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

Hawkeye: A Review - of the First Two Episodes

Marvel’s new series Hawkeye, at least so far, not only avoids virtue signaling and woke pandering, it’s actually pretty funny.

The show has its flaws, but it’s a breath of fresh air from Marvel, which has in recent years been more interested in preaching than entertaining.

In the wake of Marvel’s miraculous run of movies which began with Iron Man in 2008 and culminated with Endgame in 2019, Disney’s money-making superhero division has been searching for a creative way forward with their storytelling in both film and television.

That search has usually resulted in pathetic woke pandering and virtue signaling on social issues, or mind-time-world bending extravagancies, or an unwieldy combination of both.

For example, Black Widow boasted a shamelessly shallow girl power, patriarchy-busting narrative and Falcon and the Winter Soldier pathetically pandered on racism, both with lackluster results.

WandaVision and Loki, on the other hand, toyed with audience’s minds as they bent time and storylines, thankfully they were at least interesting.

And finally, What if? and Eternals both went all in on virtue signaling and off-world in terms of time bending, and ended up being excruciatingly laborious.   

Now with the new six-episode mini-series Hawkeye – the first two episodes of which began streaming on Disney Plus on Wednesday with new episodes released every week for the next month, Marvel is trying a somewhat different approach.

After watching the first two episodes of Hawkeye I can report that thus far, thankfully, wokeness has not overtly reared its ugly head and no gods or time - bending wizards have showed up to mess with reality either.

In fact, Hawkeye is the most-grounded, most “realistic” and most authentic piece of storytelling in recent Marvel history, which isn’t a high bar to reach but at least they reached it.

Hawkeye tells the story of Clint Barton, aka Hawkeye – the family man and badass superhero archer from the Avenger’s movies, and Kate Bishop, a Hawkeye wannabe who stumbles into trouble. They both end up working together after the costume of the vigilante Ronin turns up and falls into the wrong hands.

The series, or at least the first two episodes of the series, is certainly flawed, but it’s also unique and interesting because at its core it’s really a droll comedy wrapped in the superhero cloak of an action-mystery.

Marvel has always had an undercurrent of comedy in their films, but that was always more a function of the impeccable comedic timing of Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man and the glorious obliviousness of Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, than anything else.

Hawkeye though is legitimately and genuinely funny in the most subtle, self-ware, un-Marvel way.  

For instance, the series opens with Clint/Hawkeye in New York City for the Christmas season. As a treat, one that he quickly regrets, Clint brings his kids to see the big Broadway musical hit Rogers – which is based on Captain America Steve Rogers and the Avenger’s defense of New York, of which Hawkeye was a vital part.

The scenes of the musical are hysterical, like something out of The Simpsons’ (another Disney property) famous Planet of the Apes Musical starring Troy McClure, not just because they’re so dreadful, but also because they’re so horrifyingly believable.

This heinously egregious Captain America musical is a gloriously savage but subtle dig at the vapid and vacuous culture that made the insidious and insipid awfulness of Lin Manuel-Miranda’s Hamilton a landmark achievement and rabid sensation.

Watching the theater muffin versions of the Avengers sing “Hulk…SMASH!” and “I could do this all day” literally made me laugh out loud, most especially because the corporate pimps at Disney are bound to produce either that exact same show or one frighteningly similar to it. It doesn’t take much imagination to conjure the painful image of say U2, who once actually wrote the score for a disastrous Broadway superhero musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, teaming with establishment darling and abysmal, talentless shill Lin Manuel-Miranda to make some corporate-friendly musical like Rogers: The Musical.

Other scenes, like the one where Clint and Kate see people dressed as superheroes and Kate opines on the superhero Hawkeye’s failure to resonate with the broader culture being a function of branding issues and poor marketing, or when Hawkeye himself goes to a LARP (live action role play) event, are Marvel making fun of Marvel to the most Marvel-ous degree.

The main reason for Hawkeye’s success though is that its stars, Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye and Hailee Stanfield as Kate Bishop, are terrific in their roles.

Renner’s gruff, dead-pan delivery is deliriously good, and the luminous Stanfield is absolutely masterful with her comedic timing as well, like when she says the name of the Track Suit Mafia is “a little too on the nose.”

In Hawkeye, Renner and Stanfield are like some bizarro-world, asexual, Marvel version of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn…if Grant and Hepburn had to fight and shoot arrows at bad guys.

To be sure, Hawkeye has flaws. For instance, it can be a little slow at times and the few action sequences featured so far are not very noteworthy.

But with that said, I found myself pleased to see Marvel trying something new that didn’t involve overt woke preening and aggressive virtue signaling.

It would appear from the first two episodes that Marvel has given us a little early Christmas present this year, as the subtle, self-aware comedy on display in Hawkeye won’t work in too many other projects going forward for Marvel, but fortunately it does work well here.

We will see where the series goes from here, but thus far, I’m grateful that Hawkeye appears to be a little piece of harmless holiday fun. Let’s hope it stays that way.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Wind River : A Review

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

My Rating : 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation : SEE IT IN THE THEATRE. This is a top-notch film that works on multiple levels and should not be missed.

