In Review: ‘Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,’ ‘Zootopia 2’

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
Dir. Rian Johnson
144 min.

Now that Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig have completed their Benoit Blanc mysteries—or at least their obligations with this trilogy—it’s worth noting the degree of difficulty as yet another entry in the series slices through the pool’s surface with nary a ripple. Plenty of suspense thrillers have pulled off “whodunit” twists, but the whodunit as a subgenre has a woefully poor success rate. It’s hard to stay ahead of the audience without cheating while also properly serving characters up and down the ensemble. Plus there’s the under-appreciated “whydoit” factor: Is there any actual meaning to draw from all these turns of the plot or is the audience being jerked around for the sake of it? There’s a certain appeal to getting fooled by clever storytelling, but it can feel like empty calories if there’s no other thought behind it. 

With the Knives Out series, Johnson has seized on the opportunity to craft his own elaborate puzzle boxes, much like the “invitation” that opens the second film, Glass Onion, and play around with misdirection and nested twists that lead into bigger ones. Yet these ship-of-fools ensembles have also doubled as his barometer of the culture at large and the greedy, hubristic souls who seem to dominate it, whether they’re the entitled children (and children’s children) of a famous author, the sycophantic “disruptors” who surround a self-styled tech-bro visionary, or, in the new Wake Up Dead Man, the congregants of a church led by a toxic cult of personality. Though Blanc is the sole common denominator in terms of character, there’s a connection between the films, as if Johnson is harmonizing his thoughts about present-day society and faintly hoping that decency and justice—always the underdogs in these scenarios—will win out in the end. 

To a degree, Wake Up Dead Man feels a bit more timeless than the other two Knives Out movies simply because its primary location, a Catholic parish in a small community in upstate New York, feels so damnably cloistered and behind the times. (Imagine First Reformed if Ethan Hawke’s priest didn’t give a damn about anything.) Yet there’s something subtly damning and contemporary about a church led by a fire-and-brimstone type who demands (and enforces) loyalty, is suspicious of outsiders, and leads through a toxic appeal to people’s worst instincts. The underdog this time around is Rev. Jud Deplenticy (Josh O’Connor), an idealistic yet impulsive young priest assigned to work alongside Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), who rules his parish with an iron fist. Any worries Jud has about being welcomed into his new home are answered when Wicks asks him to administer confession and then proceeds to detail all the times he’s masturbated. All the Our Fathers and Hail Marys in the world would seem powerless to break that habit. 

Wake Up Dead Man is a gothic murder mystery, so of course there’s a dead body and a reason for Blanc to puzzle over who might be responsible. It’s not worth getting into the murder itself, but as usual, there’s a healthy list of suspects, including Wicks’ devoted secretary and enforcer (Glenn Close), the groundskeeper (Thomas Haden Church), a frustrated author (Andrew Scott), the town doctor (Jeremy Renner), a physically afflicted former cellist (Cailee Spaeny), and a lawyer (Kerry Washington) who’s been raising her father’s illegitimate son (Daryl McCormack), who has grown up to be an extremely online conservative operative. They all have secrets, individually and collectively, that account for a certain hostility, stoked by a leader whose sermons are so off-putting, he’s incapable of drawing additional sheep into his flock. 

As usual with the Knives Out series, Johnson stays well out ahead of his audience, and Craig gets more than one delightful drawing-room moment when he pulls together the elusive facts of the case. Yet beyond the special gothic kick that this setting allows—there are times when the film becomes at least horror-adjacent—Wake Up Dead Man stands out for a less egalitarian approach to the characters than the other two, which may thin out the suspects, but gives the superb O’Connor more room to operate. As a priest who’s sorting through a pugnacious upbringing that he hasn’t entirely shed, O’Connor stands out as the flip side of Monsignor Wicks—both are tempestuous by nature, but only one seems committed to change. From the mighty pulpit of his Knives Out series, Johnson wants to appeal to our better angels. — Scott Tobias

Wake Up Dead Man opens in theaters tomorrow. It starts streaming on Netflix on December 12th.

Zootopia 2
Dir. Jared Bush and Byron Howard
108 min.

Midway through Zootopia 2, the film arrives at an unusually self-aware gag. Mid-chase, our heroes pass a bootleg DVD dealer whose wares are dominated by sequels and live-action remakes to some familiar Disney titles with names reworked to fit a cinematic world filled with anthropomorphic animals. Like a lot of Disney’s output these days, Zootopia 2 seems to exist because of a “Sure, why not?” approach to franchise filmmaking. More Moana? A third Frozen? Sure, why not? That said, 2016’s Zootopia lends itself to a sequel more easily than others. At heart a buddy cop comedy built around a twisty conspiracy, the original film followed the mismatched team of con artist Nick Wilde (voiced by Jason Bateman) and idealistic young cop Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) as they explored the highs and lows of a city in which animals of all species coexist peacefully (at least in theory). If Lethal Weapon can inspire a string of sequels, shouldn’t Zootopia get at least one? Sure, why not?

A perfectly pleasant if not particularly ambitious second outing, Zootopia 2 doesn’t offer a strong argument against this way of thinking. As the film begins, Judy and Nick are now officially partners in the Zootopia Police Department, though the general consensus that their previous success was a fluke places them pretty low on the ZPD pecking order. Eager to change that perception, and to capture some more bad guys, Judy plunges them into an investigation that may involve a group of reptiles trying to cause trouble in the city. (Snakes and other reptiles, we learn, have been unwelcome since they were exiled elsewhere earlier in Zootopia’s history. It’s complicated.) But is that the whole story? And could the powerful Lynxley family be playing some role in some of the town’s troubles? (Mild spoiler: Probably!)

Written by the original film’s co-writer Jared Bush (who co-directs with original’s co-director Byron Howard), Zootopia 2 easily revives the chemistry between its two stars and has fun visiting previously unseen corners of its animated world. It’s bright, colorful, fast-paced and introduces some fun new supporting characters, most memorably Brian Winndancer, a vain equine action star-turned-mayor voiced by Patrick Warburton. It also leans heavily on winking pop culture references (kids love allusions to The Shining, apparently) and features a not-that-involving plot that deepens the series’ lore while raising more questions than it answers. More frustratingly, Zootopia 2 creeps up to the line of saying something relevant to the current political moment’s anti-immigrant sentiments without daring to cross it. It doesn’t feel as fresh as the winning original, but it also never plays like a desperate cash-in, which immediately makes it better than a lot of Disney’s recent output. But is it worth seeing? Sure. Why not? —Keith Phipps

Zootopia 2 slithers into theaters tonight.

Programming note: We're focusing on new releases during this short, pre-Thanksgiving stretch but we'll be back to our full publication schedule next week. Look for our reviews of Hamnet and The Secret Agent tomorrow.