My knowledge of Foghorn Leghorn is somewhat limited. While I’m aware that he’s a cartoon character with a distinct southern American accent, my main references derive from my father’s finely sharpened impressions, usually a mix of ‘I say I say boy’ and ‘Put a bit of pepper on it, son’. But the accent took on a persona of its own when Daniel Craig shed the suit of Bond in favour of the charismatic Benoit Blanc. It was accent that waxed lyrical about the mysteries of donut holes and their inception-like complexities.
While those donut holes don’t get a mention in Rian Johnson’s stylish sequel, we do get to hear about the multiple layers of onions, courtesy of the main glass building where the mysteries play out. And while the Benoit Blanc we met in the first Knives Out was a relative fish out of water, announcing his presence with a single dramatic piano note, the Blanc we meet here has the whole music sheet laid out in front of him. Puzzles are at the forefront pf the play from the film’s opening sequence, and the dapper detective is an adept player. Maybe not at Among Us, though. But I can sympathise with that. I wasn’t a particularly elusive imposter either. Set in the lockdown slump of 2020, it was pretty odd hearing Blanc reference Among Us, Quiplash and Codenames, all games I played with my chums during the same period. No, I didn’t play them in a bath wearing an eccentric hat with a rubber duck in range as Blanc did, but I played them nonetheless.
After receiving and completing a mysterious puzzle, Blanc is invited to the exotic island residence of billionaire Miles Bron, where a murder mystery game is interrupted by a real-life murder, forcing Blanc to find the killer. Like the original, Glass Onion is a fun, colourful and playful journey filled with mystery and light comedy, and the cast is perhaps even starrier than the previous offering. While you don’t exactly need to be Sherlock Holmes – or Benoit Blanc – to work out the identity of the killer, it’s still fun looking at all the suspects, even though we don’t have the same novelty of actors playing against type. We no longer have Chris Evans (America’s ass) playing against type as Ransom Drysdale (America’s asshole), or Michael Shannon (angry powerful Zod) challenging expectations as Walt Thrombey (weak diminutive Zod). But we do have welcome exaggerated performances from Dave Bautista (essentially Drax with toxic social media accounts) and Kathryn Hahn (Agatha on a sugar rush).
And it’s the exaggeration that’s one of Glass Onion’s highlights. It wears its Agatha Christie tropes on its sleeves while playing with amusing repeated dialogue – instead of peppering Blanc’s lexicon with ‘donut hole’, we are instead introduced to his delightfully pronounced ‘buttress’, turning a relatively innocent word into some strangely intriguing form of innuendo. Craig is on fine form as always, and, with a Blancverse in the works from Netflix, we can look forward to many eccentric ventures to come, perhaps threatening to overturn Craig’s legacy as the straightlaced British spy. The name’s Blanc. Benoit Blanc.