I don’t know where the Rian Johnson went who directed Brick (2005) and Looper (2012), but I don’t recognize the Rian Johnson who directed Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi (2017) and Knives Out (2019)

By my reckoning the latter movies don’t respect either Star Wars or the works of Agatha Christie, which really irks me.

And I didn’t expect anything different from Glass Onion, a movie that revolves around Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), the detective from Knives Out, solving a new mystery.

Which is why I’m surprised as anyone else that I really enjoyed it, perhaps because Rian Johnson treats it differently than he did Knives Out, which was taken quite seriously.

And when Johnson tries to out-Christie Agatha Christie, a fight not worth engaging in because it’s unwinnable, Glass Onion plays more like a comedy with political overtones.

Rian Johnson as a writer is not exactly subtle, and Edward Norton’s Miles Bron is a toxic mixture of Mark Zuckerberg (his rise to power as well as Alpha, which is essentially Facebook) and Elon Musk (because Bron is also fairly stupid as well as crazy rich), just as Duke Cody (Dave Bautista) is essentially every male Youtube influencer, though he strikes me as very Andrew Tate-adjacent.

Benoit Blanc (Craig) manages to receive an invitation to a murder mystery party by Miles Bron (Norton), where eventually there’ll be a very real murder – in the context of the movie – to investigate.

Though the mystery isn’t particularly difficult – the person who isn’t physically threatened? That’s the murderer – though the mystery isn’t the point, it’s the dynamics between the characters and the way they interact with each other.

And I really enjoyed it.

Am I still leery of Rian Johnson projects?

Yep, though I’m curious enough about the next adventure of Benoit Blanc that I’m willing to take another chance.