Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery Review

When Knives Out debuted back in 2019, it easily became the best big-budget movie mystery in years. In my humble opinion, the competition hadn’t been terribly fierce. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl are the only stand-outs in my mind from that entire decade. But even in a more crowded field, it’s a safe bet that Knives Out would have shined. The cast was stellar, the visuals were beautiful, and that script? Forgetaboutit.

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery manages to take everything that worked for its predecessor somewhere new without feeling like a sloppy rehash. And before I get to the cast and the visuals, I want to talk about what separates writer/director Rian Johnson’s mysteries from some of his competitors in the genre.

From the 1920’s to the 1940’s, the most successful mystery genre was the noir detective story. Think of the detective reciting poetic monologues in black and white, with light filtering through the shutters onto a bottle of whiskey just as someone knocks at the door: a dame that could turn heads faster than whiplash in a Rolls-Royce. Raymond Chandler, one of the most successful writers of the genre, talked about taking crime fiction back from the elaborate, Moriarty-esque criminal masterminds and giving it to real crooks.

Then you had the highly-successful Agatha Christie method: a “fair-play” mystery in which her detective, often Hercule Poirot, would investigate all the suspects and witnesses, look over the evidence, and then retreat to a quiet room to solve the mystery in his head. At that point in the book, Christie implied, all the necessary pieces were laid bare, and the audience, if they were paying enough attention, should be able to solve the case along with him

The Knives Out films don’t really do either of those things. These crimes are elaborate and contrived as hell, especially in Glass Onion, where some of the clues rely on the weirdest personality quirks in the world to point toward the solution. And while some would argue these are fair-play mysteries, the real mystery is hidden too deep into the movie for audiences to look for the right clues on their first go-round.

Instead, Johnson’s films excel at performing juggling acts at breakneck speed. He rapidly introduces a parade of suspects, a slew of evidence, and a fisher’s bounty of red herrings.Then he adds in a perspective switch that re-contextualizes everything you’ve seen up until that point. There are complicated coincidences and strange habits from almost every character that could be meaningless or the cornerstone of the whole mystery. Johnson doesn’t need to create an ingenious puzzle in these movies: he just needs to confuse and entertain the audience the whole ride through, and he does that very well.

It’s a trick that’s worked on me twice, anyway. The characters in Glass Onion are a delight to watch, and Johnson is great at introducing them one after another in ways that show a lot of character in a short amount of screen-time. You’ve got Kate Hudson’s Birdie throwing a thoughtlessly huge party during COVID and mistaking one of her own lamps for a smart-speaker for a good thirty seconds; you’ve got Dave Bautista’s Duke doing the hyper-masculine, conspiracy bro act before getting shut down by his mom; you’ve got Leslie Odom Jr. and Kathryn Hahn as the only sane suspects around, while also hinting at the shady deals that got them where they are. And then you’ve got Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc wearing a fez in a bathtub and chatting with Stephen Sondheim. Gosh, Craig is so good in this. Blanc was used sparingly in the first film, so letting him be our point-of-view character through so much of the film lets the character breathe and keeps the comedy rolling delightfully.

Every shot is gorgeous in this film, and the social commentary of the first (powerful people behaving predictably badly) works all over again because the characters play off of each other so very well.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but if you haven’t seen these movies yet, and you like mysteries, or movies, or laughing, you have to watch these films. 5 Jeremy Renner hot sauces out of 5. Now streaming on Netflix.