★★★½ (3½ out of 4)
A hellfire and brimstone priest who confesses to marathons of masturbation (a lie) and has a hunch that many of his parishioners might want him dead (a truth) gets stabbed to a bloody pulp at a neo-Gothic church in upstate New York during a Good Friday service attended by a flock of suspects, played by a team of all-star sinners.
That’s the setup for “Wake Up Dead Man: “A ‘Knives Out’ Mystery,” the third and best in this devilishly delightful film series from writer-director Rian Johnson again featuring James Bond apostate Daniel Craig as drawling, Southern-fried detective Benoit Blanc. This modern-day Sherlock is not above taking a fat paycheck for private snooping when a case seems unsolvable. His reputation alone demands it.
“Wake Up Dead Man” has one more week in theaters before hitting Netflix on Dec.12. Streaming has made us all lazy—the in-theater grosses for the third entry are the lowest yet—but you’re missing a good bet, not to mention an enveloping aura of mystery, when you watch this at home with all those holiday distractions.
Daniel Craig and Josh O’Connor ride their roles to glory in Rian Johnson’s teasing provocation, a sinfully funny entertainment that keeps its mysteries unraveling in your head.
The third chapter opens on a closeup of Craig, said to have pocketed a cool $100 million just for the two sequels, who then vanishes for 40 minutes until Blanc is called in on the case. Yes, we miss him, but there are ample compensations.
The first being a phenomenal performance (the best ever in a “Knives Out” movie) from Josh O’Connor (“Challengers”) as Father Jud Duplenticy, a Catholic priest from Albany, NY, who used to be a boxer and hasn’t lost his urge to throw a punch (He once killed a man in the ring, and fully intended to do so—get thee to confession, Father Jud.).
This man of the cloth has been kicked upstate to learn humility at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, the sparsely attended church run by Monsignor Jefferson Wicks, a real pulpit warrior played by a thundering Josh Brolin. Bishop Langstrom (Jeffrey Wright) warns Father Jud that Wicks is “a few beads shy of a full rosary.” And he’s not exaggerating.
Yet Wicks has handpicked a group of parishoners to do his dirty bidding. They include resentful lawyer Vera Draven (Kerry Washington) with an adoptive brother, Cy (Daryl McCormack), who’s an aspiring politician and a full-time YouTuber infamous for such posts as “There’s G-O-D in DOGE.” Then there’s Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny), a wheelchair-bound concert cellist who opens her fortune to Wicks. Add in creatively blocked sci-fi author Lee Ross (an ab fab Andrew Scott as a clone of L. Ron Hubbard), and boozehound Dr. Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner, his hot sauce was name checked in “Glass Onion”), the local sawbones whose wife just dumped him.
Best of all, there’s Glenn Close, Oscar-worthy as usual, as bookkeeper and church lady Martha Delacroix who knows where all the bodies are buried and enjoys sneaking up on people, though groundskeeper Samson Holt (Thomas Haden Church) escapes her pouncing. It’s Martha who holds the key to the tale of the “harlot whore” and a certain Eve’s Apple, a jumbo-sized diamond that brings out the larceny in this company of wolves.
Still, with the murder of Wicks and the arrival of Blanc at the behest of police chief Geraldine Scott (a scrappy Mila Kunis), the focus shifts to Father Jud and Blanc, engaging in a debate over faith (Jud’s) and the lack of it in Blanc, a strict rationalist.
All praise to the sharp wit and playful twists that Johnson invests in his screenplay. He was Oscar nominated for the first “Knives Out” and its sequel “Glass Onion” and should be in the mix for this one, his dark and dazzling peak so far. It’s a spin on the “locked-room mystery,” a genre popularized in 1935 in John Dickson Carr’s novel “The Hollow Man,” which gets a shoutout here. Everyone watched Wicks die in church, but no one saw who done it.
If Christ rose from dead, Wicks thinks he can too. That act of hubris drives the plot that shows “Knives Out” is a franchise with a lot of life still in it. What happens if they can’t afford another go at Blanc from Craig? Will the series stop at No. 3? Johnson keeps talking about wanting Meryl Streep for the next one, so hope is not lost.
For right this minute, Johnson has given Craig and O’Connor fully fleshed-out roles to play and both actors ride those roles to glory. For O’Connor, an Emmy winner as the young Prince Charles in his Diana days on “The Crown,” this is his fourth movie this year, after “The Mastermind,” “The History of Sound” and “Rebuilding,” and this shapeshifter excels in each of them, each in a different way. To watch him go toe-to-toe with Craig in a match of wits is one of the unalloyed pleasures of this movie year.
“Wake Up Dead Man,” with its reference to Easter as its own locked-room mystery, is a teasing provocation, a sinfully funny entertainment that keeps its mysteries unraveling in your head long after it hits the finish line. That alone is some kind of miracle.