Ben Shapiro Mocked For Ignorant Rant Against Netflix’s ‘Glass Onion’

Right-wing culture warrior Ben Shapiro is known for posting fiery rants online, and his famously ill-informed takes on pop culture always seems to guarantee that his posts go viral (Shapiro famously sparked an avalanche of memes after criticizing Cardi B’s WAP, which is still regularly referenced to this day).

Shapiro watched Netflix’s new murder mystery hit Glass Onion (Rian Johnston’s follow-up to Knives Out), and wanted the world to know that he didn’t like it very much.

Shapiro posted a lengthy rant on Twitter highlighting his ignorance of murder mystery stories, describing his experience of being misled by the film’s big misdirect, a standard trope of the genre, as being “actively deceived by the writer.”

“I regret to inform you that ‘Glass Onion’ is actively bad,” Shapiro wrote, adding that “the first half of the movie is a complete misdirect and a waste of time.”

“We only find out about the actual murder we’re supposed to investigate full one hour and ten minutes into the film, as well as an entirely new backstory,” he tweeted. “We’re actively deceived by the writer.”

Shapiro went on to say that “the story itself in the purest form of incredible laziness. It relies on not one, not two, but three bad writing tropes: an identical twin, a comprehensive journal, and a moron of a murderer. We get an hour of wasted time, because we have to make up for the fact that the murderer is perfectly obvious from moment one.”

It’s fine to dislike Johnson’s film, obviously, but criticizing a murder mystery for daring to mislead the audience isn’t exactly insightful criticism, especially a simple film like Glass Onion, which doesn’t attempt to outsmart the viewer; it’s just a fun, silly whodunit.

Twitter users, always keen to dunk on Shapiro, took delight in mocking the right-wing pundit’s misguided criticism of the film.

Others posted clips of Shapiro discussing his failed attempts at selling comedy screenplays in Hollywood, and excerpts of Shapiro’s own creative writing (which reads exactly as one would imagine, a sheltered suburbanite’s feverish fantasies about a racially divided public school).

But it wasn’t just the plot of Glass Onion that offended Shapiro, but the film’s politics, which poke fun at “manosphere” influencers hawking a warped version of masculinity, devoid of empathy, and vegetables.

Glass Onion also features an unflattering depiction of a billionaire, Miles Bron (Edward Norton), a narcissistic fool whose inner circle is composed of sycophants who despise him on a personal level, but maintain the facade of friendship for the money.

For whatever reason, this depiction really seemed to irritate Shapiro, who seemed to interpret the character as a direct parody of Elon Musk. Glass Onion was written long before Musk bought Twitter and destroyed his reputation, but, rather tellingly, several Musk fans have assumed that Norton’s character is a Musk stand-in.

Shapiro went on to argue that Johnson’s “politics is as lazy as his writing. His take on the universe is that Elon Musk is a bad and stupid man, and that anyone who likes him – in media, politics, or tech – is being paid off by him. This is an incredibly stupid theory, since Musk is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in human history.”

Musk, who is extremely active on Twitter, did not comment on the film, and didn’t even reward Shapiro’s flattering commentary with a “cry laughing” emoji. Rian Johnson, also a bit of a Twitter addict, did not comment on Shapiro’s criticism directly, but did “favorite” a tweet that referenced Shapiro’s rant, along with a positive review of the film.

After being mocked by almost every user on Twitter, Shapiro returned to the topic a few hours later, writing that The Last Jedi, Rian Johnson’s controversial Star Wars film, “sucks too.”