‘Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery’ Review: As Sharp as the First One, But in a Go-Big-or-Go-Home Way, and Daniel Craig Once Again Rules
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic It’s in the nature of cinema that when a hugely popular and beloved movie is grand enough, the sequel to it almost has to try to top it in a go-big-or-go-home way. For a long time, each new James Bond adventure was more lavishly scaled, baroque, and stunt-tastic than the last. “The Godfather Part II” was darker and longer than “The Godfather,” “The Empire Strikes Back” enlarged the awesomeness of “Star Wars,” and “Terminator 2: Judgement Day” made the first “Terminator” look like a minimalist trinket. So how does that apply to “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery”? Three years ago, Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out” was a seamlessly debonair retro whodunit, set in the mansion of a murdered mystery novelist, that not only evoked the edge-of-your-brain storytelling panache of Agatha Christie but expanded the Christie genre into something delectable in its meta cleverness. At a time when comic-book films, action films, and other forms of kinetic fantasy appeared to be in the final stages of killing off everything else, “Knives Out” was a cathartic reminder that a movie mode we associate with vintage Hollywood — dialogue of airy density and wit, characters who pop with all-too-human flaws and foibles, a plot that zigs and zags until you’ll follow it anywhere — could still make a righteous stand at the megaplex. Holding it all together was Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc, the film’s Southern-gentleman re-imagining of a Hercule Poirot/Sherlock Holmes sleuth, whose wryly deceptive genius made him, for some of us, more super than any superhero.