Movie battle… Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
You wait six years for one Ross v Ross blog post to come along, then two turn up in a matter of weeks.
That’s what we at RvR Towers call prolific.
You have to go all the way back to 2011 to find the last time Rosses McD and McG had a proper online cinema scrap, when the latter successfully argued against the former that Dirty Dancing kicks Footloose’s Bacon-shaped behind.
Well, from a rasher of Bacon to a slice of onion, one made out of glass. That’s right, Rian Johnson’s hugely divisive Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is getting the movie battleground treatment.
Is it a work of genius, as Ross McD claims? Or is it the pile of muck that Ross McG declares?
Let battle commence…
Ross McD: FOR
“It’s a dangerous thing to mistake speaking without thought for speaking the truth, don’t you think?”
Ross v Ross has been dormant for a while.
Over the past decade, Ross Senior has been trying to coax me back into our infantile debates… but if truth be told, I just didn’t have the fight in me any more. I just don’t care about films as much. I am jaded.
I think Rise of Skywalker was perhaps the last straw for me. A film franchise I adored. A film franchise I have tattoos of. A final film I actually crashed my car rushing to Burbank to see the media preview screening of. My insurance premium went up… for that?
It’s been so long since I really enjoyed a movie. I mean, really enjoyed. And then I saw Glass Onion. Twice, within 24 hours actually.
I excitedly texted Ross McG. “Hey did u watch Glass Onion?”
“Yeah,” he replied. “It was shit.”
Sighs
Fine. I’ll take the bait.
Glass Onion is, in my opinion, the most enjoyable film of the past decade. People who claim not to like Glass Onion are doing so just to be contrarian.
“It’s stupid,” claims McG. “It’s predictable. It’s pretentious.”
I have some news that may come as a shock: It’s supposed to be stupid. It’s supposed to be predictable. It’s supposed to be pretentious. These are literally the whole point of the movie.
FFS, Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc even spells it out in the film’s conclusion (spoiler): the only reason the world’s greatest detective (Batman aside) was stumped, was because the plot was so f***ing stupid.
OMG! Ed Norton is the bad guy, and was just pretending to be nice?? You figured it out? Well done! He’s played that exact character in like 10 films.
An identical twin sister? The most hackneyed, weakest deus ex machina in the history of whodunnits? Yes.
Watch it again. All the clues are, as writer/director Rian Johnson promises, all right there to see. The first suspicion I had was the chess endgame puzzle, with all the pieces still on the board. “Wait that can’t be right?” I thought at the time. “How did none of the characters notice that?” No time to dwell on it. The film has moved on.
Turns out, no one noticed it because all the characters are stupid.
Glass Onion is a stupid film. A glorious, hilariously self-deprecating, sumptuously shot, superbly acted, cleverly concocted, outrageously fun, stupid film.
I’ll ask McG to name one better whodunnit. The real predictableness here will be McG’s answer of Clue.
How can you not appreciate the silliness of Glass Onion, yet revere Clue? Because you haven’t got one, that’s why.
Ross McG: AGAINST
“NO! It’s just dumb!”
Anyone catch a superb and atmospheric new murder mystery movie that dropped on Netflix over Christmas and New Year?
This whodunnit had a Hollywood A-lister bringing his A-game, a wonderful cast of supporting actors, eye-catching visuals, a director with a solid back catalogue, a script at times funny and frightening – but never boring – and a genuinely shocking twist.
Yeah, I flipping loved The Pale Blue Eye too.
Sadly, McD and Me aren’t here to talk about Scott Cooper’s little-heralded gem, where Christian Bale’s detective gets to grips with a real-life master of mystery, Edgar Allan Poe, brilliantly played by dastardly Dudley Dudsley himself, Harry Melling.
No, instead we’re stuck in a f***ing onion.
Has a film been less deserving of all the internet ink spilt about it? Not since The Last Jedi, anyway.
Hate or really hate Star Wars 8, you had to at least hand it to director Rian Johnson for trying something new with a franchise that rarely strays from its now tedious triumvirate of sandy planet/space chase/shiny stick fight.
But in Glass Onion, the follow-up to the rather enjoyable but now sullied Knives Out, Johnson doesn’t really try anything at all.
This is modern filmmaking at its laziest, filled with immediately outdated references (Face masks! Twitter storms! Jared Leto’s tea!), needless cameos (Yo-Yo Ma! Serena Williams!) and painful miscasting (Kathryn Hahn as a governor!).
That the script for this mess is nominated for an Oscar is almost as big a middle finger to cinema as the one Johnson aims at his audience.
Just because you spend your movie proclaiming how everyone in it is stupid, doesn’t mean your movie isn’t stupid too.
Movies with stupid characters can be amazing – Dumb & Dumber remains a masterpiece, for example – but a movie with stupid characters that are impossible to like, or care about, just ends up grating.
Johnson could have allayed this somewhat had he decided to put any mystery into his murder mystery, but even if you cared about who did it, finding out whodunnit just doesn’t quite do it, does it?
By spending its crazy long running time lecturing its audience on how glass-eyed they are, Glass Onion becomes a totally joyless experience, sucked of any sense of wonder so often conjured by even the most basic movies in this genre.
Ross McD got one thing right though: I would say Glass Onion is no Clue. Problem is, it’s not even Murder Mystery, yeah that’s right, the one with Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston, also dumped on Netflix.
Apart from the Frank TJ Mackey reference, I can’t think of one reason to recommend Glass Onion. Sorry Benoit, I’m drawing a complete… Blanc.
Ross v Ross 
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