Editor’s Note: This review originally ran as part of our coverage on-site at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. Read through our full slate of reviews from TIFF 2022, as well as our official preview, and revisit our complete archives of this year and past festivals.
***
It may not seem this way, based on the number of pans I put out on a monthly basis, but I genuinely hate being the odd one out when it seems like everybody is having a genuinely good time. It’s no fun — especially at a big old screening that everybody’s hyped about — to be the only person sitting there, stone-faced and silent, while the people around you cackle away, especially since your own laughter can’t drown out the noise of the dude who can’t help but sound like Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker when he finds a pratfall or pun hilarious. Part of someone’s job when they’re at an event like TIFF is to try and conjure a sense of the milieu – it’s part travel writing as well as film criticism – and it’s part of the reason why watching Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion was such an alienating experience. I still wouldn’t have enjoyed the movie if I were watching it in the way God intended us to watch big-budget Netflix projects (while folding laundry, or after a large family dinner with the tryptophan from the turkey slowly causing you to nod off next to your parents on that cozy couch they have in their sitting room) but I wouldn’t have been as perplexed by it, given the contrast between the quiet peace of the living room and the loud and rapturous premiere at The Princess of Wales. It genuinely seems that Johnson has found the way to please a crowd so much that folks are begging Netflix to release it in theaters so that they can experience it with others, and I’m glad for him and those who will be entertained by it. But it also suggests a kind of capitulation to both market forces and a desire for audience affection that only started to creep into his movies after the abrasive (and still controversial) Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
To be fair, that’s easy to understand: You put up with angry nerds and the worst of the internet at a particularly toxic moment online, and one’s vision of the world can become perverted by that little lens into the ids of the millions blasting you on Twitter. So, when your last film, Knives Out, becomes a surprising success despite being an original concept in an IP-oriented world, you inevitably double-down on everything that you found compelling about it, and assume that the audience will go along. This means upping the size and scale of the mystery — it’s not just a bunch of dumbasses flinging petty insults at each other in a mansion while Daniel Craig does his best Foghorn Leghorn, it’s a bunch of dumbasses flinging petty insults at one another on a private island while Daniel Craig does his best Foghorn Leghorn — as well as the “setpieces” and the frequency of the gags. But even with all of that Netflix money (and there’s a ton of it behind this specific enterprise), something about Glass Onion feels inferior in every single way compared to its predecessor. The cast is fine enough — Janelle Monae, Dave Bautista, Kathryn Hahn and Ed Norton are having fun along with Craig — and Johnson’s formal skills as a director, from scene to scene, remain pretty solid, which makes the film watchable in a sort of inverse way to the “can’t stop looking at the car crash” metaphor. You keep waiting for the film to get better, but it’s two hours and 20 minutes long, with points practically baked in for people who want to watch it as a “miniseries” or whatever.
The root of the issues with Glass Onion can be found within its central metaphor — as many say in the film, it’s got lots of layers, but it’s still transparent and empty at the core — because the film’s script is just a nightmare. We were asked by the TIFF Programmers during the film’s introduction not to spoil specifics, so I’m gonna honor that request and do my best to obfuscate. But, going forward, I do think one can easily predict a Knives Out sequel’s story by taking note of what’s trending on Twitter some six months after whenever the last film in the series came out. It’s The Last of Sheila if it were terminally online circa April 2020: COVID culture, of the lockdown variety, dominates. There are Among Us references, Zoom interviews, “COVID pod” jokes, and dozens of other things that I’m sure I’m forgetting. That, in and of itself, is not a bad thing, as tawdry as it might be in some ways to continue presenting the “Shelter-in-Place” era from the perspective of the wealthy and well-connected. What’s the real issue is that, when we get to the Island, every single character aside from our protagonist(s) reveals themselves to be a caricature of someone Johnson has potentially feuded with on the internet. There’s a Manosphere Twitch streamer (Bautista), a milquetoast Dem governor (Hahn), a ditzy fashion icon who can’t help but get herself continually canceled by saying dumb shit (Kate Hudson), a sell-out scientist (Leslie Odom, Jr.), and the former business partner (Monae) of the island’s owner (Norton), an immensely successful charlatan who launches broad projects based on shitposts. Though, to be fair, they are faxed out to the world, rather than hip-fired online for the SEC’s attorneys to notice.
