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

The Wife: A Review

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

My Rating: 1.65 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A Lifetime movie masquerading as serious cinema.

The Wife, written by Jane Anderson (based on the book of the same name by Meg Wolitzer) and directed by Biorn Runge, is the story of Joan Castleman, the long suffering wife who must live in the shadow of her acclaimed novelist husband, Joe Castleman. The film stars Glen Close as Joan and Jonathon Pryce as Joe, with supporting turns from Christian Slater and Max Irons.

I had some time to kill yesterday and was near a theatre, so I decided to see a movie. All of the films I had any interest in seeing did not fit into my schedule, so I was left to decide whether I would see The Wife, as that was the only movie that worked for me time wise, or go home and spend time with my wife. I made the obvious decision to avoid my wife and go with my girlfriend (shhhh!) to see The Wife...as always, deciding to spend some time with any wife, but especially The Wife, left me with nothing but a headache.

The Wife yearns to be an insightful and serious drama but instead is a trite, contrived, dramatically flaccid and pandering piece of neo-feminist melodrama that is more at home on the Lifetime network than in any serious Oscar discussion. The Wife is a paper-thin metaphor devoid of any and all dramatic nuance meant to assuage the anger and hurt feelings of Hillary supporters of a certain advanced age by cashing in on the era of #MeToo and Trumpism.

The film is getting some Oscar buzz mostly because of Glen Close's performance as Joan. Ms. Close may in fact win an Oscar at this year's Diversity Olympics aka The Oscars, but not because her work is so transcendent but because it fulfills all the proper political and gender empowerment criteria. In truth, Ms. Close's performance is not noteworthy at all as it rings decidedly false and hollow. Unlike other notable actresses of her generation (Meryl Streep as just one example), Ms. Close never seems to be able to fill her character with a vivid inner life, but rather feels the need to indicate her intentions rather than organically expressing and releasing them. Ms. Close seems to want to show that she is acting, maybe in an attempt to win that ever elusive Oscar, but instead of showing, she should embrace being. Ms. Close's Joan is a one-dimensional, cardboard cutout of a character, and any praise of her performance should be taken as little more than "woke" charlatanry.

Close's performance feels entirely manufactured and stilted, without a single whiff of genuine human expression and she is joined in her acting obtuseness by Jonathon Pryce, who plays her husband Joe, in the film. Pryce creates an entirely incoherent and inconsequential character that is as light and wispy as a snow flake falling in the cold, dark Helsinki night. Pryce never fully inhabits Joe, instead choosing to use a rather theatrical approach to cover the inadequacies of the script.

Christian Slater and Max Irons give painfully banal and one note performances that fall decidedly flat. Slater is supposed to be charming or something, but he is aggressively bland while Irons is stuck being a mope for two hours.

The bad acting even spread to the extras as they were atrocious. In the climactic scene of the film there is an extra so distractingly awful that it is riotously funny.

To be fair to all the actors, it isn't entirely their fault. Director Bjorn Runge lacks any sort of visual or dramatic style and thus the actors are left at the mercy of the abomination that is the script. The dialogue is mannered and rings false throughout, and none of the characters even remotely seems like a real person. Runge's lack of a distinct cinematic aesthetic, combined with his inexperience directing English language actors (this appears to be his first time doing it) and Anderson's verbose and more stage friendly dialogue, lead to a suffocating and dramatically impotent affair.

My friend, the big shot Hollywood director Mr. X., once said to me that there is nothing worse than a bad stage play...well, with The Wife you get to see a bad stage play caught on camera, which is not a pleasing experience.

The Wife is what I deem a "post-wave" movie, similar to last year's Spielberg film The Post, that is meant to give the audience wish fulfillment after the fact, as opposed to an artist intuiting where the collective is going next. In other words, The Wife shamelessly panders to the Hillary crowd who think the election was stolen from their saintly genius of a Queen by making Joan Castleman a Hillary proxy. The cheers and groans I heard from the audience at various moments led me to believe that it also confirms the belief among these Clinton cultists that Hillary was always the brains behind the Bill Clinton's political success...wish fulfillment indeed.

In conclusion, The Wife is a dramatically contrived, cinematically disingenuous, wretchedly constructed and inefficiently executed exercise in neo-feminist gender politics porn meant to titillate and satiate the bruised feelings of the "I'm With Her"/pussyhat wearing contingent. My recommendation is to divorce yourself from any idea of going to see The Wife, as it is not nearly worth your time and hard earned money...you'd be better served going over to your girlfriend's house and watching The Affair instead.

©2018