It beggars belief that what started out as an idle thought — to continue the adventures of detective Benoit Blanc, the world’s “greatest detective” — has resulted not in just the inevitable franchise placeholder but one of the most exciting, funny and downright enjoyable movies of the year.
Shrewdly cast, it boasts one of the most brilliant screenplays of the year, not just in terms of its exquisite, laugh-out-loud dialogue and satirical barbs at pop culture but in the meticulous, meta plotting of a traditional whodunnit that keeps the mind ticking over from start to finish.
Unusually for a recent Netflix presentation, hardly a minute is wasted, and it’s no surprise that a Christmas release is planned for an intelligent crowd-pleaser that hits a bullseye with every beat.Toronto Film Festival: Deadline’s Complete CoverageDirector Rian Johnson was quite open about the original Knives Out‘s influences, and the immediate premise of this sequel — a bunch of friends are summoned to a remote Greek island by an old acquaintance — suggests an homage to the 1973 ocean-bound crime thriller The Last of Sheila, the unlikely and somewhat psychedelic brainchild of scriptwriters Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins.
Glass Onion, however, is simply teasing that reference; after it sets sail, it very much becomes its own beast, setting a frenetic kinetic pace that never lets up.
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