Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery Review

Conceited from the get-go, a sequel to Glass Knives was always going to find itself chasing a new high, one that attempted to counteract the simple charms of the first feature. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, feels eerily inevitable in that rise and subsequent mystery. As convoluted as it is poorly paced, this latest Rian Johnson feature does little to convince newcoming or even returning audience members of the charm Daniel Craig can bring to the southern American accent. Dumped right onto Netflix and featuring all the shimmering inevitabilities of a colourful ensemble, wasted here for the caricatures they play. That is what this Poirot-knock-off has sadly, inevitably, devolved into as the pieces begin to fall away from a once-promising gimmick.  

That is the trouble with a gimmick piece, namely the murder mystery sub-genre, which ever since the initial Knives Out, has seen a violent and brief boom. See How They Run is a far more atmospherically steeped piece, while the Benoit Blanc (Craig) double bill is a hidden lever, upsetting motives drawn feature. The similarities between the first and the sequel are clear and underwhelming – from the caricatures of politics and streamers brought to the front of the piece but not to life, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery finds itself confused and poorly paced. It is all looming on the Mona Lisa, small details that are told through forgettable flashbacks and double-crosses that are as inevitable as the moral compounds that are dragged toward their obvious conclusion. 

Still, Johnson has managed to create such a confusing menagerie of plot points, themes and red herrings that he manages interest in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery and its characters out of sheer willpower alone. The likes of Edward Norton and Kate Hudson are totally underutilised, and when they are given their inevitable spotlight moment, they are completely redundant and fairly plain. There is a clear difference between inferences made through dialogue and pulling meaning out of regular text because the story demands it. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery relies heavily on the latter, with Dave Bautista and Janelle Monáe struggling tremendously through no fault of their own. All of it is due to an overbearing, relatively light script from Johnson and company, with Craig and the rest of the cast already denounced and reduced to caricatures in a cameo-clad feature.  

As great it is to see Stephen Sondheim and Angela Lansbury in a cameo that recalls the glory days of famous faces in regular surroundings, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is a halfway point between nostalgic redundancy and egregious and overwhelmed storytelling. It is smarmy and constantly nodding to all those little details littered throughout the first hour of build-up, but none of it is ever clear, nor is it clear even after it is explained away. Johnson crafts a script that feels completely powerless to empower its audience, it does not take them along for the ride in solving such a mystery – it is hard to point fingers when everyone is the suspect. Although the person responsible for the sloppy, forgettable mess Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is, is all too clear.