Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Dear Rian Johnson - Wow, you sure did make a movie! It’s absolutely gorgeous, a real visual treat. The dialogue is snappy, and all the actors are having a blast playing these characters. You managed to take a murder mystery, tell it twice from two perspectives to get the full picture, and throw in enough misdirects to obscure the obvious solution. Now if only you could’ve not stuck your own head and this movie so far up your own pretentious ass, it might’ve been enjoyable. But no, you’re an insufferable douche with the self-awareness of a rock. Everything about your movie comes off as “aren’t I clever, deconstructing the murder mystery genre”, but you’re not doing anything new. Telling the story, slamming on the brakes halfway through to double back, retell it and re-contextualize it with new information and POV’s is straight out of Christopher Nolan’s growing-more-tired-by-the-day playbook. The dialogue sounds snappy, but nobody apart from Daniel Craig has a distinctive voice, and everybody but him is a slightly different shade of selfish jackass. The cast is enjoying themselves, but some of the actors (Kate Hudson, Janelle Monae, Leslie Odom Jr) are out of their depth here, and several (the assistant, Whiskey, Leslie Odom Jr) are given almost no depth whatsoever. And your lead character vanishes for long stretches. And your twists loop back on themselves from clever to stupid when, in the movie itself, call out those twists and the people who perpetrate them for being stupid. That's called lamp-shading, and it's a lazy hack's best friend, because it allows that lazy hack to be a lazy hack but point it out and look intelligent for doing so ... but it's a GOOD writer's worst enemy, because if you're good, you don't have to resort to those hoary cliches in the first place, and you don't have to put on airs of pretention by pointing them out in a futile effort to de-venom the snake. In other words, Rian, being ironic for the sake of itself isn't irony; it's being a clueless hipster. But then there’s Edward Morton’s Miles Bron. The Disruptor. That’s your big theme for this movie, which goes into your self-styled image: just like Bron fancies himself a disruptor of business, you fancy yourself a disruptor of cinema. You want to deconstruct genres, turn them inside out, make the snake eat its own tail. But, in a nice bit of irony, your deconstruction-slash-attack on the disruptor mindset has exposed you and your movies for the fraud you and they are. Because here’s the dirty secret, Rian: people who TRY to be disruptors? They’re not. They're immature idiots. They’re teenagers who say “I hate God” in church and yell out obscenities in the mall and refuse to smile in the family picture. They try too hard, and think they’re too clever for anybody to understand, but they’re all, to the last, narcissistic, petulant, overgrown children with delusions of mediocrity. That's not being a disruptor; it's being an asshole. TRUE disruption, affecting change and up-ending established norms doesn’t come from some wannabe edgelord acting like a bratty teenager and going against the grain because it fulfills some deluded idea of cool. It comes from finding something that is broken and shouldn't be and fixing it, or seeing something that is stale and refreshing it. It's not shocking the current system, but recognizing the flaws within the system and correcting them. A true agent of change tears down derelict buildings and puts up new ones that make the area better. Disruptors just blow up the derelict building and think that’s the accomplishment. That’s Miles Bron. That’s you, Rian. And that’s Glass Onion; a hollow, pointless, unoriginal movie so in love with itself, so purposefully fashioned to be disruptive, but it accomplishes nothing, because it's built on spare parts and thinks it's cool to laugh at the source of those parts. It has nothing of its own to it. It won’t have any lasting impact on the genre it’s trying to disrupt. It’s another murder mystery movie. It’s just noise. Pretty noise, sure. Fun, in its own way and mostly because of one person, sure. But it’s not half as clever as it thinks it is, and it's too busy loving itself to see it is what it spends two and a half hours mocking: yourself and your style of movie-making.