{"id":4722,"date":"2026-01-01T00:00:42","date_gmt":"2026-01-01T06:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/memorialswordandshield.com\/?p=4722"},"modified":"2025-12-29T11:44:57","modified_gmt":"2025-12-29T17:44:57","slug":"wake-up-dead-man-needs-to-fall-back-asleep","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/memorialswordandshield.com\/es\/4722\/arts-entertainment\/wake-up-dead-man-needs-to-fall-back-asleep\/","title":{"rendered":"Wake Up Dead Man Needs to Fall Back Asleep"},"content":{"rendered":"

These days, it seems like everyone and their mothers are stopping what they\u2019re doing to watch the latest Knives Out movie. With so little media to make up the modern mystery genre, it\u2019s no wonder that people are flocking towards the franchise that\u2019s given pop-culture the modern Columbo.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite the general quality of Knives Out movies, Wake Up Dead Man seems like it should have taken a minute to figure itself out before it hit the big screen.<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

The Knives Out franchise has become well-known for its revival of the mystery genre, usually satirizing whatever social issues seem biggest at the time. Knives Out focused on immigrants and their precarious position within our society. Glass Onion focused on ignorance and the COVID-19 pandemic. Wake Up Dead Man is focused on religion and cult-like followings. Every movie has also been focused on greed of some sort.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In every movie, someone has died, and the mild-mannered, world-famous detective Benoit Blanc has to swoop in to save the mystery. Every movie within the franchise directly plays off of the classic \u201cwhodunnit\u201d murder mystery, with insane twists along the way and kooky but endearing characters, all of whom have a potential motive.<\/span><\/p>\n

Wake Up Dead Man hasn\u2019t strayed from this at all. In fact, it\u2019s been able to make its characters more compelling than any other movie so far.<\/span><\/p>\n

The characters are the strong suit of every movie, but in Wake Up Dead Man each of them is a shining star in an ocean of \u201cmeh.\u201d Every character has something compelling about them that makes you connect to the movie more deeply. At any given point, it feels like you\u2019re right there along with each of them because they\u2019re all so enthralling. This is a mix of solid writing and really good performances on the parts of the actors.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The actors are amazing, even if it\u2019s a little hard to wrap your head around Mila Kunis playing a disillusioned small-town cop. The characters in Glass Onion were very one-dimensional, and still are in a sense, but it adds to the fun of the murder mystery. The fact that the characters fit tropes so well is clearly trying to go back to the classic \u201cbutler did it\u201d genre.<\/span><\/p>\n

While everyone may have their own favorite character, there is one that stands out, played by Cailee Spaeny. Her character is, no joke, one of the best depictions of chronic illness in any movie ever. The writers handled her disability with a level of class and sensitivity that is virtually unheard of, especially within a \u201cfun-for-the-whole-family mystery movie.\u201d If every disabled character were written with the same level of skill, the world would be a better place.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Even though Spaeny herself isn\u2019t disabled, the fact that the rest of the character\u2019s story is so respectful and accurate to a lot of people\u2019s experiences means that it\u2019s hard to be upset about that at all. It was so good, in fact, that it would be surprising if any disabled character in the next decade had writing as good as hers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite the movie’s strong ensemble, Benoit Blanc, the most well-established character, is easily the weak point.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For reasons that are impossible to understand, the writers have decided to make him an actual character. In the first movie, he describes himself as a \u201cpassive observer\u201d and serves pretty much exclusively to solve the mystery. In Wake Up Dead Man, he directly causes and is involved with major conflicts. Within 2 minutes of being onscreen, he goes on this weird rant about how awful the Catholic Church is, none of which actually deepens the story at all. It\u2019s just downright weird and uncomfortable.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The trend of making Benoit Blanc someone with impacts and opinions started in Glass Onion, but even then he was still obviously an outsider. He was almost entirely separate from the actual conflict. In this movie, he was easily part of the main cast. It felt like the movie wasn\u2019t about the people involved in the murder mystery, but instead about Blanc. Separately, they have drastically changed his look. It\u2019s no wonder this movie came out around Christmas, because Benoit Blanc now looks like Santa Claus 20 years younger.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Another thing that\u2019s consistently good in the Knives Out franchise is the plot. The crimes themselves are always interesting, and the twists that happen before the audience figures out who the killer is are even more so.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What’s interesting about Wake Up Dead Man\u2019s crime is that it, by all accounts, could not have happened. In other movies, the only real question was about who killed the victim. In this movie, you were much more interested in <\/span>how <\/span><\/i>they killed the victim, regardless of who had done it. The movie also did a very good job of misdirecting you. There were a lot of plot points where certain pieces of evidence represented something totally different from what you originally thought, which added to the suspense.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Even so, the movie struggled to explain a lot of major plot points. It consistently provided interesting clues that looked like they could have pointed the audience to some sort of conclusion, but then almost exclusively swept them to the side. When Benoit Blanc finally figured it out, there was almost no explanation of <\/span>how<\/span><\/i> he did so. Just an admission that he had solved the whole mystery but wanted the perpetrator to confess first.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So much of the joy of murder mystery-genre stories is when the detective goes on a long rant and explains how they expertly figured things out through little clues sprinkled in throughout the story. That explanation was present in every Knives Out movie before this one, and it was very difficult to not feel like there was something missing from the movie itself. This loss left the movie feeling a little more empty than it should have.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Though Wake Up Dead Man had many flaws, that doesn\u2019t necessarily mean that the Knives Out franchise is cursed to keep making the same mistakes. There were so many good, fresh directions that this movie went in that made it better than the previous two. Clearly, the franchise is just a little bit confused about what it wants to be here. Maybe if Wake Up Dead Man had just slept on a few things, the movie wouldn\u2019t have struggled as much.<\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

These days, it seems like everyone and their mothers are stopping what they\u2019re doing to watch the latest Knives Out movie. With so little media to make up the modern mystery genre, it\u2019s no wonder that people are flocking towards the franchise that\u2019s given pop-culture the modern Columbo.\u00a0 Despite the general quality of Knives Out…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":4723,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,136,8,91],"tags":[331],"staff_name":[290],"class_list":["post-4722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-entertainment","category-movies","category-opinions","category-reviews","tag-january-26","staff_name-ellie-andrews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/memorialswordandshield.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/memorialswordandshield.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/memorialswordandshield.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/memorialswordandshield.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/memorialswordandshield.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4722"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/memorialswordandshield.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4733,"href":"https:\/\/memorialswordandshield.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4722\/revisions\/4733"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/memorialswordandshield.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/memorialswordandshield.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/memorialswordandshield.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/memorialswordandshield.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4722"},{"taxonomy":"staff_name","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/memorialswordandshield.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/staff_name?post=4722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}