Riot’s Reviews: Glass Onion
So I realize I’m playing a bit of catch-up coming into the new year, but as should have been expected, the holidays threw a wrench into my schedule and it’s been difficult to find time to get back to the theater. I’d much rather be reviewing a title like The Whale right now, but considering the hype around Avatar: The Way of Water and today’s entry, Glass Onion, I thought it would be worth getting my thoughts down, even if they’re technically “old” titles. Similar to a lot of people I know, I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Rian Johnson, but considering I did enjoy the original Knives Out, I went into this film with decently high expectations. This time around, unfortunately, I was left feeling unsatisfied, confused, and wondering how an interesting premise could fall apart so rapidly.
To begin with, I haven’t been fond of any film or television content that has chosen to add the Covid lockdown to their storyline. Granted, Glass Onion doesn’t spend a whole lot of time in that narrative. But it comes off to me as exceptionally hypocritical for Hollywood to be making jokes or any sort of ideological judgment when we all observed the entertainment industry being exposed for exactly that: “rules for thee, not for me.” I’d argue it actually tainted the most clever sequence of the film, as the audience is introduced to the characters/players/suspects of the story through a succession of shots portraying each actor attempting to decipher an elaborate puzzle box. Immediately after this though, each character is given a goofy “miracle cure” of sorts that serves only to make further light/mockery of the pandemic. The irksomeness of the content is only exaggerated by how utterly unnecessary it was to include it and given that the audience is just beginning to settle in for the two hour and nineteen minute runtime of the film, it begs the question why it was even included in the first place. What the audience inevitably comes to find out though, is that the entire film is riddled with juvenile comedy bits that are, like the Covid references, not even remotely funny.
Like any murder mystery, the journey to the big reveal is where all the entertainment lies. To its credit, Glass Onion takes the audience on a much longer, slightly more methodical walk through the “intricacies” of the plot (I put that in quotes because when it’s all said and done, there’s really nothing intricate about it.) The strength of unraveling the mystery through more storytelling sadly also becomes its weakness as the runtime really gets annoying about halfway in. Now that I think about it, that seems to be a running theme of this film. For example, each character and the actor that portrays them is very consistent (positive), but they are consistently childish and annoying (negative). Overall, the positives that I could find failed to outweigh the negatives. The film has an overly repetitive soundtrack. The setting, a private paradise island, eventually gets reduced down to one, fairly boring room. And the cinematography doesn’t really bring any “wow factor” moments to the table. If there is any real strength to emphasize, it would probably be the acting, but even that isn’t enough to save a story that takes two hours to set up and ten minutes to utterly demolish. Surprisingly, I was most disappointed in Daniel Craig (Benoit Blanc) but not for anything he did in particular; more that his character devolved into being so insignificantly impactful, you wonder why he’s even there in the first place. The irony in it all, is that Craig and Kate Hudson deliver lines in the film/preview that succinctly sum up my feelings about Glass Onion (I find it extra hilarious that it’s also become a meme):
Craig: It’s so dumb/ Hudson: It’s so dumb it’s brilliant!/ Craig: NO! IT’S JUST DUMB!
Riot’s Rating: 6/10: It’s streaming on Netflix. Watch if you want, but I don’t recommend it.
Well said!