Wake Up Dead Man review: Confessions of a Dangerous Kind
Benoit Blanc is a showman. Sure he’s a brilliant detective, but he doesn’t solve mysteries out of societal obligation or some pathological need to do justice. What animates him is the unveiling—the moment when he synthesizes all of the scattered clues and dangling threads into a cogent and satisfying portrait before a cluster of rapt onlookers. For him, the most important element of any crime isn’t the motive or the method. It’s the audience.
That Rian Johnson, the writer-director of three Blanc-centered pictures, shares his hero’s canny crowd-pleasing instincts has long been obvious. Whether making movies about high-school Bogarts or time-traveling assassins or intergalactic rebels, Johnson is a born entertainer, using his craft and his smarts to tell elegant, engaging stories whose crisp resolutions invariably inspire admiration and applause. Wake Up Dead Man is his third Blanc film, following Knives Out and Glass Onion, and it thus carries the inherent risk of diminishing returns—the danger that this now-franchise’s vibrant charms might calcify into shtick. Read More