Johnson takes so long with the film’s set-up — the cast only reaches the island at the thirty-minute mark — that we’re forced to spend what feels like an eternity with this crew, and they’re all so one-note in their shading that they never truly become comic relief or genuine “suspects.” The film’s central mystery emerges an hour into the movie, and Johnson then turns back and makes us relive most of that first hour with added exposition before the film drags to its conclusion. Again, if you’re the kind of person who would cackle at Daniel Craig saying the word “Shitballs,” more power to you, because you’ll probably have a solid time with this one. But there’s just something so endlessly petty about Johnson’s version of “satire” that feels so out-of-step with the rest of his filmography. Like them or not, everything from Brick through The Last Jedi at least had an earnestness and a sense of timelessness behind them, without an ounce of freeflowing cynicism or a desire for “relevance” to be found in the cocktail. Knives Out seemed to ignite a latent desire in the director to use his films to castigate his enemies, as if merely poking fun at them a feature film rather than, you know, satirizing them or really critiquing their mindsets, but that film benefited from the fact that it was focused. Sure, the Book of Henry kid was an alt-right moron, but at least it was somewhat relevant to the discussion, given how immigration proved to be the running thread of social commentary there. Here, it’s all over the place, as if Johnson just forgot how many scores he was going to settle with the folks on his timeline.
Glass Onion is the type of sequel that I dub the “Victory Lap,” which is when a director (or producer or studio) tries to demonstrate the clear cultural cachet they’ve accumulated through shows of status. This isn’t always a bad thing, either: sometimes it can mean a larger effects budget – “This time, I’ll show you what I can really do!” I imagine Jim Cameron saying on the set of T2 – or an expanded mythos or whatever you want, but in Johnson’s case it’s just a bit shallower in its ambitions. How otherwise would one explain the endless parade of celebrity faces that distract from the narrative for one-note cameos that add little to the proceedings beyond being an acknowledgement of a recognizable face in a piece of media that you like, a kind of endorsement that wouldn’t be out of place in the cereal aisle of your local grocery store on a box of Wheaties. If, say, LeBron James (who is not in this film, it’s just an example) showed up here, you’d be able to appropriately identify him with the Knives Out brand and then feel good about your media consumption choices when it comes to both basketball and movies. It’s just sort of self-congratulatory, which is not to dismiss Johnson’s successes, but the private-island shoot in a beautiful locale with a bunch of your pals (including the ones who cameo in all of your movies) is normally where this stops, unless you’re Bruce Willis in Ocean’s Twelve or working on a Sandler project in New Hampshire.
Yet this also has the unmistakable reek of audience flattery to it: You, much like Benoit Blanc and the other sympathetic characters in the film, have smelled the bullshit of mawkish grifters and sellouts and know that something is rotten there, and surely there must be a fire if you see smoke, right? The characters never earn our hatred or our pity within the text itself. Instead, our enmity towards them is externally generated (provided you’re on Twitter) and are just hollow pieces shuffled about on a chessboard, working towards an inevitable denouncement that just feels right, rather than it actually being so. And this is my issue with Glass Onion: In Johnson’s attempt to satisfy his fans, he’s lost some of his ability as a storyteller and contented himself with the most obvious of-the-moment reactionary humor and plotting in order to make sure that his chosen crowd is appropriately entertained. It is not a good enough satire to be entertaining on those merits, and it is not a compelling enough mystery to captivate, and it’s hard not to envision Glass Onion having the same trajectory as a viral tweet once it lands on Netflix: intense interest and engagement for a day or two, only to be lost to the pounds of data and content being pumped out at every given turn. It’s a kind of planned obsolescence from Johnson, which is a shame, given that his output was normally built to last.