The detective who couldn't: a review of the movie "Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery"
A sequel that turned out to be unforgivably far from the original.
After Mark Mylod's toothless but sympathetic Menu, Ryan Johnson has decided to do his share of hating the rich, privileged Americans. Formerly an up-and-coming indie filmmaker, now a venerable filmmaker with his own detective franchise in his pocket. The first installment of Get the Knives came out in 2019 and also around Christmas. In addition to an impressive cast, Johnson's film delighted with homages to acclaimed classics like Agatha Christie, an ephemeral winter holiday atmosphere, a crackling fireplace and scary family mysteries masterfully solved by the witty and somewhat sarcastic detective Benoit Blanc. "The Glass Onion" is a sequel whose release was indeed highly anticipated, even despite Johnson's rather dubious deal with Netflix streaming. "Get the Knives 2" didn't follow the success formula of the original, delivering a more angsty but considerably less twisted story of a single crime investigation on a mysterious Greek island.
Without going into protracted foreplay, "The Glass Onion" begins with a dinner that is bound to be someone's last. Five friends arrive on a private island at the home of narcissistic billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) and unwittingly become part of a quest to investigate his so-called murder. Along the way, they discover that the governor of Connecticut (Katharine Hahn), a scandalous video blogger (Dave Batista), his girlfriend (Madeline Kline), a former model (Kate Hudson) and a talented scientist (Leslie Odom, Jr.) are not the only guests of Bron. Joining them in the residence are the billionaire's former partner Cassandra (Janelle Monet) as well as detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) himself. However, the latter was not invited by the owner for sure, but we will know about it much later.
Ironically, for all its flirtation with the usual detective tropes, The Glass Onion is a film with absolutely zero suspense, in which the story is significantly inferior to the facture and the facture is too mediocre to be charmed by it. In an attempt to complicate the non-trivial plot, Johnson plays with time, sending his characters back in time, back in time, back in time, back in time, using an unreliable narrator and flirting with the audience with sudden and sometimes even funny celebrity cameos, but he fires them off in vain.
What strains most about The Glass Bulb is its demonstrative conjunctiveness, each of the characters being a bad parody of one or another member of the American elite: a blogger promoting Republican ideas; a former model with toxic stereotypes from the 1990s; a planted governor working for the interests of private investors. Complementing this picture is a universal evil in the person of Miles Bron, unequivocally reminiscent of Ilon Musk, the most disliked man on the Internet, who only a couple of years ago claimed to be a folk hero.
Unlike their real counterparts, Johnson's characters are unipolar and rotten, empty inside and out, against which the only fighter for justice, Cassandra Brand, seems more of a speculative martyr than a figure worthy of admiration. All this might be reduced to cheap satire were it not for the ridiculously pompous moralizing with which Johnson exposes the vices of the privileged white class of which he is a part.
In the end, "Get the Knives 2" gets boring to watch, not so much because of the hypocrisy of the author, but because of the clumsy, looping plot, whose only charm is the beautiful picture, every detail of which, whether it is a covid masks or a giant glass onion, has absolutely no basis in fact.
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