Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

Yikes. After two rousingly entertaining all-star whodunits, the crackling Knives Out and the hilarious Glass Onion, Rian Johnson lays an egg with his third Benoit Blanc mystery. The fun of the first two Knives Out pictures was that they each featured a collection of eccentric characters played by an ecletic ensemble of movie stars from various generations and acting styles, set within a familiar movie formula injected with this unpredictable and rib-tickling wild card, a combination of Hercule Poirot, Lieutenant Columbo, and Foghorn Leghorn; the characters we think are supporting players turn out to be at the center of the mystery that we sit back and watch the great yet goofy detective solve. There's none of that here. No fun characters, no cleverly convoluted mystery, no little life in Mr. Blanc.

Wake Up Dead Man centers on a young priest named Jud Duplenticy (Josh O'Connor) who is assigned to a small but devout upstate New York congregation to assist the charismatic but domineering Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). When a seemingly impossible murder occurs during a service, Benoit Blanc finds his way to the small town to assist the local police chief (Mila Kunis) in unraveling the mystery. There are the requisite number of suspects: the Church secretary, the groundskeeper, a disabled cellist hoping for a miracle healing, a once best-selling author hoping to be on top again, a doctor, a lawyer, and an aspiring right-wing politician and internet influencer who is the lawyer's adopted son. But the one with the clearest motive is the young priest, Jud.

Where the first two movies had wonderful set-ups, where we met the various casts of characters in amusing sequences, the first 30+ minutes of this 140 minute film begins with an endless exposition sequence narrated by Jud in which he explains his backstory, that of Monsignor Jefferson Wicks and his father, the good Reverend Prentice Wicks (James Faulkner), as well as the backstory of the Reverned's other child, plus a missing fortune, and the relationship of each of the suspects to the Monsignor and/or his father and sister. We never get to meet these people; their character bios are read out to us. At first, this seemingly endless backstory is peppered with the type of humorous details, gags, and asides we expect from this series, but by the 10-minute mark, the laughs pretty much cease, and we're left listening to this character talk and talk and talk.

When Benoit Blanc finally shows up, more than 35 minutes in, we breathe a sigh of relief—finally, the character we love is here to inject some life into this corpse of a movie. Yet, Blanc is curiously subdued in this picture, offering little energy and only a few surprises. Have we just grown too accustomed to this character for him to surprise us anymore, or is Daniel Craig no longer reveling in a temporary furlough from playing James Bond and now feels trapped inside this other guy? Of course, there are some of his signature laugh-out-loud moments, most of them having to do with music, but Benoit Blanc never takes over this movie in his usual delightful way.

The picture never changes gears from its leaden setup. The gallery of suspects never blossoms into fleshed-out characters; the culprits turn out to be exactly who you think must have done it, and you have to sit through one bland, illogical scene after another, as the local police chief takes Blanc and her prime suspect through each stage of procedural discovery in ways that defy suspension of disbelief even for a movie in this genre. It's clear the filmmakers want to retain some of the light and bubbly Agatha Christie-style mystery while going for something darker and more Gothic. However, the conflicting tones clash poorly, as the screenwriting, casting, and direction fail to meet the challenge—Kunis's portrayal of an upstate New York cop is Exhibit A.

For all those trolls who complained about the overt political messaging in the prior Knive Out films, this one actually deserves that criticism. Because, when a movie like this is engaging from beat to beat and consistently funny, it doesn't matter if its jokes, characterizations, and themes are broad and a little on the nose. However, if the story is sluggish and the jokes are few and far between, conspicuous messages become heavy-handed to the point of annoyance. Hypocrisy in the Catholic Church is the easiest target imaginable, and therefore is also the easiest to mock in a nuanced manner. But such is not the case here. Johnson and co-screenwriters Ram Bergman and Katie McNeill use the story to point out how far American Christianity has gotten away from the actual teachings of Christ in favor of preserving rigid and toxic traditions that don't come from the Bible so much as from our own twisted patriarchal culture. That's a critically important theme in 2025. Still, it's just preaching to the choir when filmmakers engage in the narrative equivalent of putting their one-dimensional characters in T-shirts adorned with platitudes like, "You don't need to be religious to act with grace."

The lack of characterization here is shocking. Sure, it's great to see Jeremy Renner alive and acting again after his near-fatal snowplow accident a couple of years ago. And I'm always happy to see Glenn Close in roles big or small. But does anybody get any joy out of seeing Carey Washington, Andrew Scott, or Thomas Hayden Church in nothing roles where they're mainly limited to face-acting with the occasional overwritten speech? As for the others—Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, Annie Hamilton—what are they doing in an "all-star who done it? I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that these nothing roles are filled with actors who have just a small handful of credits to their names, because why would actual movie stars sign on to play them?

When Johnson signed his two-picture deal with Netflix to continue the Knives Out series, I'd bemoaned the stingy streamer for only granting Glass Onion a measly two-week run around Thanksgiving before the film was dumped on its platform. Glass Onion is a film designed to be seen with a large crowd in a cinema where you can share the laughter, the joys of discovery, and the surprising narrative and character twists. Wake Up Deadman seems an ideal Netflix movie. It's the kind of film that's probably best enjoyed sitting alone in front of the TV, not giving it your full attention. I watched Wake Up Deadman in the same theater at the same film festival with the same group of friends as I did Glass Onion and, while my friends and the rest of the audience certainly laughed and reacted a good deal more to it than I did, the unmistakable audible difference in audience responses between this film and its predecessor signifies a far more damning critique than any meaningless little review I could write on my blog.

I certainly hope this is not the last film in this series, and we get at least one more Benoit Blanc mystery. That way, Wake Up Deadman can take its rightful place in the box set as the entry that gets played the least. After all, who the hell wants a heavy, pretentious Knives Out movie?