New battlehorse made in Netflix, from now franchise « With knives drawn », Glass Onion came out on the American platform and collected rather praiseful reviews from its audience. Your servant, who had managed to avoid the first, decided to rub it. Mal took it from him.
Reason: Overflow franchising
Known for several prominent films (Looper, but also the 8th part of the saga Star Wars and quite a lot of serial episodes of which Breaking Bad), USA Rian Johnson offers a career in half-tone but generally appreciated by the public. And this is not the commercial and critical success of With knives drawn in 2019 that will challenge it. On the contrary! Besides, Netflix knows how to quickly place his balls by having him sign a contract for two films, appearing each time Daniel Craig in the role of investigator Benoît Blanc. In two steps three movements, With knives drawn becomes a franchise whose famous Glass Onion is the second opus. What is it?
Suspect: Agatha Christie 2.0
Because that's what this is about: an investigation by Hercule Poirot at the time of the influencers and the soft Cresus of the bulb. Investigator Benoît Blanc (Daniel CraigIn this way, one billionaire (Edward Norton) brings together his gang of buddies named the « Disruptors ». Island on which obviously a giant Cluedo will unfold, since each of the guests seems to have a good reason to want the skin of their supposed friend. How will Rian Johnson play with this chessboard of characters more annoying than each other? Answer below.
Crime weapon: Scenic snorkelling
Unfortunately, the comparison with Christie stops here. The scissors of the intrigue of Dantan give way to a huge screenplay, leading a crazy casting that seems to be gathered only to serve as a man-sandwich to the ton of product placements marking the feature film. A taskman's role, which apparently does Daniel Craig and his painful cabotinage, but also the director who deliberately looses the reins: assemblage with the vave of clichés, Tchekhov's rifles with the shovel, ultra-anticipated climax and absolutely messy point-of-view changes.
Typically, Johnson who proposes us to decorate one-by-one the different layers of this onion of glass will find a way to make us a twist in the middle of a feature film that I will not spoil the surprise, but which you will easily remember if you have already seen Glass Onion. This reversal is supposed to bring us a new angle in the apprehension of the plot, like the recent one. The Last Duel of the Ridley Scott or older of Rashōmon. But it's nothing! If he makes up his process as the addition of new clues thanks to this new point of view, he is content in fact to reveal more at length scenes that he had already shown us.
Worse still, in his tripotée of Chekhov's rifles he throws out some very crude clues about the progress of the plot. The only way he can not make them too easily assimilated by the spectator is to drown them in a constant flood of dilapidated debilities, drained by his band of millionaire slash influencers in a grey matter breakdown. Unfortunately, this indigence of writing is not caught up in the aesthetics of the film, which tends to a pure visual aberration. Because yes, if there's one thing that can't save the feature film, it's his image!
Crime Mobile : Retina Ray
The film is a formal ugliness unspeakable. Whether it's CGI (constantly missed, Banksy pontoon to final flames, it's a horror) or lighting company that seems to have permanently deserted the plateau to offer a month's vacation in Mykonos, Glass Onion is abject visually. False-not in the career of director of photography of Steve Yedlin ? Let's call it that. He was already behind a lot of Rian Johnson projects, but also responsible for the very medium Carrie, revenge (2013) of Kimberly Peirce. Remake kingien of which Glass Onion makes an obvious wink in one of its final scenes...
Mitigating circumstances?
If I shoot red balls on Glass Onion, it would be dishonest of me not to recognize the effectiveness of certain sequences (the valve containing the Mona Lisa, in particular) and some projections of humor that will have me out of the slow lethargy in which I plunged the two hours twenty of the feature film. A very meagre extenuating circumstance for a film so big and badly tied, which manages to fail almost everything that it does until it becomes embarrassing. In short, a low ceiling Netflix output, a whodunit who doesn't reinvent anything and, worse, doesn't even make the spectator want to find the culprit.
In short, it does not take more to accuse director Johnson of being guilty of the death of whodunit, in the Netflix Manor using his big camera. End of game!
With its small onion casting and stimulating staging, this part of Cluedo among the rich simmers to shun the codes of the whodunit, break the contemporary artifice and unmasking the elites. Jubilatory!
[...] too long, served by a leading duo (Edward Norton / Daniel Craig) overtly captivating, Glass Onion simmers in almost two hours thirty without ever raising the level, nor by its [...]