Surely the first murder-mystery to pay active homage to Scooby-Doo, Rian Johnson’s latest addition to the franchise he created and presides over with irrepressible glee is the most out-there and fun so far. There’s no great Dane and no one leaps into anyone’s arms in terror, but a goofy spirit runs through its veins – along with all the usual poisons and industrial-strength tranquilisers you’d expect to find in a movie full of narrative trapdoors and Grand Guignol excesses.
It’s on the long side – think bread knife, rather than something for chopping carrots – and the ending is hardly the last word in bow-tying neatness, but Johnson has assembled his strongest cast yet and provides them with entertainingly ‘extra’ characters to inhabit – and for us to tut at. Best of all, Daniel Craig and Josh O’Connor form a sleuthing double act with shades of Holmes and Watson.
The Mystery Machine here, of course, is the stylish old banger belonging to Craig’s southern gent detective Benoit Blanc, a bourbon-sipping Columbo eight steps ahead of his smug suspects. He arrives in a rural New York community presided over by Josh Brolin’s bullying Catholic priest, Jefferson Wicks. Someone has been murdered but who did the deed? And does a priceless missing diamond have something to do with it?
Daniel Craig and Josh O’Connor are a double act with shades of Holmes and Watson
The list of possibles includes Andrew Scott as a sci-fi novelist turned conspiracy theorist, Jeremy Renner’s cash-strapped town doctor; Cailee Spaeny is disabled cellist; Glenn Close’s fanatical church lady; Kerry Washington’s stressed-out lawyer and her wannabe politician stepson (Good Luck to You, Leo Grande’s Daryl McCormack). The latter’s habit of filming everything and sticking it on YouTube provides clues and red herrings in equal measures.
Helping Craig’s crime-solver sort the suspicious from the merely obnoxious is O’Connor’s young cleric, Jud Duplenticy, a one-time boxer with a skeleton or two of his own, who has been banished to the parish to suffer under its tyrannic priest.
Taking a leaf out of Conclave’s book, Wake Up Dead Man has fun smuggling all sorts of one-upmanship and sneakiness under its religious vestments. Wicks is intended to be a Trump-y figure, blaring down division and enmity from the pulpit, and his flock surrogates for some of modern America’s more fringe voices. As with the previous Knives Outs, the satire is applied in broad but enjoyable brushstrokes.
Blanc and Duplenticy, the atheist and the believer, joust satisfyingly over a crime that has all the signs of miraculous conception. The pair of Brits are a blast, with O’Connor showing his comic range and Craig showing new sides to his character as he finds himself moved by his sorta-sidekick’s humility and needing to put his contempt for religion to one side to crack the case.
There are plenty of fun supporting turns, too, with Jeffrey Wright as an unexpectedly sweary priest, and Sideways’ Thomas Haden Church playing the mild-mannered groundskeeper. (Listen out, too, for a voice cameo from the director’s old Brick star Joseph Gordon-Levitt.) Only Mila Kunis gets lumbered with a duff role as the town’s police chief.
Surely they know by now just to leave it to Benoit?
In select cinemas worldwide Nov 26. On Netflix Dec 12.