I sometimes hear variations of this refrain applied to writer-director Rian Johnson’s Knives Out movies: I’ll keep watching them as long as he keeps making them. The statement suggests that will remain true even with an inevitable dip in quality — a reality that blights the new Wake Up Dead Man. The third chapter in this series of comedy-buoyed whodunits, released in some theaters in November before being somewhat unceremoniously made available on Netflix on Friday, isn’t bad, and there’s some pleasure, amid this turbulent, up-is-down year, in watching a twist-overrun conflict be decisively resolved. But it also incarnates the kinds of diminishing returns one would fear from the (for now) trilogy: a steep, even when it’s trying to be funny, drop-off in laughs; an underutilization of its expectedly pricey cast; a swollen runtime; and a regularly flashback-speckled mystery that’s cleverly constructed but not particularly satisfying.

Fashioned somewhat in the mold of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot — just secret agent-sexy and with a Southern accent that makes it sound like there should be a handlebar mustache curling around his upper lip — Knives Out (2019) and Glass Onion (2022)’s detective protagonist Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) returns in Wake Up Dead Man to investigate, what else, an at-first-glance inexplicable murder in upstate New York. The victim is a monsignor named Wicks (Josh Brolin) who specializes in manosphere-channeling sermons who’s good at emotionally manipulating the tiny flock (Glenn Close, Andrew Scott, Kerry Washington, Jeremy Renner, Cailee Spaeny, and Daryl McCormack) that hangs on to his every word. Suspected in his killing is a good-hearted boxer turned priest, the newly transferred Jud (Josh O’Connor), who’d explicitly had it with his crass superior just before his deadly stabbing, and Wicks’ said tiny flock, who it’ll be revealed had recently gotten a lot less smitten with their godly stand-in.

Wake Up Dead Man’s predecessors, Knives Out and Glass Onion, often hilariously distinguished themselves from their genre forebears (namely 1973’s The Last of Sheila; the several Christie movie adaptations dotting the 1970s and ’80s) by more pointedly lampooning upper-crust greed and delusion, a mode made especially vogue around the time of their release by 2019’s zeitgeist-defining Parasite. Some of that is in Wake Up Dead Man, but the movie pivots to point more of its ire, and comedy, to the cynical leveraging of religion as a means to amass power and influence rather than uplift the vulnerable. 

Such is a thorn in the side of the gentle Jud, who typifies his emotional generosity by getting caught up, for hours, in a meant-to-be-transactional phone call with a lead in the case (a fleetingly great Bridget Everett) who’s heartbroken over her elderly mother’s dementia. Wake Up Dead Man’s thematic thrust fortifies it against the cozy-sweater disposability that can be associated with the big-screen whodunit; Johnson is not immune, though, from a heavy-handed line or point-belaboring lighting to augment a character’s monologue.

In his fourth movie of the year (and additional argument for his agility as a performer), O’Connor is so good that his soulful, wounded-bird work makes the film appear better than it is. He also makes nearly everybody in the supporting cast seem like they’re not doing very much in comparison. (He can make a shy smile or a startled widening of his eyes go a long way.) That doesn’t include the rigorously campy Close or the consistently delightful (albeit more superfluous-feeling than is customary for these movies) Craig, who rarely seems to have as much fun as he does in the Knives Out films. The underwhelming use of the film’s expansive ensemble isn’t helped by some of the personal lives contained within it: One is not inclined to take as seriously Wake Up Dead Man’s performed moral clarity when one person has prominently defended a convicted rapist and hitched herself to an Israeli government propagandist, and a couple of others have been accused of abuse. But I’m probably expecting too much from a Netflix-sanctioned, $152(ish)-million movie.

Photo credit: John Wilson/Netflix