Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Story - A Review: Please Go Back to Sleep Dead Man

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. If you like the Knives Out formula of convoluted and absurd murder mystery mixed with bad writing and even worse performances, then this movie might be for you. It wasn’t for me.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Story, written and directed by Rian Johnson, is the new mystery in the Knives Out franchise that once again features master detective Benoit Blanc solving an impossible case.

Set in a small town in upstate New York, Wake Up Dead Man – which premiered on Netflix on December 12th, revolves around a tyrannical, dare I say it – Trumpian Catholic priest, Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), who is surrounded by a tight-knit group of sycophantic parishioners.

Enter into this dynamic a young former boxer turned priest, Jud Duplenticity (Josh O’Connor), sent by a Bishop to try and bring some semblance of Christ and normalcy back into Msgr. Wicks’ parish.

Father Jud runs into lots of resistance from not only Msgr. Wicks but from his coven of adherents. There’s steely church lady Martha Delacroix (Glen Close), alcoholic town Doctor Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), former best-selling author turned right-wing loon Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), tightly wound lawyer Vera Draven (Kerry Washington) and her adult son Cy (Daryl McCormack) – an aspiring slimy politician, disabled former concert Cello player Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny), and finally church groundskeeper Samson Holt (Thomas Haden Church).

In order to avoid spoilers, I will refrain from going any deeper into the plot so that those that wish may watch the film with as little information about it as I did.

The first Knives Out film came out in 2019 and was a smash hit. People loved it. I loathed it. In fact, I wrote an article about the film shortly after its release that caused quite a kerfuffle.

That article, titled “Knives Out Sharpens the Blade of Anti-White Racism”, pointed out the fact that Knives Out was a not-so-thinly-veiled piece of anti-white racist propaganda. Despite a very angry response from many readers, time has been extraordinarily kind to that piece and to its main thesis.

The second Knives Out movie, Glass Onion – which came out in 2022, was riddled with much of the same sort of trite cultural politics and anti-white animus.

Wake Up Dead Man is not infused with as much anti-white animus as Knives Out or Glass Onion…which is a nice change of pace. It is also surprisingly more even-handed when it comes to Christianity than you would otherwise think.

That said, I still thought it was a bad movie. It was poorly constructed, abysmally executed, politically trite, culturally patronizing, and exceedingly dull…BUT it was the best of the Knives Out movies so far…sort of like being the tallest dwarf.

The best part about the movie is Josh O’Connor who gives a pretty good performance as Fr. Jud – a man trying to come to grips with himself, his God and his purpose and meaning here on earth.

O’Connor does not make for a believable former boxer…but he does make for a believable tormented priest struggling with his consistently frail humanity. So, hats off to Josh O’Connor.

The rest of the cast are…well…pretty atrocious…mostly because they are given a script that is so unforgivably poorly written.

Josh Brolin’s Msgr. Wicks is a pseudo-Trumpian figure and is a caricature’s caricature. Glen Close’s Church Lady is a one-note bore and snore. Andrew Scott’s frustrated writer is like the invisible man…you forget he’s even in the movie. Kerry Washington is, shock of shocks, all righteous indignation – yawn. And Jeremy Renner as the drunk doctor is like a tumbleweed rolling through the festivities unnoticed.

I didn’t even mention Daryl McCormack’s Cy or Thomas Haden Church’s Samson or Cailee Spaeny’s Simone because they are so shallow as characters they don’t even register.

The worst of all is Mila Kunis who plays local police chief Geraldine Scott. Kunis is so bad in this role and so uncomfortable on screen it felt like she was an amateur who won a raffle and the prize was getting cast in the movie.

Speaking of awful…now is when I must comment on Daniel Craig as the world’s greatest detective Benoit Blanc. I admit I greatly enjoyed Craig as James Bond…but I find his Benoit Blanc to be an unamusing, unfunny version of Foghorn Leghorn and Forrest Gump. He also looks like he has had some particularly unfortunate plastic surgery…which was about as well-done as his performance. Yikes. Every moment with Craig on-screen is a moment of cringe.

I must admit that the whodunnit is not really my cup of tea to begin with, and your mileage may vary in regards to that, but the problem with Wake Up Dead Man is not that it’s a mystery but rather that it is so clumsily written and executed.

As I watched the film I was never trying to figure out ‘who did it’ but rather ‘how much longer is this?’ Unfortunately, it has a run time of two hours and twenty-four minutes…and it feels longer.

Another issue with the film is that while it is set in a Catholic church it is more Catholic in aesthetic than in theology. The truth is the film is decidedly Protestant, if not outright Evangelical, and it feels like the Catholic setting is just to make it feel more profound…which amuses me – a Catholic, no end. I mean you really can’t set a murder mystery worth watching in a church in a strip mall, right?

Writer/director Rian Johnson may or may not be a Catholic, I have no idea, but he certainly seems pretty obtuse when it comes to Catholicism.

One thing Johnson does believe in with great faith is making unnecessarily convoluted and absurd murder mysteries saturated in Boomer shit-liberalism that is the left-wing mirror of the mental midgetry of MAGA mindlessness. Good for him?

Ultimately, I did not care about any single person in this film, didn’t care who was killed and who killed them, and why. I just wanted it to end.

Wake Up Dead Man is yet another frivolous and inconsequential piece of pop culture garbage that the mindless masses who confuse mediocrity with mastery and vacuity with verisimilitude will find to be phenomenal.

God help us all.

©2025