Rian Johnson’s second Benoit Blanc mystery is bigger, sunnier and more elaborately built than the first, and Janelle Monáe gives it something to care about. It is also 140 minutes long, aims its satire at the easiest targets available, and explains its cleverness twice.
Rian Johnson has taken his detective out of the New England mansion and put him on a Greek island in high summer, and the result is broader, brighter and a good deal louder than Knives Out. Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) turns up, apparently uninvited, at a murder mystery weekend thrown by the tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) for the five old friends he calls his disruptors. It is an enjoyable film, cleverly built and beautifully dressed, and it has Janelle Monáe in it, which matters more than anything else about it. It is also long, pleased with itself, and pointed at people nobody in the audience will mind seeing hit. Worth an evening if you liked the first one; less of a surprise this time.
Steve Yedlin shoots the island in hard sun, all white stone and blue water, so that it looks like a brochure for somewhere you would not want to go. Rick Heinrichs gives Bron a house with a glass dome on top, a chime that sounds on the hour, and rooms full of art that nobody looks at, which tells you most of what the script spends two hours telling you about the man. Jenny Eagan’s costumes do a similar job for the guests. Kate Hudson’s Birdie Jay changes outfit for every entrance, and Craig is given a striped bathing costume and a neckerchief that made us laugh before he had said a word. Nathan Johnson’s score bustles underneath the talk and mostly stays out of its way.
Craig has loosened. He plays Blanc as a man slightly bored by puzzles, and the early scene in which he takes Bron’s carefully designed game apart in about a minute is played not as triumph but as mild embarrassment on the host’s behalf. Norton is good as Bron, a man who has bought the word genius and wears it a size too large, and who cannot get through a sentence without misusing something in it. Dave Bautista’s Duke Cody carries a pistol and a grudge, Kathryn Hahn’s Claire Debella carries a campaign, and Leslie Odom Jr.’s Lionel Toussaint carries the scientific credibility Bron borrows and never returns. Each of them is given one trait and asked to keep hitting it. Hudson hits hers hardest and gets the most laughs.
Monáe is the reason the film is more than a very expensive parlour game. Andi Brand is the one person on the island Bron has actually wronged, and Monáe plays her as someone who has decided to say almost nothing and see what the others do with the silence. In the first hour we found we were watching her rather than the people talking, which is what the film wants and what only she achieves. When the script finally lets her loose, later, she is the only actor on screen whose anger does not sound written.
The structure is the boldest thing here and the most tiring. Around the halfway mark the film stops and starts again from a different place, and we will say no more than that. It is a clever piece of construction, and it means that the same 140 minutes contain a good many scenes twice. Bob Ducsay’s editing is sharp on the jokes, cutting away on the beat before the laugh has landed, but he cannot make the second pass feel as quick as the first. The satire has a similar problem. Bron and his friends are rich, stupid and for sale; Johnson establishes this in the first ten minutes and then keeps establishing it. We felt agreed with rather than provoked, and by the last half hour we were checking how much longer the agreement would go on.
Set against Johnson’s own films, this is the most relaxed and the least pointed. Brick and Looper had ideas that cost him something; the first Blanc film had a family, a house and a quiet nurse at its centre, and its jokes about the rich were about a particular kind of rich. Here the target is a brand rather than a person, and the film treats hitting it as a public service. Most critics have enjoyed it a little more than we did, and we understand why; it is hard to dislike something this sunny.
Watch it in company, with people who will shout their guesses and be wrong. Alone, the second hour is long and the explanation longer. Craig’s bathing costume is a reason on its own, though not, at 140 minutes, quite reason enough.
