Why Glass Onion didn’t work for me
I have some thoughts on Glass Onion (2022), the sequel to Knives Out. I loved Knives Out. It scratched an itch that I didn’t even know I had. Big house, lots of well-developed characters, intrigue, a memorable detective, interesting victim, humour. It wasn’t “cozy” mystery, but it has the feel of old school whodunnit.
Unfortunately, Glass Onion didn’t work although it has most of these elements anyway. And I think it came down to three problems.
(Mild spoilers about the structure of the movie ahead. I’ll try to keep plot spoilers to a minimum.)
Firstly, we didn’t really get to know the primary victim. The victim was the most one-dimensional character in the whole movie. That can work in a detective story if we get to know the victim’s impact on the supporting characters over the story. Unfortunately all the suspects had exactly the same antagonistic relationship with the victim, so there was no way to make the victim flesh-&-blood through interactions.
Secondly, the secondary crime. In detective fiction, there’s a venerable tradition of “crime committed in front of detective”. Sometimes the detective is there by chance, sometimes by design. But “detective is on a case & sees a related crime” plots must show that the related crime hinders the original detection in an obvious way. Maybe the main suspect gets murdered. Maybe the client vanishes. The crime that Blanc sees happening in Glass Onion is not a hindrance to the case. The victim is also the worst person in the movie. So we have no stake at all in the secondary crime, not even sympathy for the victim.
Which leads us to the third point: the mid movie plot twist. They revealed the plot twist to make sense to the plot, to make the secondary crime count. Which is great, but a plot twist where the secret was known to the detective but not to the audience is anathema to whodunnits. A good plot twist reveal, like the one in Knives Out, brings us closer to the person with the secret as we share their secret. But we are supposed to be on the side of the detective anyway, especially in a sequel! “You get to know a secrtet advantage the good guys had” is a thriller trope, not a whodunnit trope.
So, what was Glass Onion? A third-rate revenge thriller told in the form of a classic whodunnit that didn’t realise why the first was successful.
Only good part was the detective’s realisation that the billionaire was a fucking idiot. They took a lot of inspiration from real life CEO types in creating that character. Jobs, Musk, Jack, Bezos… They — especially Musk — should see it.