Two illustrative facts about the year in movies, 2022. Every movie in the box-office top ten was some kind of big-budget sequel or reboot. And not a single movie in the Oscar-bait slate, the prestige movies that dropped between October and the New Year, has managed to earn even $25 million at the box office, let alone become a major hit.

So what movies are audiences actually seeing in this prestige season? Next issue we can talk about the big one, James Cameron’s long-gestating Avatar sequel that’s hoovering up billions worldwide. But first let’s talk about a more curious case: Glass Onion, Rian Johnson’s sequel to his murder-mystery hit Knives Out. The new movie had an impressive theatrical debut in November, earning more in a weekend than, say, The Banshees of Inisherin or The Fabelmans has earned in its entire theatrical run. But then, being a Netflix property, it was yanked away and re-released at Christmastime on the streaming service, where it now sits at No. 1.

One of the key problems for the year’s prestige-season movies is that even the good ones don’t really try that hard to entertain, preferring to marinate in their own idiosyncrasy and difficulty. (Basically every would-be highbrow filmmaker currently working needs to be locked in a room with the Coen brothers’ oeuvre, to see how idiosyncrasy and actual entertainment can go hand in hand.)

That’s not a charge that you can level at Glass Onion. It’s escapist in the literal sense, sending its cast of characters off to a billionaire’s sun-kissed vacation island, where they flounce around in bikinis and silks, gobble the scenery in their every speech, and face the prospect of being knocked off by a killer.

Unfortunately, just aspiring to entertain is not enough: You also need a script that makes a lick of sense, characters with whom the audience can plausibly identify, and a murder plot that builds suspense steadily on its way to resolution. Glass Onion has none of these things, and at some level the movie knows it. Its big reveal, telegraphed by the title’s image of a layered-seeming object that’s actually transparent, is that its murderer is clumsy and obvious. But in a murder mystery, the plot’s the thing, and a clumsy killer is usually a tell that the writer is the clumsy one, pawning off his failures on his characters.

The original Knives Out was often described as a kind of Agatha Christie revival, with its heavily accented master detective (Daniel Craig’s southern-fried Benoit Blanc) dealing with a house full of suspects following the sudden death of a wealthy paterfamilias. But in reality it was more broadly satirical than Christie’s books, and more misanthropic. Her novels specialize in characters flawed enough to seem capable of murder but also sympathetic enough that you’re rooting for their innocence (or their survival). But the point of Knives Out was that all the suspects were terrible human beings save one, the saintly illegal-immigrant nurse who deserved to inherit the fortune that the (white, rich, bigoted) American family was so desperately squabbling over.

Glass Onion has a similar politicized misanthropy. Its characters are a group of longtime friends who became the hangers-on of a Muskian billionaire, Miles Bron (Edward Norton), who in turn is revealed to be an empty vessel who actually owes all his success to an African-American business partner (Janelle Monáe), whom he first relied upon and then betrayed.

As in the original, the main suspects besides Monáe’s honorable character — and the great detective Blanc, invited to Bron’s island under mysterious circumstances — are all intensely dislikeable: Kate Hudson’s supermodel-turned-designer, Dave Bautista’s Andrew Tate–style masculinist influencer, Kathryn Hahn’s corrupt politician, Leslie Odom Jr.’s corrupted scientist.

But unlike the original, in which the dislikeable people were all plausibly part of a single toxic family, Glass Onion never adequately explains how its wildly disparate group of toxic “disrupters” ended up as friends initially, before they all fell into Bron’s orbit. (Nor, for that matter, is it explained why Monáe’s character ever liked or needed Bron, or why she or Bron would have involved the other characters in their own business efforts.) It feels like Johnson just made a list of types he considered ripe for satire without ever figuring out a logic that would make them fit together as a group.

Nor did he figure out a narrative that fits together the way a detective story should. Instead the first half of the movie turns out to be misdirection, which would be fine if the redirection were accomplished quickly — a swift flashback, a few scenes recast in a revelatory style — and then the rising action resumed. But the redirection takes almost as long as the initial story, which has to be retold from the start, all its key beats replayed, while the actual “who’s our killer?” suspense slowly leaks away.

These failures are particularly striking because we have stronger examples elsewhere in late 2022’s pop culture of what Johnson is trying to accomplish. For a more effective satire of rich people making a pilgrimage to a mad genius’s island, you can watch Ralph Fiennes serving guests their last meal in The Menu. For a truer imitation of Agatha Christie, albeit one without a detective unraveling its plot, you can watch the second season on HBO of Mike White’s The White Lotus, which manages to start with a mysterious death and then make almost everyone a suspect without expecting you to actively despise them.

Whereas the epitaph for Glass Onion is served up by its characters. “It’s so dumb, it’s brilliant!” one of them bursts out when the central murder is explained.

To which Blanc responds, with the same irritation I felt at this point in the movie: “No, it’s just dumb.”