Daniel Craig in "Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery": The perfect film for the celebration

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Daniel Craig in »Glass Onion«: Freed from Bond at last

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John Wilson/Netflix

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could step back and have a good laugh at ourselves at the end of this busy year of depressing news and dogged debate?

About our thirst for recognition, our overplayed insecurities and all the strange blossoms that humanity produces in a society plagued and shaped by social media?

About the cocky doers as well as about the gullible brakemen?

The movie »Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery« is just a crime comedy, an entertainment spectacle.

But great art at the same time: a mirror, a seismograph, a feel-good bath for purifying emotions.

This is all the more surprising given that the film itself is so blatantly a commercial product: the sequel to the surprise cinema success »Knives Out«, the rights to which Netflix cost 450 million dollars in the fight for subscribers, with the production of a third part already included in the price .

Not a small auteur film, but a big zampano circus starring Daniel Craig in all his post-Bond glory.

But despite all the playfulness, it is so focused that the wildly entertaining genre variation becomes a great social satire.

The who-was-crime based on Agatha Christie is actually at the top of the list of the most stale film formulas, and that's why the premise of »Glass Onion« sounds just boring at first: tech billionaire charging up his best friends his own island of show-offs in Greece, so that together they lose themselves in a game of find-the-murderer.

The pop stars, YouTubers and scientists all have bones to settle with him, and of course it doesn't take long before the first real dead person is around.

That director Rian Johnson, who also wrote the screenplay - so an auteur filmmaker after all!

– turns this into a shower of sparks of intoxicatingly original comedy art, is the real miracle of this film.

At the height of the pandemic, wasn't it said that viewers certainly never wanted to see actors with masks in films and series?

Johnson, who wrote the script during the 2020 lockdown, made fun of the then new social skills of wearing a mask for fun right from the start.

Before the illustrious tour group left, a man with an incredibly ugly ponytail suddenly appeared, who waved a silver vaccination gun down the throat of the participants in turn and announced that all protective measures were now obsolete.

Outrageous, how much we wished for such a miracle vaccine two years ago!

Then the weird man is gone again, one briefly wonders if that was Ethan Hawke with a bad wig, but new developments are already demanding attention.

It's like this all the time, there's always little scenes to marvel at that burst with ingenuity and want to linger longer, but then the next one is just around the corner.

And yes, that was Ethan Hawke (Serena Williams and Hugh Grant also do wonderfully funny cameos).

It is best to say as little as possible about the details of the story anyway.

The concept may be from the day before yesterday, but the execution is not, and Johnson actually manages to incorporate unpredictable twists and turns in abundance.

To be more precise, the film basically starts all over again after the first third, only under a completely new premise.

But the fun is mainly due to the characters, each of which stands for an outgrowth of the present in their own way.

Apart from Daniel Craig's whimsical nose, Benoit Blanc, who stands for Daniel Craig alone.

The highly acclaimed vodka commercial, in which Craig recently showcased his dancing skills, was something of a precursor to this film.

The role of the dandy detective with the broadest Southern accent, the most outrageous retro wardrobe and the smartest mind can confidently be seen as exorcising the devil.

Craig's late Bond seemed imprisoned in his fractured, depressing macho masculinity.

With the tongue-in-cheek, ironic-elegant Benoit Blanc, who also strays in his sexual orientation, the audience can watch a world actor as he plays himself free with the greatest pleasure.

Also wonderful: Edward Norton as a tech billionaire, who doesn't pluck the Beatles classic "Blackbird" on any guitar when his friends arrive, but of course on Paul McCartney's original instrument.

And at dinner in the evening the Mona Lisa is presented, of course not a high-quality copy, but the original.

Yes, it's cheap how Johnson unseats this braggart and shows it as a simpleton with too much power, but hey, it's good and damn funny.

The fact that the real bigot Elon Musk ran amok in reality just in time for Netflix's launch shows that the gods are apparently with »Glass Onion«.

Maybe the tech billionaires are getting on their nerves too.