Wind River, written and directed by Taylor Sheridan, is the story of Cory Lambert, a tracker/hunter with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, who teams up with FBI agent Jane Banner to solve a murder on the Wind River Indian reservation in Wyoming. The film stars Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen, with supporting turns from Graham Greene and Gil Birmingham.

The first thing to know about Wind River is that it is not an art house film, well...not really. Writer/director Taylor Sheridan writes mainstream types of stories, about the drug war in Sicario (2015), or bank robbers in Hell or High Water (2016) and now a murder mystery with Wind River, but Sheridan is so skilled and gifted as a writer he is able to infuse these well-worn narratives with such originality, insight and intelligence that they are elevated from the mundane to the sublime. 

Taylor Sheridan is unquestionably the best writer working in Hollywood today (proof of this being he has two nominations and one win for the most prestigious award on the planet…The Mickey©®!!). His previous screenplays, Sicario and Hell or High Water, were exquisite masterpieces. The script for Wind River certainly lives up to his stellar earlier work. 

Wind River is Taylor Sheridan's first time directing a major feature film. His direction is unspectacular but noteworthy for being both proficient and efficient. Sheridan keeps the pacing taut but never rushed, and allows his scenes and his actors some breathing room in the vast expanse of the Wyoming wilderness.  

As screenwriter, Sheridan is a physician who keeps properly diagnosing the disease eating away at the core of America in general, and the American Man in particular. Sheridan's characters are not verbose, but they speak volumes about the wounded state of masculinity in this country. While on the surface Wind River is a murder mystery in Big Sky country, it is considerably more than that. Wind River is a meditation on grief and the current state of Man. The film reveals the festering toxicity of damaged masculinity that is contagion in America, and that infects and destroys everything it touches (look no further than the current occupant of the White House for proof of this). Sheridan has written about the world of men effectively in both Sicario and Hell or High Water, and he does so again in Wind River. The murder-mystery story is well-executed and intriguing, but for me the most compelling part of the film is Sheridan's sub-text dealing with the debilitating state of modern manhood and the crippling effect of grief. 

Jeremy Renner plays hunter/tracker Cory Lambert and delivers the best performance of his career. Renner's work is well crafted, meticulous, detailed and is most definitely Oscar worthy. Renner's Lambert is a reserved and laconic man, but the anguish and fury contained within him is palpable. The scenes between Renner and Gil Birmingham's Martin Hanson contain some of the most subtle and layered acting on film this year. The scene between the two men on the front porch of Martin Hanson's home is a wrenching one, where the pain that pulses through these men's souls reveals itself out of the abyss of their heartbreak. It is a startlingly fantastic scene that would have been ordinary in the hands of lesser actors. 

Elizabeth Olsen does terrific work as well as fish out of water FBI agent Jane Banner. Olsen's Banner is in over her head, but she has the smarts and guile to keep herself together, until she doesn't. Her scene with Renner towards the end of the film highlights her skillful, subtle and wonderfully effective work in the film. Olsen is an often overlooked actress, but she is a potent talent who just needs the right script to shine, thankfully she gets one with Wind River.

The supporting actors, particularly Graham Greene, as a local Indian police chief, and the previously mentioned Gil Birmingham as Martin Hanson, are fantastic. They are two characters used to the bleak existence of life on the reservation, and their existential grief and angst hang over them like storm clouds. 

Another actor who has a very minimal but pivotal role is Jon Bernthal, and his work is exceptional. With minimal screen time and dialogue, Bernthal is able to create a fully formed and multi-dimensional character that is unique but familiar. Bernthal's work is vital to the film, and he shows himself to be a really strong actor capable of doing a lot with a little.

Cinematographer Ben Richardson makes the most of the glorious setting and delivers crisp visuals highlighting the contrasting colors of the wintery mountains. Richardson's striking visuals combined with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' soundtrack make for a mesmerizing film going experience. 

As someone who has felt the biting sting of grief, Wind River resonated deeply with me. As someone with an intimate connection to the Native American community, my kindred relationship to the film was further enhanced by Sheridan's respectful but brutally honest assessment of the state of Indian life in America that was both depressing and infuriating. The fact that Native American women are the only group of people in the United States for whom they do not keep statistics regarding missing persons is one of the more incredible statistics you can find…or not find in this case. It is also all the evidence you need to understand that Native people in America have been dehumanized for centuries by many Americans and the U.S. government, and continue to be to this day. 

In conclusion, Wind River is a terrific film that boasts an Oscar worthy performance by Jeremy Renner and and equally impressive script from Taylor Sheridan. Wind River was very captivating but at times difficult to watch, but regardless of how emotionally wrenching the film could be, it was always honest and insightful about humanity and the malevolent world we inhabit. I highly recommend you spend your hard earned money and go see Wind River in the theaters. The lessons it imparts are ones we all desperately need to learn.

©2017