In 2019, Netflix’s whodunit hit Knives Out blew critics and audiences away with its fresh spin on a classic genre. Now, its sequel Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is doing the same. Due to the immense popularity and critical acclaim of the first film, audiences are naturally drawing comparisons between it and its sequel, and as such are pointing at which of the two they believe is the better of the pair.
Once again tasked with finding the culprit behind a mysterious murder, Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) travels to a remote island where he and several others have been invited to partake in a murder mystery game orchestrated by tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton). When someone on the island is suddenly killed, the backstories of these so-called friends are peeled back one by one until we discover that things aren’t as they seem, and iron-clad alliances not only put these friends’ lives at risk but the entire world.
The movie, which was once again written and directed by Rian Johnson, saw a limited theatrical release in November where it scored both critical and audience acclaim. That being said, it was pulled from theaters shortly thereafter and released on the streaming platform this past weekend to all of its subscribers.
Both Knives Out and Glass Onion have faired exceedingly well among critics and fans, but according to the response from audiences, there is a clear winner between the two.
One Twitter user had complaints over the sequel’s political nature, which indeed is backdropped by the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, the characters in this installment drastically differed from that of the first film, sporting “caricatures of e-celebs,” according to this Twitter user, referring to people who have become famous over the internet.
For others, the only real complaint was that Glass Onion was missing the main element that made Knives Out so great: Ana De Armas.
Aside from characters and politics, one Twitter user believed Knives Out simply told a better story, one in which Benoit Blanc investigates the murder of a wealthy family’s patriarch, mystery novelist Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), his dysfunctional family, and his medical nurse, Marta Cabrera (Ana De Armas).
One Twitter user accused Glass Onion of being predictable, and while it’s true the film’s murder element is a bit predictable, it leans into that in such a way that makes it feel both humorous and fresh, so much so that its predictability becomes a sort of sleight of hand.
Nevertheless, Glass Onion can hardly be described as a miss or a flop, as one Twitter user gave it just one number less than the original movie in their score out of ten.
Both films received a certified fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes with the first landing a whopping 97 percent critic score and the second a 93 percent. Glass Onion’s audience score is just one percent higher than Knives out with 93 percent to Knives Out’s 92 percent.
At the end of the day, both Knives Out and its sequel have succeeded in reviving the whodunit genre to such an extent that it has birthed an entirely new franchise that has no intention of stopping with Glass Onion.
To decide for yourself whether Knives Out or Glass Onion is a better murder mystery movie, Glass Onion is currently available to stream on Netflix, and Knives Out can be rented on Amazon Prime.