Film Review - Wake Up Dead Man

I love movies. Ever since I was a kid, I've always loved the magic that made film so enthralling. As I grew older, that hasn't changed. My tastes are varied and wide, running the gamut from sci-fi to comedies to horror and beyond. When I first started doing this blog, way back in the 2012-2013 days, I had a slightly different format. I will be changing that up and going with something new.

Buckle up, buttercup.

But before you do, this a spoiler alert. If you haven't watched the movie yet, maybe come back after you did (although I do make sure not to give away the who in my review).

Title: Wake Up Dead Man - A Knives Out Mystery

Release Date: November 26, 2025

Director: Rian Johnson

Screenplay: Rian Johnson

Starring: Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Cailee Spaeny, Andrew Scott, Kerry Washington, Glenn Close, Jeremy Renner, Mila Kunis, Daryl McCormack, Josh Brolin, Thomas Haden Church

Run Time: 2 hrs 24 mns

Genres: Mystery, Comedy, Thriller, Crime, Drama

Overview: A baffling death inside a quiet church draws Benoit Blanc into a tense investigation where faith secrets and suspicion blur as a close community turns against itself.

Many will know but for those that don't, this is the third installment in the Knives Out universe featuring master detective Benoit Blanc (played by Daniel Craig). I still remember watching the very first one and loving it. Admittedly, once I watched the original a second time, it wasn't as good. That's because it's just not as good when you know the who in the whodunnit part of the mystery. However, with that being said, I still have a very fond recollection of that particular movie and it still carries a 4-star rating on my Letterboxd.

But that is not Wake Up Dead Man.

Wake Up Dead Man was enjoyable. I liked it well enough. The mystery of an "impossible" crime was a different way of approaching a Knives Out movie than what we've seen in the past and I appreciated that. However, with that being said, it was pretty easy to figure out the who part of this whodunnit mystery. It wasn't all that hard. I didn't know the specifics behind every last little thing but I did pinpoint the mastermind pretty early on in the movie.

There was another issue that I came across in this movie that I noticed and that was the absence of Benoit Blanc for the first half-hour or so of the film. It wasn't that big of a deal at first until the main character that is being focused on at the time keeps sort of droning on and on. Looking back through my memories of the first two movies, I am not sure if the same thing happened. If it did, and Blanc didn't show up until after about 30 mins, then I did not notice. In this movie, it was GLARINGLY obvious. Ultimately, however, it wasn't that big of a deal. It was just something I noticed.

While this was not, by any stretch of my imagination, a bad movie, I just didn't like it as well as the original. The actors did a fantastic job and were very compelling. Glenn Close was phenomenal as was Josh Brolin, Daniel Craig (of course), and the rest. Josh O'Connor didn't exactly hit the mark for me though. I am not really familiar with his prior roles but I found his performance somewhat lacking. There were moments of greatness though, mostly when he was talking about why he was Catholic and what that really meant to him. But for the most part, his character didn't do much for me. Which is sort of bad considering a lot of the movie revolved around him. Similar characters in the first two movies like Marta Cabrera (played by Ana De Armas) and Andi/Helen Brand (played by Janelle Monáe) did a much better job in my opinion. It's nothing personal against Josh O'Connor but that is how I felt watching it.

With all that being said, I did like this one much better than the Glass Onion installment. The story was better and it did capture my attention for most of it. I enjoyed Blanc's final checkmate moment being halted and the reason for it being stopped. I also enjoyed moments where you get to see his observational deductions in action. That is one of my favorite parts to this particular character. It just, at the end of the day, did not quite measure up to the first movie.

One of the great things about the Knives Out movies is that they do not need to be watched as a whole. You can watch one without the need of watching any of the others. But I would still recommend watching all of them (even Glass Onion, despite that one being the weakest of the three). They are fun watches.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars