By Tony Medley
144 Minutes.
PG-13
The first of this series, written and directed by Rian Johnson, in 2019 was a hands-down winner, a snappy comedic murder mystery with a standout performance by Daniel Craig. The second, Glass Onion (2022) was a great disappointment, so I saw this with trepidation in my heart.
To my great delight, this one is a lot better than average. It’s a satire of organized religion with similarity to The Resurrection of Christ.
Josh O’Connor plays Fr. Jud Duplenticy (yes, you got that right), a former boxer turned Catholic priest who is reassigned to a small, struggling parish called Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude (there is no such Lady in Christian theology, again a spoof of organized religion), led by charismatic Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). Benoit makes no bones about his agnosticism; in fact, it’s pretty clear he just doesn’t believe.
Fr. Jud is being penalized because he cold-cocked a deacon that ticked him off (Fr. Jud is a former boxer who killed a man in the ring and became a priest out of guilt). Msgr. Wicks apparently has his small entourage (played by people like Glen Close and Mila Kunis) wrapped around his fingers. However, appearances, as they say, can be deceiving; there’s a lot here that is more than meets the eye.
Alas, during a Good Friday service, Wicks leaves the pulpit to go to a small room next to the altar. When he doesn’t come back, Fr. Jud goes into the room and finds him stabbed to death. Because of circumstances, Fr. Jud is the prime suspect.
The local police chief calls in famed detective Benoit Blanc (Craig), who believes Jud is innocent and enlists him as an informal partner. The plot is based on the locked room murder genre and has delightful twists and turns.The acting is very good, but the one that stands out is Brolin as the fire-and-brimstone pastor. It’s not as comedic as the first in the series, but it holds out during the well over two-hour runtime.
Tony Medley is an attorney, columnist, and MPAA-accredited film critic whose reviews and articles may be read in several newspapers and at rottentomatoes.com, CWEB.com, robinhoodnews.com, Movie Review Query Engine (mrqe.com), and at www.tonymedley.com. A former sports editor of the UCLA Daily Bruin, he is the author of four books, UCLA Basketball:The Real Story, Sweaty Palms: The Neglected Art of Being Interviewed, the first book ever written on the interview for the interviewee, having sold over a half million copies, and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Bridge, which has sold over 100,000 copies, and Learn to Play Bridge Like a Boss. He is an American Contract Bridge League RubyLife Master and an ACBL accredited director. He is a Mensa Life Member and a member of the International Society of Philosophic Research, ISPE (“The Thousand”).
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