WAKE UP DEAD MAN: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY

Here's the honest tally. This is a handsomely made movie — the production values are high, the lighting does real work, and Josh O'Connor and Daniel Craig both deliver strong performances. There's a genuinely interesting debate at its center between an atheist detective and a faithful priest about sin, forgiveness, and God.

But the cost is steep. More than 40 obscenities and profanities pepper the script, including irreverent misuse of Jesus's name. A long, crude confession scene, strong sexual references, rear nudity, and pointed violence round out the content. On top of that, the film builds its central conservative Christian character as an aggressive, abusive caricature — a portrait the source calls false and politically slanted, not a fair picture of the millions who fill American pews each week.

Add in a script that juggles too many storylines and a twist less clever than the franchise's earlier outings, and there's little reason to spend two hours here. Skip it.

Father Jud, a former boxer turned priest, is transferred to a small upstate New York congregation led by the charismatic, hard-edged Monsignor Wicks. Their pastoral styles collide immediately — one preaches grace, the other wields anger as a tool. When Wicks announces he's closing the church and plans to expose the congregation's failures, tensions boil over. Then, on Palm Sunday, Wicks drops dead mid-sermon. Atheist detective Benoit Blanc arrives to untangle a church full of suspects, each with a motive of their own.

Three stars means real craft with real limits, and that's exactly what's here. Director Rian Johnson uses lighting almost as a character, giving the film visual depth, and the acting is a clear strength — O'Connor's faithful priest and Craig's brilliant detective both land well.

Where it falters is structure. The mystery juggles too many storylines and subplots that add little, the final twist is more obvious than in the earlier KNIVES OUT films, and plot holes creep in along the way. The result is a good-looking, well-acted film that's simply less satisfying and less sharp than its predecessors.

There's real gospel material tucked inside this mystery. Father Jud's backstory is a genuine testimony of transformation — a man who killed someone in the boxing ring and found forgiveness and a new life in Jesus Christ. Characters pray in Jesus's name, and the film lets a priest speak plainly about grace. That's worth noting.

But the film sets that good material inside a mixed, pagan-leaning worldview, and its portrait of conservative Christianity is where the trouble lies. Monsignor Wicks — aggressive, physically abusive, obsessed with politics rather than the souls in his care — functions as a stand-in for patriotic, conservative churchgoers broadly, and other characters reinforce the same false caricature: professing Christians who don't act like Christians, and a script that implies people don't really change just because they say they believe. That's not a fair likeness of the tens of millions of Americans who fill church pews every week, nor of a faith that teaches turning the other cheek rather than the sword. The atheist detective, for his part, is given every chance to encounter the gospel and never quite does.

Underneath the murder plot is a real question the film can't fully answer: can people actually change? Scripture says yes — "if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come" (2 Corinthians 5:17). Father Jud's story gestures at that truth even while the film around him doubts it.

There's a good movie's worth of craft here, and even a real gospel thread in one character's story. But between the excessive profanity, the crude sexual content, and a script that flattens conservative Christians into a caricature, this one isn't worth your evening or your conscience. Our answer stands: skip it. For something the whole family can actually watch together, start with our latest.