Ambrose & Elsewhere

A kind of review, I guess.

Executive summary: a fun satire of techbro billionaires and their self-built cults, set inside a movie about mystery stories and puzzles. It’s maybe half an hour too long, like practically every movie made nowadays. Some mild spoilers may follow. Let’s inbrethiate this moment fully, and then plunge in.

As a mystery, this is not very challenging. If you ask yourself at the beginning Cui bono? (“Who benefits?”), it’s fairly clear to see Who Is Behind It All. It’s less interesting as a whodunnit than as a howcatchem, like a Columbo episode. (Kids, ask your grandparents who Columbo is. Don’t Google it, or your timelines will fill up with ads for adult diapers.) There are a couple of twists and turns along the way that surprised me, even if the destination didn’t. The gifted cast digs their teeth into the scenery and each other, having a great time, and that’s fun to watch. Everyone is pretty great, particularly Kathryn Hahn, who always is, and Janelle Monae, who is stellar in doing something I can’t talk about without spoilers. I have to admit Daniel Craig’s chicken-fried accent is growing on me, and he was a genial and wily presence throughout. Ed Norton’s befuddled, store-bought, not-quite-brilliance was entertaining, too.

Much is made in this movie of puzzles and people who like them. It’s deliberately reminiscent of The Last of Sheila: Sondheim himself (screenwriter of Sheila) is seen briefly onscreen in a Zoom call, for instance, and in both movies the setup involves a rich narcissist who invites a clutch of his guilty frenemies to an isolated location so that he can torment them with a mystery game. It also reminded me a lot of Sleuth (1972), a performance about performers, gamesters, and tricksters, with most of the parts being played by Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine, not to mention some some able assistance in smaller parts by screen veterans like Alec Cawthorne, Eve Channing, and Teddy Martin.

That’s good for Glass Onion, because those are very good movies to be compared to. But it’s also bad, because they’re better movies than Glass Onion.

Not that Glass Onion is bad. I know that Ben Shapiro thinks so, and if you take his opinion seriously you’re unlike to take mine seriously. But let’s start with his objections:

Misdirection in a mystery story? How very, very shocking. Is that really allowed? Please fetch Mr. Shapiro’s smelling salts. But let’s continue while he’s overcome and hope that he’ll be able to catch up. You know—someday.

Having quoted the Shapiro’s tweets, I suppose it’s not too much to say that the plot of the movie doubles back on itself a couple of times and that we have occasion to realize that things we actually saw with our own eyes didn’t happen quite as we understood them. That’s as much as I want to say about the plot.

The script has some really funny bits in it, like the malapropisms that accumulate in Norton’s lines until Craig’s character brutally calls them out in what seems to be (but is not) the climactic scene of the movie. The situations are kind of funny, too, as when the preening, gun-wielding advocate of “mandom” turns out to be a cuckold, and when the strained, smilingly inept character played by Kate Hudson manages to stick her foot in her mouth and bite it off (not literally). It’s a witty script with some cartoonishly broad performances, but there are also moments where characters reveal hidden sides, like this one thing I can’t talk about, and another thing I can’t talk about, and Madelyne Cline’s character Whiskey, who proves to be more thoughtful than the arm-candy she seemed to be at first. Then there’s this guy who walks on and off screen, like the roommate of Thakkarzorg, Tyrant of Dimension 14-B. I could go on.

Unlike its forbears, this is not a great mystery. But it is a well-written and cunningly plotted comedy with a translucent core of explosive satire. I could recommend it whole-heartedly, if it weren’t too long.