Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (dir. Rian Johnson, 2022) — Review

Spoiler alert: like Edward Norton's tech guru, corrupted by his digital riches, Knives Out director Rian Johnson might be preying on the goodwill of his willingly captive audience. Johnson’s original modernized whodunnit won rave reviews in 2019, with its formula of an A-list cast, topical character profiles, and delicious knitwear. After that riff on the Agatha Christie stately-house setup, we rejoin ridiculously Southern detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) with a new band of suspects on a Greek island, in a White Lotus meets Mamma Mia move. The ingredients work well enough this time round — but the $450 million that Netflix ponied up for two sequels does grate a little with its social messaging.

This time, Blanc has swapped his three-piece suits for beachwear and a clime more suited to his trademark Kentucky Fried drawl. But the film makes it clear that this is a change in the elite, not of the elite — as in the first movie, we meet a batch of objectionable human Clue cards, with the added judgemental frisson of a setting in Covid. Boo-worthy rich villains come thick and fast, with all the subtlety of a billionaire’s taste in supercars. Musk-alike tech bro Miles Bron (Edward Norton) sends mysterious puzzle boxes to a group of old pals, inviting them to his private island in Greece. Also present is Blanc, there to join the dots between clean energy, sweatshops and, of course, murder.

Blanc, our Virgilian guide into the moral underworld of the super-rich, first appears when zooming his buddies from the bath in a lockdown slump. Not to worry. The rule-breaking elite offers a chance of escape, in the form of a Bond-style Mediterranean lair and long-buried grudges.The question is (sigh): just how far will their rule-breaking go?

Johnson has a great cast once again, but the deep social statements they’re meant to evoke veer into the gimmicky. It’s a bold choice not only to shoot in the Covid pandemic but to make it a plot point — or rather, as a loud, judgy way to divide the characters between maskers and anti-maskers. Chief in the latter camp is washed up model Birdie (Kate Hudson), whose vanity, enthusiasm for sweatshop labour, and Twitter gaffes make her an archetypal Karen. Miles, meanwhile, commits the classic billionaire sin of hoarding art — including the Mona Lisa — in his bland, glass-shaped onion luxury home simply because he can.

Arrayed against these not-at-all subtle bogeymen of rich white people are gay everyman Blanc and impassive tech whiz Andi Brand (Janelle Monae), a Black woman whose quest for justice has brought her to the island. The film’s real question is not so much ‘whodunnit’ as ‘is this person evil or just really rich and annoying’. Thus, we also meet hypocritical politico Claire Debella (Katheryn Hahn) and her assistant Peg (Jessica Henwick); men’s rights streamer Duke Cody (Dave Bautista) and his influencer girlfriend Whiskey (Madelyn Cline). The film’s conceit — the group has been invited to Miles’s island to play a murder mystery game — provides all sorts of jollies, but little sense of real risk. With the baddies painted in comical shades of entitled thickness, there’s no question of who’ll come out on top — the only three-dimensional characters.

It’s good fun, but the barrage of references to ‘high culture’ for the Instagram generation start to grate by the second act. For a film that ostensibly skewers the elite, and their obsession with cultural capital, Glass Onion manages to shove in a lot of celebrity cameos, from Hugh Grant as Blanc’s husband to, bizarrely, Yo-Yo Ma and Steven Sondheim. Certain audiences can laugh at Miles’s pretentiousness as he flexes his Philip Glass-composed alarm tone; they can also pat themselves on the back for understanding the joke. Let them eat cake, and have it, indeed.