After two installments of his “Knives Out” franchise skewered old and new money, director and writer Rian Johnson targets religion in his third, a gloomy and clunky outing that may test fans’ faith in the filmmaker.
“Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery” gets a new starry cast to orbit Daniel Craig’s foppish detective Benoit Blanc, mixes operatic overacting with sly humor and bites off more than it can digest attempting cultural satire. The pacing is off, too. You won’t exactly need to be nudged awake but it gets pretty soggy there for a while in the middle.
Blanc takes his sweet time to appear, which means that the first half of the movie is carried by the young Catholic priest Jud Duplenticy — a name Johnson apparently thinks is witty — who is sent to a troubled New York parish called Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude run by a monsignor who is “a few beads shy of a rosary.”
The young priest — played by a really winning and soulful Josh O’Connor — is a former boxer with a troubled past who in his new faith has found guidance and meaning. He preaches the gospel of love and calls himself “young, dumb and full of Christ.”
What he finds is that the parish is run by a thunder-and-lightning monsignor who preaches the gospel of fear. Played deliciously by Josh Brolin, Monsignor Jefferson Wicks uses shame and guilt to keep his tiny flock in line against a permissive world. “Anger lets us fight back,” he announces. “I hold the line.” Johnson is making a leaden dig at those in power who inflame divisions for their own power.
When Wicks is found dead, Blanc finally shows up. The manner of the death is a classic detective book trope: The so-called locked-room mystery. Blanc calls this crime’s “Holy Grail.”
There are many suspects, of course: His devoted secretary (Glenn Close), an alcoholic doctor (Jeremy Renner), the groundskeeper (Thomas Haden Church), a sci-fi novelist in decline (Andrew Scott), a cellist with nerve pain (Cailee Spaeny), and a MAGA-like political hack (Daryl McCormack), and the woman who raised him, a resentful lawyer (Kerry Washington). Johnson tries hard to give each depth, despite their sheer number, with telling details, like the way they tap a spoon on a tea cup.
Chief among the suspects is our bare-knuckle priest, whose relationship with the older Man of God has gone from bad to worse. “You’re poisoning the church,” he tells the monsignor and vows to “cut you out like a cancer.” No wonder the town’s police chief (Mila Kunis) quickly zeros in on the younger man.
There’s no way you can solve this one so just relax and let it stutter-stop several times to its overcooked end. Along the way, Johnson makes jokes about Oprah, “The Phantom of the Opera” and even Netflix, the hand that feeds him, while dead bodies go headfirst down the stairs thunk-thunk-thunk, an $80 million diamond appears and suspects scream, as storms swirl, that “Vengeance is mine!”
Perhaps the movie’s best bits are when the young priest and detective team up to solve the crime. Blanc reveals himself to be a “proud heretic” who only “kneels at the altar of the practical” and believes religion is just storytelling, a means of control. The younger priest believes the opposite and is torn between sleuthing and his ministry, his open heart propelling the movie while Craig’s Foghorn Leghorn, Southern-fried dandyism grows increasingly tiresome. (Although fans do get to hear him utter “Scooby Dooby Doo.”)
Johnson has so far made a few glancing blows against cults of personality and the dynamics of in-groups, but nothing terribly crushing. He then comes to more tricky waters when the monsignor seemingly emerges alive from three days in a crypt, a riff from a foundational tenet of Christianity: the resurrection itself. It’s the ultimate in glib.
A satisfying conclusion awaits but, truth be told, it has been a bit of a slog, with soft digressions into social critiques and the meaning of faith grafted onto a setup that, by the third movie in the franchise, shows its seams instantly. Wake up, indeed.
“Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” a Netflix release in theaters now that hits the streamer Dec. 12, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for violent content. bloody images, strong language, some crude sexual material and smoking. Running time: 140 minutes. One and a half stars out of four.
