Imagine a literary mash-up of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown amateur detective stories and John Dickson Carr’s locked-room mystery The Hollow Man, together with what appears to be a sly takedown of a current political leader whose power comes from preaching anger and fear. The result is Wake Up Dead Man, the third entry in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out murder mystery series. The new film promises a return from the exhausting Greek Island excesses of Glass Onion to the more compact pleasures of the first movie, swapping the country house for a small Catholic church and rectory in upstate New York.
But appearances can be deceptive, as any good sleuth knows, and this puzzler with neo-Gothic trappings, while it gets off to a promising and very funny start, becomes too clever and convoluted for its own good. That starts to become apparent almost as soon as the investigation…
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