Society Reviews

You either love Rian Johnson for destroying  the Star Wars brand or you hate Rian Johnson destroying  the Star Wars brand. In 2017, Johnson was responsible for Disney’s Star Wars The Last Jedi. The film without question fractured the fanbase of one of the strongest brands in the entertainment of all time.

Critics loved the film which deconstructed the decades-long legacy of the Star Wars franchise while fans were put off by a movie that took a sledgehammer to the lore of their favorite franchise.

Johnson has painted himself as a king of subverting your expectations ever since. The art of knowing what you want and knowing what you’re expecting yet giving you the opposite. In 2019, Johnson won himself over with expectations smashing critics with his ensemble cast film ‘Knives Out’.

Critics loved the film as it did not hide its disdain for “MAGA People” with many gushing about it as a fun ‘f*** you’ to rich white Trump voters. Last year, Netflix bought the rights to two Knives Out sequels for $469 million. Netflix then agreed to a limited one-week theatrical release before premiering the sequel on their own streaming giant leading us to Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.

Glass Onion takes place sometime after the events of the last movie. This time around an arrogant Tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) sends elaborate puzzle boxes to a small group of his rich and influential friends in order to invite them to a “murder mystery party” on his private island called Glass Onion.

All of the guests are surprised when world-famous private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) appears on the Island without being invited along with an old estranged friend Cassandra Brand (Janelle Monáe). When Miles asks how Blanc received one of his invites, he concludes that one of the other guests sent their box to Blank as a joke. On the night that the murder mystery begins, two of the guests are found dead and the game becomes a real investigation where Blanc must crack the case and discover who the killer is.

When compared to Johnson’s 2019 film ‘Knives Out’, Glass Onion is certainly a slight improvement due to the fact that the characters are much better represented in this film than in his last. Instead of dealing with a big evil family With nefarious motives, the characters in green onion are well-defined Even if I’m principal there are stereotypes of the rich.

The biggest downside of Rian Johnson’s expectation-subverting style is that as a writer Johnson isn’t nearly as smart as he thinks he is. Predictability was a major flaw in Knives Out and it remains a problem in the green onion as well. Johnson likes to use his films to take a bat at his political enemies however doing so makes it very easy to see where the film is going to end up that’s the very beginning of the adventure.

Edward Norton plays the character of Miles who shares a lot of parallels to Elon Musk. a tech-savvy billionaire who is full of himself. He is portrayed as an idiot savant. you can see exactly the direction that Johnson is going with this film in the first couple of minutes but you hold out hope that the greater mystery at hand leaving much more to be desired.  Johnson, also brings back his trope of the morally pure minority using Janelle Monae in the same fashion he used Ana De Armas in the first film.

Expecting a detective movie from the world’s greatest detective is too much to ask from Johnson’s writing style. The film often mistakes red herrings for intrigue which gives audiences a false sense of tension. In a mystery movie, you look for every little detail in the story that couldn’t be used as a clue to solving the mystery. In Green Onion, there is no point because the storytelling makes the fine points irrelevant.

There are far better detective movies you can look for. A slow start, an interesting middle, followed by a childish ending.

1.5/5

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