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Though we don’t get one every year, people seem to look forward to every installment of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out series, which kicked off in 2019. That first movie introduced the world to Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc, a detective whose manners and Louisiana accent are as smooth as churned butter; in that picture, his job was to solve the mystery of a best-selling crime novelist’s sudden death. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, released by Netflix in 2022, was somewhat less satisfying, though its Greek island setting allowed for a kind of voyeuristic lavishness—and also made a great backdrop for characters played by the likes of Janelle Monae and Kate Hudson to swan around in floaty-chic getups.
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Now, the powers that be have blessed us with Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, also written and directed by Johnson, in which Josh O’Connor plays a feisty but dedicated priest who, after losing his temper with an uppity deacon, gets reassigned to a new parish in a calm, bucolic upstate New York location. Unfortunately, this tiny, tight-knit congregation happens to be lorded over by a megalomaniac monsignor, Josh Brolin’s Jefferson Wicks. Wicks is a fire-and-brimstone hothead with an iron grip on his followers, who include a crackpot sci-fi writer (Andrew Scott), a faithful longtime servant and family friend who will do anything to protect her boss (Glenn Close), and a brainy, driven lawyer who nonetheless seems to have fallen into Wick’s controlling grip (Kerry Washington). Wicks ends up dead, stabbed in the back with a sinister-looking thingamabob. Who on God’s Green Earth might have done such a thing? The newcomer, O’Connor’s Father Jud Duplenticy, a former boxer who freely admits to once having killed a man out of pure rage, is eyed suspiciously.
The plot of Wake Up Dead Man is fatally cluttered, and the story winds up in a blur of exposition that’s not particularly clever. What’s more, the ensemble of actors…
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