Criticism of ‘Daggers in the Back: The Mystery of the Glass Onion’, Benoit Blanc returns

Forty years ago, the director, Guy Hamilton, who faced 007 with a more than billionaire villain in ‘James Bond against Goldfinger’ (1964), took Hercule Poirot to a Mallorca (actually Greece) full of millionaires, movie stars and the rest socialites in a crime mystery not exempt from comedy such as ‘Death under the sun’ (1982). In Agatha Christie’s literary original ‘Evil under the sun’, she had in the script Anthony Schaffer, the author of the play that gave rise to another case of murder/class warfare, in this case the brilliant ‘La huella’ (Joseph L. Mankiewicz). Evil and sun, and now Greece, are the axis of ‘Daggers in the back: The mystery of Glass Onion’, also delightfully comical in its skinning of the rich and famous of this millennium: magnates of new technologies, models, youtubers, influencers and a etcetera that will meet, as the Agatha Christie canons dictate, but also of Schaffer, to be the reflection of an absolutely vulgar and cretinous elite. On the contrary, nothing is vulgar in the film by Rian Johnson, a director who jumped from ‘Star Wars’ with the most claimable title (along with ‘Rogue One’) of the film franchise in recent years to convert the last James Bond ( Daniel Craig) in a southern Hercules Poirot, a kind of equally literary Aloysius Pendergast created by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child with no supernatural insight, but a tendency towards slapstick (the scene with the statue) and to be the inspector Clouseau who would have fraternized (despite the Franco-Belgian clash) with Poirot.

Benoit Blanc (Craig as Dashiell Hammett’s Nick Charles with Buster Keaton’s tics) returns again, after ‘Knives in the Back,’ in a mystery that smiles at the impossible script twists, an outcome “by the face” and each one of the puzzle pieces of art deco eccentricity that Rian Johnson unfolds before his media private investigator, his murder suspects and us the viewers. Pieces as devilish and funny as, in the end, an excuse to go tearing off layers of this glass onion, so beautiful, posh, valuable and ultimately fragile as the background of its masters of the 21st century universe to whom they lend a great comic look. self-parody (Edward Norton: who among his Hollywood peers wouldn’t have fantasized about assassinating him?) a host of performers perfectly assembled on the game board and where it would be impossible to single out just one of them. ‘Daggers in the Back: The Glass Onion Mystery’ enhances humor, both physical and verbal (those replicas and dialogues worthy of golden Hollywood, golden like Shirley Eaton from ‘Goldfinger’ or the tanned corpses from ‘Death under the sol’) like acid to play with the clichés of the genre with elegance and the right point bitchy from a song by Cole Porter (the axis of the aforementioned ‘Death under the sun’). He cites another mythical composer, the late Stephen Sondheim, and not only keeping him in mind, as his muse in the musical and muse of the whodunit, as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, as the madwoman in ‘Death on the Nile’, but also from Christie or like Jessica Fletcher, Angela Lansbury, but with the construction of the plot following the evil Cluedo (on Hollywood) that Sondheim and Anthony Perkins created for ‘Sheila’s End’ (Herbert Ross, 1973).

For classy crime mystery addicts who can’t stand Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot

​

DATA SHEET

Address: rian johnson Distribution: Daniel Craig, Edward Norton, Janelle Monáe, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom Jr., Jessica Henwick, Madelyn Cline, Dave Bautista, Kate Hudson, Ethan Hawke Country: USA Year: 2022 Release date: 23–11-2022 Gender: intrigue, comedy Script: rian johnson Duration: 139 min.

Synopsis: When billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) invites a few of his close associates on a getaway to his private Greek island, it soon becomes clear that all is not perfect in paradise. And when someone turns up dead, who better than Benoit Blanc to unravel all the layers of the mystery?