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

Luca Guadagnino Streaming Double Feature: Queer and Challengers - What Else Can I Say...Everyone is Gay!

****THESE REVIEWS CONTAIN SOME SPOILERS!! THESE ARE NOT SPOILER FREE REVIEWS!!!****

 Queer: 2 out of 5 stars – SKIP IT.

Challengers: 2 out of 5 stars – SKIP IT.

Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino put out two films last year, Challengers and Queer, both of which garnered at least some awards buzz, but to the chagrin of some, neither got any Oscar nominations.

Having missed both in the theatre, I watched them on streamers recently and I have some thoughts.

Guadagnino came to the fore of film in America with his 2017 Oscar-nominated film Call Me by Your Name, starring Timothee Chalamet, which chronicled the gay love affair between a teenage boy and a man in his mid to late twenties.

Call Me by Your Name was showered with praise, including multiple Oscar nominations, but I found the film to be rather poorly constructed and executed, cinematically flaccid and philosophically infantile.

The thing that stood out the most to me in that movie is a monologue delivered near the end of the film by the teenage boy’s father, who reveals that he might be kinda gay and bemoaning the fact that he didn’t have a torrid gay affair as a young man. My reaction to that scene was to quote the Nirvana song “All Apologies” where Kurt Cobain sings the unforgettable lyric “what else can I say, everyone is gay”.

When I watched Challengers (now streaming on MGM+), which opened in April of 2024 and follows the ups and downs of a love triangle between a woman and two male professional tennis players over the course of a decade or so, that lyric was at the top of my notes after watching the film conclude in the absolutely gayest manner possible when both men realize in the middle of a big tennis match that they actually want each other and not the woman. What else can I say…everyone is gay, indeed.   

I avoided watching Queer, which opened in November of 2024, for quite some time because I assumed it would be the same old thing from Guadagnino. I finally watched it the other day (it is streaming on Max) and literally laughed out loud when Trent Reznor and Atticus Finch – who do the music for the film and for Challengers, opened the movie with Nirvana’s “All Apologies”, most notably the line “what else can I say, everyone is gay”. Bravo!

The reason I share this anecdote is because Luca Guadagnino, who is gay, seems completely incapable of understanding that there actually are people in the world who are not, in fact, gay.  Dare I say it…the reality is that the overwhelming majority of people in the world are not…you know…gay. According to some polls the percentage of gay and lesbian people in the world is roughly 3%, but in Luca Guadagino’s world it feels more like 103%.

In the past forty years or so homosexuality has transformed from being a much stigmatized and often criminalized trait into being a celebrated and shame-free lifestyle. It seems cinema, particularly gay cinema, is having a hard time catching up with the normalization of this once oppressed sexual orientation.

Let’s start with Queer. Queer, which is based on William Burroughs book of the same name, stars Daniel Craig as William Lee, a gay American ex-pat living in Mexico City in the 1950s who spends his time drinking, doing drugs and chasing men….definitely not in that order.

Queer could’ve, and maybe should’ve been great, or at least been celebrated by a film industry desperate to signal it’s progressive bona fides. But the film falls completely flat despite its witty Nirvana quoting opening.

Queer is such a bleak and dismal glimpse into the gay world (or A gay world) that I wouldn’t be surprised if some homophobic pastors  showed it to “confused” teens at gay Evangelical conversion camps.

All of the gay people in this film are the most repugnant and repellent human beings imaginable as they are all desperate, despairing, depressing and depraved. If they are supposed to be an accurate representation of gay men of that or any other era, then that is quite an indictment of that community. One can only assume, and hope, that the film is just focusing on one particularly grotesque group of gays that are not representative.

Daniel Craig, most famous for playing James Bond, no doubt took this role – which some might call gay-baiting, in order to get an Oscar, but his performance felt incredibly mannered to me and distractingly off the mark.

Craig, who has been the subject of quite compelling gay rumors himself, plays Lee as a sort of disgusting desperation incarnate. Lee is less gay as he is obsessive over gay sex, and he comes across like a two-bit actor playing Tennessee Williams in a community theatre production in Blaine, Missouri.

Lee isn’t the only repulsive character in the film, as Jason Schwartzman’s Joe Guidry is so revolting it sort of boggles the mind. That none of these people are even remotely interesting is secondary to how unappealing they are to spend time with.

The plot for Queer lacks any sort of emotional coherence, and devolves into a sort of dreamlike fantasia in the final third, which undercuts whatever gritty and grimy reality was established in the first two acts.

Ultimately, Queer felt like an over-indulgent exercise in gay exploitation rather than exploration, with Craig being so superficially committed to his character’s gayness it appeared like he just wanted to kiss a man in public to see if he could get away with it.

Challengers was the hipster choice for film of the year in 2024, but apparently, I am not a hipster because I found it to be so ridiculous as to be inane.

The film, which stars Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist, is supposed to be this sexy jaunt through the world of tennis, but it, and its two lead males, is so transparently gay from the get-go, and features such unappealing dullards as the main actors, that I found watching it to be a tedious undertaking.

Let’s start with Zendaya. I just don’t get it. I admit I have not seen all of her work, for instance I tried watching the HBO drama Euphoria and thought it was garbage so I bailed…so maybe she is great in that…who knows? But everything I have seen her in she is an awful, anemic actress. The Spider-Man movies, Dune, and now Challengers. Just consistently bad, boring, dead-eyed and lifeless.

Josh O’Connor is supposed to bring a bevy of sex appeal to his role of Patrick, a talented but down on his luck tennis player, but he strikes me as a dullard and dopey looking doofus – which is probably why he was so good as Prince Charles in The Crown.

As forgettable as O’Connor is in this film, Mike Faist, who plays Art, his tennis and love rival, is like the invisible man. Faist, who I last saw in Spielberg’s useless remake of West Side Story, is a song and dance man, good for him, but he is so devoid of charisma he might as well be a tumbleweed. Good lord.

As Challengers goes on the story becomes more and more grating, as do the performances, until it all climaxes with the single most ridiculous, and gay, climax imaginable for a tennis movie…when Patrick and Art literally fall into each other’s arms in the middle of a tennis match.

What struck me about Challengers in the context of Guadagnino’s other work, is that the director really does seem to be incapable of understanding that people could not be gay.

Guadagnino’s approach on Challengers (and the father character in Call Me by Your Name) would be like a straight director making a movie about the Gay Men’s Chorus of San Francisco but the gay men in the chorus are actually, deep down, secretly straight.

Having typed out that last paragraph I now realize that I may have just revealed a billion-dollar movie idea…so remember that this material is copyrighted!!

In all seriousness, Challengers could have been an interesting movie set in a unique world, and the same is true of Queer, but Guadagnino has such a repetitive, one-track mind, that he is incapable of bringing any nuance, subtlety, intricacy or dramatic depth to his work. And so we are left with a one-note representation of gayness as some irrepressible truth that lies deep within us all. Sigh.

The bottom line is that both Challengers and Queer could have, and should have, been good, but neither rises to even the minimal level of being interesting, never mind entertaining.

In other words, you do not have to waste your time watching Queer or Challengers because I wasted my time watching Queer and Challengers. You’re welcome.

©2025