Glass Onion

 Glass Onion's big budget is on display in the film's use of Lennon & McCartney songs; it's notoriously expensive to acquire the rights to Beatles' music and the producers of Glass Onion obviously have money to burn -- in fact, the song "Glass Onion" plays during the closing credits, a thankless role since Netflix encourages its users to click away from credits on the back end of a movie to access other content.  (This is an annoying feature on Netflix but speaks volumes of the attention deficit disorder that apparently afflicts many of its subscribers.)  In all respects, Glass Onion is competently crafted with spectacular sets and glossy, fashion-magazine photography; it has A-List players, Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc, a fey detective (he speaks with a Southern accent and seems to be channeling Truman Capote and Miss Marple at the same time) and Ed Norton playing the part of the villainous tech mogul Miles Bron; the strangely malformed Dave Bautista and Kate Hudson also are featured and there are numerous cameos by various celebrities including YoYo Ma, Kareem Abdul Jabar, and, of course, Hugh Grant, who plays Benoit Blanc's longsuffering house-husband.  The film is curiously tedious despite all its high-jinks -- there are acres and acres of exposition required by the ornate plot.  Everything is well-written, ingenious, and crafted to within an inch of its life, but the movie is so contrived and pointlessly intricate that it turns out to be tedious (the film is about two-hours and twenty minutes long).

To write about Glass Onion is to spoil the film since the entire proceedings involve various twists and turns that are supposed to intrigue the audience between bouts of long-winded explanations.  I'll respect the film's format and, merely, sketch the situation:  An arrogant, if dim-witted Tech mogul (think Elon Musk crossbred with Mark Zuckerberg) has invited his seven best friends onto a Greek island where he has built an elaborate pleasure garden and pleasure dome (the titular "glass onion.")  The island is more than a little creepy -- it will remind viewers of Jeffrey Epstein's "orgy-island" in the Bahamas.  Bron, the tech tycoon, calls his guests "disruptors" and wants to cast them as a merry band of free-thinking libertine geniuses  -- but, in fact, they are all sycophants and toadies and each of them has a motive to murder Bron.  (The plot is shamelessly derived from Agatha Christie's And then there were None, sometimes known as Ten Little Indians.)  Bron intends to stage a "murder mystery" involving his own fake homicide and has invited his old business associates to these festivities so that they can exercise their powers of ratiocination.  It's not clear why the ace detective Benoit Blanc is present; Bron denies inviting him.  Blanc is a genius at solving puzzles and he immediately figures out the murder mystery plot and solution even before Bron gets a chance to stage his fake demise.  But, then, one of the guests drops dead, the result of poison, and, as Sherlock Holmes would say "the game is (then) afoot."  The guests harbor considerable hostility toward Bron who treats them in a condescending manner as mere props.  Bron has a napkin on which one of the guests penned his tech-empire's business plan -- implausibly, this souvenir shows that Bron has not been the architect of his success; rather one of the guests invented his successful business model.  There has been intense litigation over Bron's misappropriation of the intellectual property of others and the scribbled-upon napkin becomes a MacGuffin that everyone pursues during the second-half of the movie.  In effect, the writer and director Rian Johnson provides three puzzles for solution:  first, who is imagined to have killed Bron in the fake murder?  Second, who committed the real murder by poisoning?  And who fired the gun killing another guest?  And, third, where is the fatal napkin hidden and who will end up possessing it?  

In an early scene, at a sort of depraved party, someone (YoYo Ma) defines a fugue as being the statement of a theme over which the same theme is superimposed.  This little bit of business is a self-reflective comment on the film's structure.  In the first half of the film, we see the events leading up to the poisoning and the subsequent death by gunfire of another guest.  The movie then launches into an extended flashback in which we are shown the exact same events but from different perspectives so that we can actually understand the secret cabals motivating the action.  Once, the explicative flashback catches up to the action on screen, the movie then shifts over into focusing on the pursuit of the napkin marked with Bron's business plan -- this aspect of the movie borrows from Poe's "The Purloined Letter."  Until the film's last 15 minutes, the movie is very theatrical and, indeed, would work as a stage-play -- in this regard, it appears to pay homage to Peter Schaefer's Sleuth and shows a similar interest in the solution of intricate puzzles.  (The movie, which is derivative of many other better films, stories, and plays, also toys with motifs from the sole film directed by Stephen Sondheim, The Last of Sheila --and Sondheim's photograph, together with Angela Lansbury, appears prominently in one scene.)  The film's ending is apocalyptic and seems to have drifted into the movie from some other source -- there's an entirely different paradigm in the movie's last fifteen minutes.  Glass Onion is very sharply written and contains excellent dialogue, but it's an odd combination of the baffling and overly explicit.  The film manages to be confusing and patronizing at one time -- the director doesn't seem to think that we're paying much attention because he has to reprise key scenes to make sure we see the clues installed in those sequences; at the same time, the plot is so pointlessly intricate that the viewer can't ever know exactly what is happening.  The movie is brilliantly edited -- in particular, there's crosscutting to a famous Old Master painting that keeps sealing itself into a crystalline protective case when phones ding that is very effective. In general, the movie's complex but coherent editing is its best technical feature.  There are numerous in-jokes, some of which are a little disturbing -- for instance, a hot sauce marketed by the celebrity actor Jeremy Renner plays an important role in the movie.  But Renner almost killed himself the weekend that Glass Onion was dropped on Netflix and blood-colored sauce assumes a sinister significance in light of the actor's real life accident and serious injuries.  The movie is a bit like Beat the Devil -- it's full of hammy bits of business and feels like a joke that got out of hand and has begun to regard itself with unflattering gravitas.  It's mildly amusing and, more or less, completely forgettable.