Glass Onion (2022) review

Knives Out holds a very special place in my heart. Long story short, it rocks. It’s probably my favorite murder-mystery ever. Along with this years Everything Everywhere All at Once and Nope, I think it is part of a rare class of modern successful blockbusters that doesn’t come from a preexisting property like a comic book or an 80s movie. It’s one of the very few movies that I thought should have a sequel that’s actually gotten one (cough, The Nice Guys, cough). Needless to say, I had pretty fucking high expectations for Glass Onion. Not only is it a sequel to one of my personal favorites, but it is the latest by a director who has so far had a completely spotless career.

I hate to trigger any Last Jedi haters that might read my blog, but yeah, Rian Johnson is still a really smart writer and talented director who is very good at subverting genre conventions. If you establish yourself as one of the modern greats by making one of the best murder-mysteries ever, direct two of the best episodes of Breaking Bad and one of the best Star Wars movies, the bar for your output is gonna be high. And Glass Onion did not disappoint at all.The way that Glass Onion subverts the tropes and structure of the murder-mystery genre is even more unconventional than Knives Out.

As much as I love Knives Out, Glass Onion is easily just as good… maybe even slightly better? It holds to the tried and true sequel mentality of going bigger than its predecessor, and that can usually go two ways; like Die Hard 2, or like Die Hard with a Vengeance. Unlike something like Die Hard 2, where it’s just the same plot copy-pasted into a new location, Glass Onion luckily feels more akin to the ambition and creativity of Die Hard with a Vengeance. Yeah, it is basically the same movie as first one if you look at it closely enough, but the setting, mystery and scale of the story is bigger and more bombastic in every way that makes it a satisfying continuation as opposed to feeling like a lazy rehash of the first movie.

If you liked Knives Out, I can’t think of any reasons why you wouldn’t like this as well. Pretty much everything about it is as good or better than the first one. Where Knives Out felt like a crisp, chilly Thanksgiving murder-mystery, Glass Onion feels like going on a cruise over Christmas vacation. It is bright, sunny, vibrant, and kinetic as Rian Johnson’s directing pops off the screen with every frame. His directing is as good as ever, and the visual storytelling is as strong as can be. Speaking of storytelling, the writing somehow manages to still be fresh and unique despite being a sequel. It’s just as cleverly written and structured as a subversion of a done-to-death genre as Knives Out, which is a pretty fuckin’ impressive feat if you ask me. I would say it’s consistently funnier, one of the few criticisms of Knives Out that I have are some of the jokes don’t land all that well for me, but in Glass Onion I didn’t have that problem on a first watch. If I had to come up with one criticism of these two movies, it would be Rian Johnson has a bit of a tendency to over-explain what’s happening. Obviously for something like this, some amount of exposition is necessary, but I think some of the cutting back to previous scenes to show the clues Blanc is talking about could’ve been cut down a tad and nothing would’ve been lost. If anything, it would aid by making rewatches more rewarding.

Speaking of, Daniel Craig is great as Benoit Blanc once again, and the entire new cast gives a career-highlight performance here, especially Edward Norton as Miles Bron, a stand-in for tech-giants like Mark Zuckerberg, as well as Dave Bautista as Duke Cody, a hilarious amalgamation of right-wing Internet personalities like Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate. The highlight of Glass Onion is Janelle Monae as Cassandra/Hellen Brand, who goes from a red herring in the first act to one of the best characters in both movies by the time the movie is over.

At first, I was kind of worried with what was happening in the plot, especially in the first act as the plot was initially starting to unfold. The way that Knives Out is structured and how the first act unravels is very specific and has a somewhat uncanny feeling to it, where initially, (emphasis on the word “initially”) the first act of Glass Onion feels like any other murder-mystery setup and structure. I was sitting in the theater like “oh noooo, is this gonna just be another See How They Run or any of the Scream sequels where it’s just a straightforward boring murder-mystery that’s been done a million times before and uses self-awareness as a crutch to get away with not doing anything new or interesting?” Nope! My boy Rian is too smart for that. As the movie transitioned into the second act, revealing that the murder at the core of the story had actually happened before the movie even started without anyone except Blanc and Hellen knowing it, making the entire first act a complete misdirect subverted my expectations of the genre in an even bigger way than the first movie had. Usually, a rewatch can be the kiss of death for a movie like this, but with the directions Glass Onion takes, I can only imagine that the first act is going to be much more rewarding on subsequent viewings. I watched this movie a month ago and now that it's on Netflix I can't wait to give it another watch.

Something I always forget about Knives Out is how good of a job it does weaving coherent political themes through the sense of a murder-mystery detective story. Where the first movie tackles upper-class liberals acceptance of immigration, Glass Onion is a lot more overt with its criticisms of the sub-sect of the upper-class that has been born from tech-boom. Like everything else, Glass Onion ramps up the political commentary and humor of the story in a big way that are so on point that if Rian Johnson announced that Glass Onion was written, filmed, edited and released within the last month, I would believe him.

Miles Bron, played by Edward Norton, is such a wonderful encapsulation of everything wrong with the Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world. He does nothing but fail his way upward, buys support from his friends and the media and manipulate everyone around him into thinking he’s a genius... just like Elon Musk. All of the moves he makes are blunt and dumb, making it obvious that he’s a fraud to anyone paying attention… just like Elon Musk. He’s a narcissist who manipulates his public image in order to make himself look smarter than he really is… just like Elon Musk. He steals other peoples ideas and passes them off as his own… just like Elon Musk. The only ideas he actually comes up with are abysmal failures that everyone around him desperately tries to stop him from making… need I go on? One of the funniest parts of the movie is Benoit Blanc berating Miles for how much of a careless idiot he is.

While it is highly relevant to the current situation with Elon Musk’s botched ownership of Twitter, the core theme of incompetent higher-ups being exposed for the frauds they are is a tale as old as time. Like Blanc says, just like a glass onion, people like Bron may look complicated, but if you look at them closely, you can see straight through ‘em.

Anyway, this is yet another victory lap for Rian Johnson and I can’t wait to see what he does next.