My God, I HATED "Glass Onion". [spoilers ahoy]

Cafe Society
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Let me start with some of the things I liked alot. The cast and performances were excellent. Every single actor, even Dave Bautista, really did an exceptional job. Especially Jonae Monae, who Is absolutely jaw droppingly gorgeous and talented. Daniel Craig was fun, too. Pretty much everybody was. That wasn’t the problem. The problem wasn’t the characters or the dialogue - it was a bunch of other things, mainly that it constantly challenged my suspicion of disbelief. I’ll get that to a minute, but first a couple of more minor flaws.

It’s a movie that you know going in is going to have twists, and it had some very entertaining ones. The twin sister thing I absolutely loved. The third act, however, threw twists at you at breakneck speed, and too many of them just seemed to be throwing a twist in when it’s really not needed. Also, any time Benoit solved anything it was based on clues that weren’t shown. Mysteries are fun when the viewer is shown clues and can try to figure out. Think the old trope of Chekhof’s Gun. But Glass Onion doesn’t do that. NO, Glass Onion consistently only gives you the clues AFTER the explanation. There is no moment where you think “I should have caught that”, because vaudience wasn’t shown the clues upon Benoit’s explanation.

It’s kind of insulting.

But what’s more insulting, and these two things are what really shaked my suspension of disbelief were the murder and the alternative energy McGuffin. When Bautista’s character is murdered, it’s with poison… apparently. All we really see is him stand up off the couch, grab his neck, and then fall over unconscious. Now, I get that the characters are ridiculously selfish rich people and may not be the type to people to offer aid, but one of them does say “Is he choking?” The “World’s Greatest Detective” then crouches down next to him, looks at him for all of five seconds, doesn’t even touch the guy, and pronounces him dead by poison. What?! Can the “World’s Greatest Detective” not check a pulse? Forget medical care. Judging by these detective skills, you should never fall asleep anywhere near the guy otherwise you’ll wake up in the funeral home.

This is writing problem, but the MOST EGREGIOUS writing problem was the big world changing energy tech. I am absolutely fine with a fictional tech. Iron Man has his arc reactor, Star Trek has its dilithium crystals, and I have no problem. And I wouldn’t have a problem with the “Crystalized Hydrogen” in Glass Onion except that that they don’t go full fictional next level on it. They somewhat kinda try by having a characters say stuff like “It hasn’t been tested!” and “This will destroy the world!” But how will this destroy the world? Apparently because “Crystalized Hydrogen” will emit hydrogen gas in peoples homes. “Hindenberg” is used alot. Bitches, I pay real world money to pipe flammable gas into my real world home. I run the furnace and my water heater off of a flammable gas. I even cook with the shit!

Anyway, if anybody reading this liked it, well, good. I’m glad it gave you enjoyment, and I’m not the type to judge people who like pieces of art that I don’t. But I ended up HATING it, and I think that’s valid, too.

Fucking loved Jonae Monae in it, though.

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Almost as stupid as the solid hydrogen was the magic puzzle boxes, made out of the same stuff that allows helmets to fold into nothing in SF movies.

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I’m not sure if I liked it or not, but it certainly kept me entertained for 2+ hours. So I certainly didn’t hate it. I do know that I won’t watch it again.

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Ditto, hated it

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I kinda liked part of that sequence, though. You have all these idiot rich people working together playing the game to get into the boxes, and they solve it to get the invitation. And then there’s the TRUE disrupter, working apart, who doesn’t even try to solve the puzzle. She just smashes it with a hammer and opens it that way. That part actually did make me laugh.

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That was suppose to be a reply to Darren_Garrison

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There’s an existing thread on this movie with 300+ replies:

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But it would have been better if it was a plausibly buildable object, which this puzzle box very much was not. It was pure TARDIS-level fantasy construction.

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The explanatory flashbacks were an unusual narrative technique, but I had no problem with it at all. Nowhere is it written that a mystery movie has to be constructed like a puzzle so that the audience can try to solve the mystery from the clues. A movie above all should just be entertaining, and this one definitely was. In fact, for just that reason, and because the plot was intricate enough that I probably missed a lot of things, I’m definitely going to watch it again.

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I hated Knives Out so have no intention of seeing the onion movie.

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I would say that it, and knives out, weren’t true mystery movies, but more of a light hearted homage to the mystery genre that doesn’t take itself to seriously. Getting upset that it didn’t follow the mystery genre is missing the point.

And I’m glad they didn’t go into more detail about why the hydrogen is bad. Most movies that try to explain their own made up crap tend to dig their own graves the more they try to explain.

Overall, I was delightfully entertained for a couple hrs. But I don’t see myself watching it again any time soon.

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A reviewer on an NPR podcast claimed she figured out that Jonae Monae was playing an imposter from her uncharacteristic wooden acting.

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I didn’t mind the flashbacks so much, but I did think that the writer(s) and editor(s) did not play fair with the viewers. Our vocabulary of film has developed so that we expect that a cut from one angle to another in a short scene may be interpreted as being sequential (or at least chronologically close). In this film, that is simply not true. Cuts that appear to be close in time may actually show events that are separated by several minutes. The attempted murder by handgun (I won’t spoil it any further than this) is just one example.

At least in old movie serials, the cliffhangers were resolved in the next episodes by showing a different camera angle…where the hero has ducked out the door or jumped into the water to save himself. They didn’t just say, “Well, you thought the cut to this camera angle shows what happened next. But in OUR world, two whole minutes (and a lot of action) have passed during the cut.”

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Nitpick: Janelle Monae

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At needscoffee. Crap, fuck. You’re right. She’s my favorite one in the film and I screwed it up. What’s worse is I’ve seen her before in “Hidden Figures” and I [i]still[i] got her name wrong.

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I didn’t really care for it, I’m considering watching it again solely because enough other people liked it that I wonder if some re-evaluation is in order, but I may not get around to it.

If you say so, but if they were going for some kind of Galaxy Quest of mystery movies, it’s a swing and a miss IMHO.

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Yeah, it wasn’t trying to go that far into parady either.

I liked the movie and already said I’m not going to see it again. If you didn’t like it, definitely don’t bother trying again.

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This is the only thing I want to take issue with. Bautista may have started as a wrestler, but he takes his craft really seriously, and has been making a deliberate effort to work for interesting directors on good scripts that challenge him as a performer. Compare Dwayne Johnson, who has crap taste in projects and never works for a director who is more important than he is, and consequently has been less and less interesting as an actor with every passing year. Sure, Bautista may never be a De Niro, but he’s been quietly assembling a genuinely impressive portfolio of work. (Except for Stuber, which was terrible, but nevertheless give Bautista credit for, again, wanting to stretch beyond his comfort zone into a new genre.) For anyone who’s been paying attention, it’s no surprise that Bautista would be giving a fun performance in Glass Onion.

Edit to add: Also, on a personal level, he’s just a really good egg.

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I wasn’t a big fan of “Knives Out”, so I wasn’t exactly pumped upon learning about “Glass Onion”.

Then, when the trailers came out, I had zero interest in sitting through it.

mmm

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There were two major clues that were shown on first viewing. Rich guy being a complete dumbass making up his own vocabulary and the Bautista murder. I noticed the Bautista murder the first time through, didn’t recognize it for what it was, and changed my recollection to “grabbed the wrong glass” once the movie told me to.

There were also a few Easter eggs of clues thrown in that were hard to see, like when Janelle Monae throws a recorder into what’s her face’s bag poolside… that was shown explicitly the first time through, a close up of what’s her face, you see a flash of something fall into her bag, and it pans back to show Janelle behind her.