rian Johnson

2022

Anyone who’s followed Rian Johnson’s career knows what a smartarse he is, and now, with so much Netflix money, and nothing to stop him, he is in absolute smartarse mode, plus with a budget that can afford the rights to Beatles songs.

A dangerous combination. I liked Knives Out just fine, no complaints there, but I never really thought I needed a franchise to arise from it, nor did I think necessarily that the Benoit Blanc character played with deep fried Southern accented charm by Daniel Craig needed to come back either. But he’s back, and now he’s kind of the main character rather than being a detective that swoops in and solves a crime at the end to the benefit of the person we think is innocent, and the detriment of the other shitheads.

This is, as well, a flick made during the pandemic which means delightfully setting it on an isolated Greek resort island was probably more of a necessity rather than a need for an exotic locale to tell this pointless story.

As Benoit Blanc helpfully explains to us, at least twice, a glass onion is a metaphor, unlike the actual Glass Onion structure on the island, for something that looks incredibly intricate and complex at first, that ultimately is revealed to be dumb and straightforward. For a murder mystery within another murder mystery, there isn’t much about the actual murders that are a mystery. There’s a murder, and then another murder, and then we find out there was an earlier murder, but there isn’t much of a mystery as to who did what.

The bigger mystery is how Benoit Blanc, world’s greatest Foghorn Leghorn impersonator, got on the island, and why the murderer or murderers allowed it to happen, and went along with it.

The first part is explained, eventually. We see Benoit in a bath lamenting the lockdowns and lamenting not being able to get out there and solve mysteries in person, failing as he is at all these detective games like Among Us or online Zoom Cluedo (with Stephen Sondheim and Angela Lansbury cameoing just prior to their deaths, no less), as his husband (Hugh Grant) informs him that he has a delivery.

A bunch of “winners” in their respective fields have these puzzle boxes delivered to them. Some of them solve the puzzles. Others take a hammer to the box, or have someone else solve it for them.

One is a men’s rights activist online (Dave Bautista) whining about how estrogen has breastified the world, just before his mum whacks him in the head and tells him not to talk back to her. He has a blonde girlfriend who calls herself Whisky whose only objective is to be blonde and influential online.

Another is a scientist (Leslie Odom Jnr), another is a governor (Kathryn Hahn), and there’s one with a clothing line who’s big on Insta (Kate Hudson). And there’s Andi who everyone hates or fears (Janelle Monae). All of these people know each other, and know the person who invited them, being a tech billionaire who owns the island (Ed Norton).

Norton fully, and I mean fully leans into the douchbag tech bro billionaire role. He is smarmy, unctuous, speaks in barely comprehensible jargon, and generally gets to do whatever the fuck he wants, especially to these people. Though most of them have been friends for some time, it doesn’t feel like actual friendship. Most of them seem to be in thrall to him, fearful of incurring his wrath; fearful of losing the crumbs they get from his endless resources.

Except Andi, and except Benoit. It’s never really clarified as to why the other characters accept that Andi, who wasn’t invited by the Elmo Husk clone, or Benoit, need to continue being there, but we eventually understand the how of it. The why, well, you’ll have to ask the murderer, and that you can never do, because whoever they are they’re a fictional character in a Netflix movie, and you shouldn’t talk to the screen ever, unless it’s to say “uh-nuh, don’t go in there!”

Various people have complained about the structure and the plot, and they’re missing the point entirely. Of course stuff happened before these events, which will come into play later on. Of course people make choices and choose actions that we know nothing about until it’s explained to us.

Knives Out similarly had something happen which was no mystery to us, which could only eventually be completely explained later on. But the value of that film was the machinations of the dead patriarch’s shitty, mostly racist family and how that related to the main, good character, being the one played by Ana de Armas, and how people tried to screw her over under the guise of getting what they felt they were owed.

Similarly, here, the central crime that seems to underpin Elmo Husk’s wealth is of more relevance than the various murders, and whether his thralls will ever rise up and defy him, something like repentant Trump supporters after January 6th standing up and declaring “maybe he always was a total piece of shit?”

I found the flick goofy and foolish, and deliberately so, and that’s okay. It is less complicated and less intricate than an episode of Father Brown, and wants you to know that it knows that too, and that’s okay as well. It’s only meant to be a bit of fun, of foolish fun. There’s no notion of justice or the law actually applying to mega rich people, and that hurts, a little bit. Most flicks give us at least the boring, staid version of justice that means that if someone can’t be punished by the law, well, at least someone can shoot them in the face or something.

This flick crafts a different kind of revenge. A very elaborate, very complicated form of revenge that could only really happen to people if they’re already quite rich.

I won’t spoil it, but, at first, when it happened, I was absolutely gobsmacked, even though it had been completely telegraphed from the get go. I was like “bravo, you dingbats, bravo”. Then I was like “wait a second, that makes no fucking sense whatsoever?”

And that, ladies, gentlemen and esteemed non-binary folks, is the most you can ask for from a flick made by Rian Johnson. It’s that brief, happy window that you get to enjoy at the cleverness of his constructions, before you wonder too long and then go from “how fiendishly intricate!” to “what needlessly complicated trash”, and realising he’s being clever for cleverness’s sake, yet again.

It’s fine. I do enjoy seeing Daniel Craig as this character, I do, I can’t help it. Norton is wonderful as this awful person, playing a villain yet again, like he has for most of his career, both on and off screen. Kate Hudson particularly stands out as an utterly lacking in intelligence or self-awareness influencer. She is great in her lack of caring about absolutely anything in the world that’s not about her.

The greatest scene, and the one most people quote, relates to her seeing herself as this fearless truth-teller, who says all the stuff everyone else thinks but is too afraid to say. Benoit gently schools her by pointing out that it’s dangerous to conflate speaking without thinking with truth-telling.

I can’t say how great her delivery of “Are you calling me dangerous?” is, I really can’t.

It’s a long-arsed film, but it’s on Netflix, so what do you expect? Heaven forbid any of these films where people are having fun in exotic locations (allegedly) are under two hours.

I won’t say it’s a great way to spend two and a half hours, but I will say it was perfect for watching immediately after Christmas lunch / dinner last year, where no-one’s brain is up for anything that complicated, and there are approximately 200 hundred people in the room you’re trying to watch this in, and most of them aren’t watching it at all. Maybe it was the perfect movie to watch between Christmas and New Year’s?

7 times I loved the scenes where the “friends” were hanging out back in the 1990s, especially Ed Norton’s clothing choices out of 10

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“Mr. Bron, I've learned through bitter experience that an anonymous invitation is not to be trifled with.” - Glass Onion