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Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), a sleuth conventional wisdom agrees is the world’s greatest detective, has perhaps never been antsier to solve a case in his life. Glass Onion, the new sequel to Rian Johnson’s excellent whodunit comedy Knives Out (2019), begins in May 2020, and reacquaints us with Blanc while he’s stuck, as many of us were then, in a kind of purgatory. He no longer can go on his usual detective jaunts owing to COVID restrictions; especially relatably, he’s become so sick of game nights over Zoom that even virtual opponents like Angela Lansbury, Natasha Lyonne, Stephen Sondheim, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar can’t do much to restore even a milligram of the old thrills his now-jeopardized day job once gave him.

As if the universe were granting wishes, a potential case plops into Blanc’s lap around the same time he’s bemoaning his dry spell. A tech billionaire of the Elon Musk variety, Miles Bron (Edward Norton), has invited his inner circle onto a private Greek island for a getaway. It includes a scientist (Leslie Odom, Jr.) growing fed up with Bron’s increasingly far-out demands; a Connecticut governor (an underused Kathryn Hahn) now campaigning for a Democratic senate position; a fashion designer (Kate Hudson) in hot water after “accidentally” tweeting a slur and comparing herself to Harriet Tubman in an interview; a successful men’s rights activist-slash-Twitch streamer (Dave Bautista) recovering from a scandal (he was shilling bad sex supplements); and a bitter former flame (Janelle Monáe) who very likely is responsible for most the ideas on which Bron has built his name. This posse been tasked with “solving” Bron’s murder in a tongue-in-cheek whodunit game. Blanc gets the same ornate invitation everyone else does. But when he arrives at Bron’s impressively garish compound, the host is dumbfounded. He definitely didn’t — and wouldn’t — include someone like Blanc on his elite guestlist.

Read the full column on 425.