The clearest message viewed through this Glass Onion is that super rich people are just as likely to be morons as anyone else you'll meet - the problem is that when they fuck up, the rest of us are the ones who pay for it. Privatizing reward, socializing risk. It's the same song left on repeat with the volume constantly rising over the past forty years. We're at the point where the owners of capital are happy to foot the substantial bill for a blockbuster critique of their own monstrosities because there's absolutely nothing anyone can or will do about it in a culture that has all but forgotten collective action. In a blunt, silly, yet kind of elegant way, this movie creates a simple narrative diagram to explain why the biggest criminals of all are virtually never taken down. Everyone here has a stake in their wealthy host's illusion of success. His blunder will become a fatal millstone around all their necks if anyone speaks up. Nobody in a position to affect change wants to bite the hand that feeds them. Nobody wants to risk their own modest piece of the pie in the kind of economic upheaval that might actually make a meaningful, permanent, structural difference. And those with nothing to lose - we don't even see them here. They're not invited, not part of the story at all. They're us. And even more than the celebrities and the star singers and the rich-but-not-private-island-rich, we pay that price when the ones at the top blunder into another hubris-fueled disaster.

The movie was really fun and clever even if it didn't have the total clockwork precision of Knives Out, a movie I've now watched four times because I just like it that much (and it's great for sharing with friends and family). I'll probably do a more real-review thing next time I watch this.. which reminds me that I hope to hell netflix actually releases this on disc. It really sucks when these platforms leave their exclusives stranded in one place that may or may not exist in a decade.