Film Review: Glass Onion is a fun, Cluedo-esque escapade in the world of Knives Out
Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
- Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
- ★★★★☆
(12A) is a different kettle of red herrings entirely. Building on the unexpected success of the original Knives Out (2019), Glass Onion finds the debonair Southern detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) summoned to the private Greek island of the Alpha CEO, tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton), who has assembled a gathering of his dearest friends – among them Birdie (Kate Hudson) and Duke (Dave Bautista) – to play an extravagant murder-mystery game.
That things do not go to plan is a given, partly because Miles and his guests quickly find themselves embroiled in a real-life murder investigation, in which Blanc sets about discovering the identity of the killer of Helen Brand (Janelle Monáe), Alpha’s former CEO and the woman who once stood in the way of Miles and his beloved billions …
Written and directed by Knives Out helmer Rian Johnson, Glass Onion is a different kind of movie to the original: here the emphasis is very much on offbeat humour, much of it derived from Ed Norton’s delicious portrayal of the erratic, unhinged Miles Bron, who – naming no names – is loosely based, according to Norton, on ‘the Übermensch of tech illuminati’.
The story is akin to a game of Cluedo, albeit one in which all of the suspects have motive, means and opportunity, all of which adds to the fun, central to which is Daniel Craig’s slyly satirical portrayal of the Hercules Poirot-like Benoit Blanc and his ‘Southern hokum’ – the succession of increasingly ludicrous costumes donned by Blanc is almost worth the price of admission alone. (Netflix)
