Chapter 1: What are the initial thoughts on 'Wake Up Dead Man'?
It's much more exciting to me when you get, you know, a group of people who are like coming up to you and really, really excited about it. And then there are other people who walk out just, I mean, literally saying it was the worst movie I've ever seen. Having those two extremes to me is, you know, is the mark of the type of movie that I want to make.
Alrighty, folks, we're here to review Wake Up Deadman. It's the latest Knives Out mystery from director Rian Johnson, responsible for masterpieces like The Last Jedi and Glass Onion, both of which you can view my prior reviews. Obviously, I love them. It is filled with stupid characters and stupid writing, and Rian Johnson's a stupid, stupid man. We'll get to that in a moment.
The latest Knives Out mystery from director Rian Johnson. Okay, so gigantic cast. You look at this cast and you think this could be like an all-time great murder mystery, right? This could be an Agatha Christie murder mystery. You got Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc, the private detective. You have Josh O'Connor as Judd Duplantis, who is a priest and former boxer. Good actor, he's good.
You have Glenn Close. You have Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott. A veritable wealth of riches, a cornucopia. And somehow, Rian Johnson blows all of it. I will say that the movie holds your interest. It holds your interest because it moves pretty fast, but it violates the same cardinal rule as Glass Onion.
It's so dumb. It's so dumb, it's brilliant. No!
And this drives me up a wall. If you're going to present a mystery, like the original Knives Out, you must present the clues to the viewer such that if they watch the first two acts of the film and then the reveal happens in the third act, sure, they might have missed something, but all the clues are present, so you could have theoretically figured out who did what.
In the first Knives Out, this is actually there. In the first Knives Out, very unlikely you're able to figure out the mystery the first time you watch it, but once you know the answer, you could go back and re-watch the first Knives Out, despite all my criticisms of the film, and you could actually see how the mystery was constructed.
My big critique of Glass Onion is that precisely the opposite was true.
My twin sister committed suicide.
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Chapter 2: How does the cast of 'Wake Up Dead Man' impact the film's quality?
Only morons believe it. The original story is nonsense and trash. And basically, if it offers you any value, it's only the value in having kind of a good-hearted, low-level psychologist. And if you have somebody who's sympathetic to you... and offers you a feeling of absolution, that this is the only thing that matters in religion. Everything else is completely a waste of time.
And at one point, Daniel Craig's Detective Blanc actually says that. He says to the young priest, the reason you fell into religion is you felt guilty over the fact you were a boxer and you killed somebody in the ring, and therefore, You sought a sense of absolution that you could only find in a church. And that is the message throughout the movie.
Everybody who is deeply religious is a bigot or a charlatan. Everybody who follows the priest is corrupt and bad. Virtually everybody who is presented as a true villain of the beast is radically right-wing. And Rian Johnson isn't making any bones about this. Like, clearly, he's aiming for this.
If you go character by character, everybody is either a sort of ignorant tag-along, like, for example, Thomas Hayden Church, who plays Glenn Close's husband in this. He's sort of an innocent tag-along. Or a vicious right-winger.
So, for example, Josh Brolin's Wicks, he himself gets up there and he spews a bunch of kind of raging right-wing rhetoric about how the world is a threat to the church and you have to fight the world and then... It shows a bunch of YouTube videos of him, and they're all labeled with essentially Andrew Tate-like YouTube labels. He's supposed to be bad because he's a right-wing priest.
That's why he's bad, as opposed to Josh O'Connor's priest, who basically has nothing valuable to say other than, I feel your pain. The Bill Clinton view of Catholicism. Then you have Glenn Close. Montenegro. playing Martha Delacroix, who's a devout church lady, and she's right-hand woman to Jefferson Wicks, who is the son.
There's a whole backstory where Jefferson Wicks is the son of a disgraced young woman who herself is the daughter of the Monseigneur in the church. Basically, he's also really, really rich, and he converts his entire fortune into a diamond, but won't give it to his poor daughter because he's a bad priest, right? He's a terrible priest because, again, any standards are... terrible.
