There is no more divisive director of the last decade than Rian Johnson.
Depending on your point of view on his efforts in a certain space-related franchise, Johnson is either the king of modern mainstream movie-making, or the man who ruined your childhood, cinema, fandom, discourse, and forced you to head-canon an entirely different result (we’ve all done it – I, for instance, have never heard of an Alien 3). All of which means I had to cover him next in this series. Except The Last Jedi will not feature as the best or worst of Johnson’s movies because I still, after all of these years, find it resting some place in the middle.
Best: Brick
This was a close one, as I believe that both Brick and Looper are Johnson’s best movies by far, so I flipped a coin in my head and today it came up Brick. Picking a director’s first movie as their best can feel like a bit of a dig – because it is. As much as I am a fan of Johnson, I think the best that he has managed post his 2005 teen noir thriller is to meet it rather than better it. Like Blood Simple for the Coens brothers, or Following for Christopher Nolan, Brick has the embryonic-stage building blocks that would feature in all of his future work: a big cast of characters played by character actors with hints of star power, labyrinthian plots, an obsession with genre tropes and how to twist them, and an overall balance of the world that he has created.
Johnson, until his worst movie, has put his unique spin on a few different genres to mostly brilliant results: his follow-up to Brick is the criminally underseen heist movie (an oversimplified descriptor) Looper, and a Star Wars movie that, if nothing else, couldn’t have been made by anyone else.
Brick is the genesis of all of this: a hard-boiled teen pot boiler (IT’S BOILING) that positions the ever charismatic Joseph Gordon Levitt as a teen sleuth trying to solve the murder of his ex-girlfriend. Less teen drama, it’s more like Dashiell Hamnett’s great novel Red Harvest- from which Brick lifts its structure nearly wholesale. It’s a lean, mean movie that makes Riverdale look like, well, Archie comics, and it was the announcement of an exciting new directorial voice. So, what has he been up to lately?
Worst: Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Let’s be clear, if Glass Onion was the worst movie in my career I would be sleeping just fine at night. The sequel to the surprise hit Knives Out, starring Daniel Craig and anyone that wants to work with Daniel Craig, Glass Onion suffers form a malady that has affected many sequels to surprise hits in the last decade. The novelty has worn off. Not for everyone, in fact, as I’m writing this the biggest stars of IMDB’s top one hundred who don’t have a scheduling conflict are currently signing up for a third adventure with Benoit Blanc.
Glass Onion is in the same boat as Shazam Fury of the Gods, Aquaman 2, The Marvels, Deadpool 2, and Zack Snyder in general: it’s very hard to recapture the alchemy that excited audiences when they are already familliar with the product. This is something Johnson has avoided up to now because he has never made a direct sequel to one of his own movies. It’s easy to scrape away the window dressing of an exotic locale, another super cast, and a bunch of weird cameos, to find the same plot as Knives Out. The person with the smallest bank balance wins and the asshole with the biggest was the killer all along. Johnson’s world-building, something that he is excellent at, is undermined, as it is used to plug gaps in the movie rather than simply add to it. How am I supposed to take Johnson’s viewpoint of “rich bad” when this Netflix movie has no fewer than twelve incidental cameos by people that are mostly richer than him? It’s all a bit much, which was bound to happen to a director that is used to rolling into the next genre after putting his stamp in the previous one.
Knives Out may have saved Johnson’s credibility as a director (making a billion-dollar, critically acclaimed sequel nearly ruined it, somehow) but it has backed him into a creative corner for the first time in his career. I find myself with the same reaction I had when it was announced he was making a Star Wars movie: but that’s going to stop him from making his own little gems! If you or Johnson disagree, well – you know where I eat lunch.
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By Kevin Boyle
(header image via Netflix)
No But Listen 