Three years from his Netflix’s surprise hit Knives Out (2019), American filmmaker Rian Johnson is back with a sequel, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. The film follows similar tropes of mystery, thriller and comedy in its genre from the first instalment.
The film, which is set in the same universe as “Knives Out,” stars Daniel Craig as Benoic Blanc, a private investigator who is often referred to as “the world’s greatest detective” and has yet another mystery to solve.
The film starts out with Benoit Blanc being invited to an exclusive weekend murder mystery game hosted by billionaire entrepreneur Miles Bron (Edward Norton) on his private island.
Joining him in this weekend gateway are Miles’ inner circle, who are respectable enough in their own field. This group of “disruptors” as Miles calls them, are Claire Debella, a politician who is also the governor of Connecticut; Lionel Toussaint, the head scientist of Alpha, the tech company Miles co-founded with Cassandra Brand who was also invited; Duke Cody, a men’s right Twitch streamer and last but not least, Birdie Jay, a former supermodel turned fashion designer.
Granted, the film’s opening narrative was a bit cliché. What starts out as a murder mystery game that is supposed to be fun, soon turns into a real murder investigation. However, the story was still the best part of this film.
Viewers later find out that our protagonist was not actually invited by Miles to the game, but rather because someone calls him in to join in – our first mystery for the day, and also a sign that something bad is about to happen. True enough, when each character’s conflicts were revealed, it sets off all sorts of events, prompting us to question each and every one of them.
The conflicts, the twists and turns – how the writer and the director keep us guessing and waiting for the mystery to unfold, things like these are what make this film so interesting to me.
For some reason, it does feel like the writer and the director both seem to have some kind of personal vendetta towards the wealthy billionaires out there. Throughout the film, we were shown the dumbness that lurks within Miles, and each of them seems to be worse than the last one. As a start, for the wealthy person that he is, Miles is not exactly very smart with his money.
And when the big reveal finally came, the case was closed with rather a very straightforward conclusion. It annoys Benoit so much that even he admitted that there was nothing genius about the mystery on hand. To quote our master detective himself, “It’s just dumb!”
I believe the film was made with the wealthy and the elite in mind precisely for these reasons. What Rian Johnson has done here reminds me of an expression that I came across not so long ago, “Film been made not because the filmmaker wants to say something but because he has something to say”. I’m not sure who exactly said it, but it hits home with this one.
Rian Johson just wants to show us how absurd these wealthy billionaires can be to the point of wanting to be credited for the works of others. Take Miles, for example, a tech mogul and a supposed genius, who can’t create his so-called murder mystery game without the help of a ghostwriter. LOL.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is available on Netflix!
Watch my review of another film called Hustle starring Adam Sandler.
