It's a Miracle!

Film: Wake Up Dead Man
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

I genuinely enjoy the regularity of the Knives Out franchise. Based on the past decade, we’ll get a new film in the franchise around the end of 2028. The latest one, called Wake Up Dead Man hits all of the points that we got from the original Knives Out. The script is dynamite, the mystery is a good one and yet completely solvable (I guessed right), and the cast is a who’s who of modern Hollywood.

This time, and for the first time in three films, the person who is being falsely accused of a murder is a man, and a priest, no less. Former boxer and new Reverend Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) has been relegated to a backwater parish in upstate New York as his first official appointment as a priest. He is in the position of assisting Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). Wicks is prickly and demanding, abusive and rude. He’s also heading a cult of personality of local parishioners, all of whom have their own foibles and dependence on Wicks.

Things become murderous on Good Friday when Monsignor Wicks drops dead in a storage closet near the pulpit. He is discovered with a knife in his back, a knife fashioned from a devil’s head lamp piece that Jud had taken from a local bar. There’s no clear evidence that Jud is responsible for Wicks’s death, but he immediately comes under suspicion from the parishioners, who, as members of the Wicks cult of personality, already dislike him.

Enter Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), detective extraordinaire. Having heard of the case, and how it seems to have been impossible, Blanc decides the case is worthy of his genius. He arrives, and we get a much better look at the different people in the area who are going to be our potential killers. These are:

Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close), a woman who was devoted to Wicks’s father when she was a child and is now just as devoted to him.
Vera Draven (Kerry Washington), a lawyer working for the church in large part because her father did before her.
Cy Draven (Daryl McCormack), an aspiring politician and the adopted son of Vera.
Dr. Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), the local doctor and a man with a serious drinking problem.
Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), a science-fiction author who has fallen on tough times with his books and his ability to write something new.
Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny), a former concert cellist who has been sidelined by chronic pain.

We’re also going to be spending some time with Samson (Thomas Haden Church), who works as the groundskeeper of the church and is also romantically attached the Martha as well as Geraldine Scott (Mila Kunis), the local police chief, who wants to end the investigation as quickly as possible by just arresting Jud and being done with things. The man who assigns Jud to the church in question is played by Jeffrey Wright, continuing the practice of getting solid cast members even for minor roles.

Where the Knives Out movies excel, and Wake Up Dead Man is no different, is in producing a murder mystery that is difficult to figure out, but that is easy to understand once the whole thing is laid out for us. It’s complex without being complicated and doesn’t rely on any trickery beyond what someone with a good head for crime (or in this case, a good library for it) would be able to accomplish.

What’s the downside? The truth is that Wake Up Dead Man is not as good as the original Knives Out. Some of this might simply be expectation. The first film really set high expectations, and while Wake Up Dead Man does live up to most of them, it’s perhaps damned by those high expectations. A tight, intelligent screenplay with vibrant and quirky characters is what is expected, and so when that’s what we get, we’re not getting more than those expectations.

With three movies in the series so far, I rank this one right in the middle. I liked it more than Glass Onion and not as much as the original Knives Out. I don’t know what Rian Johnson has to do to really excite me or a fourth film in the series, but I know that when it comes out, I’ll watch it when it does.

Come Oscar season, I expect this will get a screenplay nod. One of the problems with these films is that aside from Daniel Craig, there really is no lead actor in the film in general. It’s the best way to use an ensemble cast, but it’s still an ensemble, and sadly, I don’t think Glenn Close will get a nomination for this, which means that we’ll be going another year without her getting the Oscar she’s deserved since Dangerous Liaisons.

Why to watch Wake Up Dead Man: These movies are cast and scripted within an inch of their lives.
Why not to watch: The first Benoit Blanc movie is still the best.