Glass Onion: A knives out mystery Review

The Glass Onion is a great movie that suffers a bit from typecasting and formulaic writing. It is however worth the watch. There are minor to mild spoilers about the plot!

Glass Onion is the second installment of the “Knives out” franchise. It is directed by Rian Johnson, of Star Wars fame, and features an ensemble cast including but not limited to Daniel Craig, Kate Hudson, Dave Bautista, and Katherine Hahn.

An uninvited guest to the Glass Onion

Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) joins a group of friends on the island where the murder mystery game will be played. However, he was never invited despite receiving a box from Miles Bron (Edward Norton), allegedly.

From what I gathered, Bron is a very eccentric man if you look at his crystal office and one-of-a-kind car. He’s a collector of rare and expensive things. The boxes that served as invites were crafted by a specialist for who he paid big bucks. While Bron didn’t send it, he urges Blanc to stay.

Birdie (Kate Hudson) a former Fashion Icon, is someone who’s got her heart on her sleeve. And says all the stuff nobody else dares to say. She was a star in her day. Youngest fashion editor, supermodel, and more. She is in a relationship with Peg (Jessica Henwick). She is also not very smart.

Birdie compared herself on the Oprah Winfrey show by calling herself the Harriet Tubman (in spirit she defends herself) and that cost her her career. Nobody would touch Birdie with a 10-foot pole. That’s how bad it was.

Peg is sticking up for her but her motives are self-serving. Bron wants her to make a statement about Bangladesh, which Birdie managed to mess up. Peg is trying to stop it because if Birdie goes down, she goes down. So that makes her questions to Bron self-serving in Glass Onion.

The tour of the house

When the guests arrive at dinner, they get a tour of the house. There is a Mona Lisa, which changed Bron’s life the first time he saw it in Paris and it’s also the first time Bron made the plan for life that he would do something that would make him unforgettable.

There is a new fuel source he wants to invest in. It’s made out of abundant seawater and he calls it Klear. With a K. It’s zero carbon emissions and he wants to announce it at an event.

After the tour, it is time for dinner and for the murder mystery to begin. There are clues all over the island and the contestants need to remember what they know about each other. The joker here is of course Benoit Blanc. He doesn’t know the contestants and they don’t know him.

But he can rely on his detective skills, something the others can’t since they don’t possess that skill set. Benoit Blanc features in the first Knives out movie as well as in Glass Onion. I hope he will do more movies.

Benoit Blanc, private dick

Private dick is slang for private detective of course. And as mentioned before: Blanc is the only one with detective skills. He quickly deduces that the murder mystery party is about to unfold unless he intervenes at the last moment. And he does so with grace as Blanc quickly deduces that there is an arrow pointing from a classic crossbow aimed at Bron. And all fingers point to Birdie. The arrow shoots and it’s a dud. The murder mystery has been solved and the guests are done for the weekend. Or are they?

Blanc follows Bron into his office and they talk. Turns out that the actual murder mystery is yet to start. Blanc shares the info that he gathered on the guests and concludes that they all have a potential motive to kill Bron.

Birdie, about Bangladesh. Duke (Dave Bautista) about but it’s cut off, Claire Debella (Kathryn Hahn) about her political campaign and more. Like Damocles’ Sword, Bron has a lot of information he can use to blackmail his guests with unless they all agree to make clear the path for Klear.

As Blanc says: What you have put on the table is a loaded gun, turn the lights off and it becomes a case of whodunnit. To which Bron agrees. But no murder has been committed yet…so they could all agree potentially to do Bron’s bidding.

The group has motives

The entire group has a motive to kill Bron. They act nice in front of him but when he’s out of the room, it’s a different story. All of them want Bron dead for whatever reason. But when Bron enters the room, they are all smiles. Bron knows he’s made a huge mistake with his friends a couple of years ago in a bar called The Glass Onion. And he is making up with them by being friendly and giving them what they want.

For instance, Duke needs help with his brand Alpha. He wants to expand and Bron can and will help. But before we even get there, Duke falls to the ground. He’s been poisoned. And what’s even worse is that the glass he drank from was Bron’s. So if there ever was a moment to say whodunnit, this is that moment.

The big secret was that Duke’s girlfriend Whiskey was sleeping with Bron. At first, you’d think she was cheating but she used sex as a tool to make sure that Bron would put Duke on the TV network Bron owns since his YouTube numbers are dwindling.

Bron offers Blanc 1 billion dollars to find the killer.

Glass Onion has so many twists, you will be dizzy

Blanc of course turns down the offer and this is where the movie actually comes together. Nothing is what it seems. There are so many twists and turns as to why Duke was killed but an even bigger question: What happened to Cassandra who was ruined in the lawsuit?

Cassandra is the partner of Bron and she died a few weeks ago. It was suicide allegedly. But there is more going on. Cassandra refused to sign over the entire business empire that she and Bron built together. So a suicide in a murder mystery movie is just an alleged one.

The twists and turns in Glass Onion will leave you in a state of vertigo. It all comes with the Mystery Murder movie genre.

The evil twin sister, the dimwit, the nerd, and the big manipulator. And ofcourse, the sharp detective who has a keen eye for details that are quite visible when you watch the movie for the first time.

Glass Onion has a great cast but…

First and foremost, I loved the cast and their acting. To watch Daniel Craig in something else other than James Bond was refreshing. Although that Southern accent gets annoying after about 30 minutes, that could well be because of me being used to him being Bond.

You can see that Craig has quite a range as an actor and I do hope he will continue to make more great movies. However, a washed-up detective who is undercover. It feels like a typecast.

And that’s not the only typecast. Dave Bautista essentially plays Drax but then less literal. Bautista deserves more than that IMO.

The movie I would love to see Bautista in would be a drama movie about a washed-up fighter trying to fight back to the top and overcoming obstacles along the way. Like making amends for the people he’s hurt and getting back at the people responsible for his downfall.

The breakout role for me in this movie is that of Cassandra, played by Janelle Monáe. She plays her role so incredibly that I really believed everything about her that happened in Glass Onion. I hope to see more of Ms. Janelle Monáe in the future.

The rest of the cast was ok. Edward Norton’s enthusiasm splashes off the screen. You can see he has a lot of fun doing the movie. He plays the evil guy and I have never seen him play anyone evil so it was good.

As far as Katherine Hahn goes. I loved her in Wandavision and I hoped that she could perform as well as she did in the series but she was given such few lines that I wonder if it is even worth having her up there.

Let me put it this way: If her character didn’t appear in the movie, the movie would have still been the same. I just wished she had played a bigger role. The same goes for Lamar Odom and Jessica Henwick.

All this is not to say that you should skip the movie but the formulaic writing of the genre makes it so that you can only watch the movie one time. Kind of like The Sixth Sense. Once the gimmick is out, the film is not watchable the second time around.