The premise of Glass Onion is that a group of friends are invited to a private island to solve a murder-mystery game created by Edward Norton’s character, billionaire Miles Bron, where Detective Benoit Blanc also shows up. The hook, though, is that all of Miles’ friends have reasons to kill him, which sets up the story. Benoic Blanc, on the other hand, wasn’t originally invited, much to the surprise of Miles and everyone else on the island.

Without wasting time, I’m just going to come out and say that I have no idea what other people see in this movie, which, maybe I’m on an island with (no pun intended), who knows. When the film originally came out, even though I was a big fan of the first Knives Out at the time, I had no interest in watching this movie solely because I didn’t find the premise, trailers, or any of the marketing to be all that interesting. After having finally watched it in preparation for Wake Up Dead Man, I still don’t find this movie interesting.

First off, I thought the pacing was really weak. It takes way too long to get to the island, and when the characters finally do arrive on the island, not much happens for the vast majority of the runtime. A lot of time is spent revealing what Miles has been up to, and I found none of it to be intriguing or super needed for the story. It also takes an even longer and, frankly in my opinion, ridiculous amount of time before anything big actually happens. Adding onto what I just said about the stuff with Miles not being needed for the story, well, there is a lot of that. Glass Onion is way too overcomplicated in my opinion, and while it’s easy enough to follow along, it’s really difficult to latch onto any of the material within the story because of how much there is to it. I really missed the much simpler and focused plot of Knives Out.

The writing was perhaps the biggest thing that I found to be extremely weak here. There is an abundance of plot conveniences, which, sure, kind of have to happen for a mystery movie to work, but the ones here are a bit on the ridiculous side. I’m also not sure what was going on in the writing department when it comes to how the whole story was sort of outlined. The film artificially creates surprises by revealing key details simply whenever it wants to, instead of, and I’ll say it again, like in Knives Out, when it felt a lot more natural to the story. For a very unspecific example, there is a big scene that happens that is sort of a turning point in the story, where, in order to surprise the viewer later on, it literally just plays back the scene again with dialogue that was cut from the original scene.

Glass Onion also commits one of the biggest offenses in storytelling by being way too much tell over show at times. There is a strangely high amount of exposition thrown in there throughout the movie, and it’s another part of the film that was very overdone and overcomplicated. Benoit Blanc, in particular, has some monologues that were honestly just ridiculous.

I’m getting towards the end of the review, trust me, but one of the last things I’ll talk about is the characters. The reason I decided to talk about the characters so late is that quite literally only three of them felt prominent to the story, with Benoit Blanc being one of the obvious ones. I won’t mention the other two’s names just because I don’t want to give away the murder mystery side of the story. Even though none of the other characters felt very prominent throughout the story, they still made an impact on my viewing experience, one that was entirely negative. Knives Out had over-the-top and obnoxious side characters, but they were more intentional than that, as the entire crew of them was antagonistic towards the main character from the beginning. Glass Onion’s main group of characters, on the other hand, aren’t as obviously antagonistic, but more obnoxious, like Rian Johnson decided to dial them up to eleven. I found all of them with the exception of the three I already mentioned, to be almost unbearable.

The final thing I’ll talk about is the ending, which, to say the very least, was absolutely ridiculous. None of the eventual answers was even nearly as satisfying as they were in the first movie, and they were all very contrived and made no sense. I was already very bored with the movie before the third act and ending, but the ending honestly decided to ruin the film even more for me.

I get I’m probably very alone in this opinion, and you might look at my rating and completely discredit me as a movie critic (an unofficial one, but hey, it still counts), but this rating honestly reflected my experience with the entire movie. I was not only bored but also extremely frustrated throughout the entire thing, and I tried to find something positive to say about it, but honestly couldn’t think of literally anything. I hope that Wake Up Dead Man is more akin to how good the first Knives Out was, and I do have a little bit of hope in it, as it seems to return to a much darker and serious tone.