And so he deprives her of her fortune. She ends up dying and the son can't find the fortune because the grandfather hides the fortune somewhere. But the young secretary knows where the fortune is. And later she becomes Glenn Close. If all this is confusing, that's because it's deliberately meant to be. We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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Chapter 3: What are the main critiques of the film's writing?
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There's so many great actors here who are just thrown away. Andrew Scott is in another movie called Blue Moon this year, in which he plays Richard Rodgers, and he's tremendous. He's a really great actor, and they just throw him away here. He's a right-wing author who's been drawn into the orbit of the Monsignor, but really has no part to play in pretty much anything.
He's just kind of standing there the whole movie. Nothing that he does is integral to the plot. You have Kerry Washington, who plays a tightly wound lawyer who is the victim in all this because she has been forced to take on the son of Monsignor Wicks, who of course has an illegitimate child. That's how you know that he's really bad because he's a hypocrite. He's not just a right wing guy.
He's also a hypocrite who fathered a child from some whore mother of his own. That person is played by Daryl McCormick. The son of Jefferson Wicks is, of course, an aspiring right wing politician. And so everything that he does is driven by his desire for power and his desire for glory.
So the whole town is set up as this really right-wing town under the auspices of this Monsignor, who's a right-wing figure. They're all judgmental. They're all terrible. They're all evil. Some of them are participating in murder. The ones who are not terrible and evil are victims of the terrible, evil right-wingers and all the rest. So that is the politics of the film.
And again, the politics of the film is so scornful of traditional Catholicism.
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Chapter 4: How does 'Wake Up Dead Man' compare to previous Knives Out films?
At no point do you get a real defense of Catholicism in any real way. Again, the only value of religion... in this particular movie is that a religious person could theoretically make a lady feel better after she led a terrible life and then she's dying. That's pretty much the feeling of the movie.
Near the end of the film, Josh O'Connor's character offers Daniel Craig the ability to come to a mass and Daniel Craig says, there's nothing I would less like to do, which I think is Rian Johnson's generalized perspective. So that's the politics of the film. In terms of filmmaking, none of the performances is standout enough that you remember any of them.
Again, the cast is just huge and everybody's a throwaway. The only characters you're going to remember coming out of this are Daniel Craig, Josh O'Connor, Glenn Close, and Josh Brolin. Everybody else is a complete throwaway. It appears that the budget on this film was $152 million. $152 million. You have any idea how much money that is? That is so much money.
And maybe Netflix makes back their money on subscriptions because, again, star-studded cast, big P&A budget, and all the rest of it. But this is a locked box mystery in a small town requiring no real special effects. Where did that money go? I mean, what the... I mean, I assume some of it went into Daniel Craig's pocket. And again, I assume people like this movie, but it's 144 minutes.
It's two hours and 24 minutes. It's over long. It's overstuffed. Nobody gets their fair shake. None of the clues lead to the final conclusion. You can understand the clues and still not get to the final conclusion. It's lazy. It's just lazy, which is the hallmark of Rian Johnson. Rian Johnson is a lazy writer.
When he comes up with these ideas, he does not bother to try to construct a story such that one domino follows another. He doesn't try to link up the pieces of the puzzle. He doesn't even try to present you with the pieces of the puzzle. He knows that if he does, he's afraid you'll outthink him. And so instead he just hides the entire puzzle except for like two pieces.
And then in the last third of the movie, he brings forth all of the pieces you've never seen and fills them in. And this drives me crazy because if the thing is supposed to be clever, it should either be clever in its dialogue, it isn't. It should be clever in its character construction, it isn't. Or it should be clever in its plotting. It isn't.
And even the end of the movie makes very, very little sense. There's like a tag on the end as to what happened with this fortune that's sort of at the center of all of this that's been converted into the diamond. And, um... Instead of using the diamond to do something good or worthwhile or use that fortune to make people's lives better, the diamond is just sitting inside a statue at the end.
It makes no damn sense. It's bad. It's a bad movie. I wish I could say that it were not a bad movie, but this has become typical for Rian Johnson, who really, I think, has a deep and abiding dislike of his own audience. He's all about just, can I subvert the expectations of my audience? He doesn't care about whether the audience expectations are good or useful.
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