Rian Johnson's Glass Onion is a very, very good title for this film, because it captures basically what this movie is: shiny and nice to look at, but hollow when you look too deeply into it.

On the surface, Glass Onion has good performances, excellent set design, costumes, cinematography, and slick editing. It's a well shot and executed film, that fools you into thinking there's more to it. We should've known from Daniel Craig's horrible accent that this movie isn't all it seems.

Glass Onion fails at being a murder mystery, plain and simple. The "murder mystery" is barely a part of it. It's exceedingly obvious who committed the murder and why, it throws a wrench into the story and "subverts" tropes associated with the genre...by embracing even sillier tropes. I'm sorry, I do not accept "identical twin" playing their sibling stories anymore, and especially when we're encouraged to have our minds blown by what is LITERALLY a soap opera trope.

A good murder mystery has an eclectic, interesting cast of characters with differing motivations as to why they'd commit a murder. You learn more about each of them as the movie goes on and the audience can reasonably surmise who they think the murderer is by the information presented.

A bad murder mystery has one note characters who all have the same motivation, yet none of whom possess the skill, intelligence, or drive to actually carry out the murder, so it's obvious who did it. A bad murder mystery doesn't present information properly, relies on conveniences and retconning to trick the audience, and pats itself on the back.

Whereas it was fun in Knives Out, in Glass Onion, it's taken to a hilarious extreme. Johnson literally replays scenes but adds a different character in, so there is NO WAY you could've seen the "plot twist" coming. It's just extremely lazy writing.

And for what? For a rich Hollywood power broker to wax poetic about his hatred of billionaires? To act like every billionaire is the product of other (of course, "oppressed") people's work and to label everyone around them as talentless hacks? I guess that's fine, but is that such a profound message that you had to contort a murder mystery around it?

I'm reminded of Bodies Bodies Bodies when I watched this movie, an inventive, fun, and genuinely well written murder mystery that only gets BETTER every time you watch it. While a lot of people liked Glass Onion upon release, it's telling that very few are even still talking about it.