Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery Review: A Razor-Sharp but Pandering Yarn

For all the pleasures in writer-director Rian Johnson’s 2019 whodunit Knives Out, there was also a sense of a filmmaker trying a bit too hard to prove his progressive bona fides on real-world issues of class and race. While the film’s stylistic elegance was enough to disarm criticism, that tendency has only increased tenfold in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, which, for better and for worse, is in keeping with its “bigger is better” ethos.

One can sense that approach right off the bat not only in regard to the sequel’s more frenzied tone, but also with the broadness of its jokes and the more overtly topical nature of its references. Set in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Glass Onion flies out of the gate with scenes of characters on Zoom calls with others while quarantined at home, donning masks while outdoors, or behaving irresponsibly by throwing large indoor parties. “They’re all part of my pod,” says Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson), the perpetrator of the latter act, with a smirk.

Birdie, a former supermodel turned lifestyle entrepreneur, is one of this film’s cast of upper-class characters, all of whom inhabit the financial orbit of Peter Thiel-like tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton). Other characters include Claire Debella (Kathryn Hahn), an aspiring Connecticut governor; scientist Lionel Toussaint (Leslie Odom Jr.); and Cassandra Brand (Janelle Monáe), a former business partner of Miles’s before he betrayed her.

These characters are essentially repositories for countless rapid-fire gags that rib everything from social media influencers—including Duke Cody (Dave Bautista), a men’s-rights YouTube star—to macho right-wing gun nuts to Silicon Valley tech-bro types. They’re all low-hanging fruit as far as comic targets go, and there’s a sense very early on that Johnson hasn’t bothered to give them much dimension beyond their caricatured surfaces.

Miles has invited these people and others to his private island in Greece for a weekend in which they participate in a murder mystery he himself has planned out. Also receiving an unexpected invite is Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig). The sleuth extraordinaire is introduced sitting in a bathtub lamenting to some of his famous friends—among them Angela Lansbury and the late Stephen Sondheim—over Zoom about how he hasn’t had a fulfilling case in a long while (Ethan Hawke and Yo-Yo Ma pop up elsewhere in Glass Onion). Such spot-the-celebrity-cameo games suggest that Johnson is far from shy about flaunting that Netflix budget on the screen—which to some degree undercuts the film’s attempt to take the piss out of the privileged.

Johnson has at least come up with yet another enjoyably twist-laden narrative, ensuring that Glass Onion satisfies on the base level of a breezy genre entertainment. The film also draws much of its frisson in showcasing the sharply contrasting acting styles among its large ensemble cast: Craig humbled yet watchful and firm when necessary, Hudson gleefully oblivious, Monáe full of quietly wounding fury. Once those surface pleasures quickly fade, however, it’s the political implications of the central mystery in Glass Onion that linger.

Without spoiling too much of the plot, the film builds up to a howl of despair at the state of present-day America: a capitalist system that protects the self-interested one-percent and their accomplices, as well as a justice system designed to insulate them from severe consequences for their misdeeds. The explosive climax has a certain primally cathartic power, but it doesn’t quite dispel the air of self-satisfaction that envelops Johnson’s screenplay. As topical commentary, Glass Onion feels less born out of deeply felt personal fury than an interest in pandering to audience members of the same progressive political persuasion.