If you were wondering whether or not Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig would eventually drop the ball (or burn the Mona Lisa, so to speak) on their Knives Out series, the answer appears to be…not this time. Reviews are in for Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, and they are stellar. Record-setting, even.
Wake Up Dead Man is the third film in the ongoing mystery series, and it’s gotten a 94% critic scores and 94% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. For comparison:
- Knives Out – 97% critic, 92% audience
- Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery -91% critic, 92% audience
- Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery – 94% critic, 94% audience.
That makes it the highest audience-scored Knives Out movie so far, but wait, you want more records? Well, this is also Rian Johnson’s highest audience scores as a director (it may not be a surprise Knives Out movies make up the top three). On top of that, we can also look at actor Daniel Craig’s catalogue to see that it’s the top one for him as well. Outside of the Knives Out series, his first turn as James Bond in Casino Royale had a 90% audience score.
The fact that both Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig say they’d be content to make Benoit Blanc mysteries forever should not be much of a surprise, given all this. Fly to fun locations, meet a dozen new A-list friends, get rave reviews, air on the biggest streaming platform on earth which also allows you a bit of a theatrical release. What else could you ask for? (Besides a full theatrical release). This is incidentally the reason these scores are coming out now, Wake Up Dead Man has hit select theaters, where it will run for just two weeks before the movie fully moves onto Netflix. It will start streaming on the service a bit before that on December 12.
Here’s the synopsis and the stacked cast for Wake Up Dead Man, with the trailer below it:
Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) returns for his most dangerous case yet in the third and darkest chapter of Rian Johnson’s murder mystery opus. Starring Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, and Thomas Haden Church.
We do not have an early greenlight for Knives Out 4 yet, though it certainly seems more likely than not, given Johnson’s past quotes. He has apparently mused some more about Star Wars, and we recently learned he shot down episode IX after The Last Jedi got him so much hate online. He briefly had a trilogy in the works before that was canned, and now? This seems like a simpler life.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
