- As far as I'm concerned, Rian Johnson should dedicate himself exclusively to making more Knives Out movies. If he became the directorial equivalent of Agatha Christie, churning out entertaining mysteries like Glass Onion for the rest of his life, I would have no complaints. This time around, Daniel Craig's country-fried sleuth Benoit Blanc finds himself on a Greek island owned by Elon Musk stand-in Miles Bron (Edward Norton). Joining them are some of the worst people in the world: fashion designer/offensive tweeter Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson), men's rights livestreamer Duke Cody (Dave Bautista) and his bikini-clad assistant Whiskey (Madelyn Cline), calculating Senate hopeful Claire Debella (Kathryn Hahn), and corporate scientist Lionel Toussaint (Leslie Odom, Jr.). Bron's mysterious ex-business partner Andi Brand (Janelle Monáe) is also present, even if she initially doesn't have much to say.
- While the audience patiently waits for the first body to drop, the film has a lot of fun lampooning its various celebrity archetypes. Bron had an islandwide "Dong" chime composed by Philip Glass and constantly deploys malapropisms that underscore his complete cluelessness. Birdie Jay claims that her widely misunderstood Halloween costume was intended to be a tribute to Beyoncé and sees nothing wrong with sweatpants being manufactured in sweatshops. Duke lives with his mom (Jackie Hoffman) and uses his pistol the way some people use punctuation. Without going into too much detail, Jeremy Renner's hot sauce and Jared Leto's hard kombucha play significant roles in the story. Did I mention that Bron rented the Mona Lisa? That seems significant.
- Ostensibly, this collection of narcissistic "disruptors" has been assembled to attend Bron's murder mystery party, but the film pulls that particular rug out from under the audience in a single hilarious scene. Although the real murder eventually arrives as expected, the next surprise is that one of the guests was killed off before the film even began. In flashback, we find out that Blanc and one other guest landed their invitations to Bron's island in unexpected ways and that the real mystery has to do with a missing napkin. Time to review the important scenes again from another angle to discover what we missed the first time (which is a relief, because I was just beginning to worry that the production had wasted Janelle Monáe).
- While Glass Onion contains an overly chaotic finale and a few superfluous characters (Jessica Henwick, Noah Segan), its excesses are perhaps understandable when considering the intrinsically excessive targets of its satire. The cast is excellent, with Craig, Monáe, Norton, and Hudson turning in especially terrific performances. As in the first film, the margins are crammed with wonderful details, many of which revolve around celebrity cameos: Hugh Grant is Blanc's domestic partner, Yo-Yo Ma helps solve a music riddle, Serena Williams is Bron's personal video trainer, a Zoom conversation features both Angela Lansbury and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The film's basic ethos is probably best summarized by Blanc's wry quote: "It's a dangerous thing to mistake speaking without thought for speaking the truth." Glass Onion is crammed full of both thoughtlessness and the truth and is all the better for it.
- I'll never catch them all, but Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ethan Hawke, and Stephen Sondheim also cameoed.
