Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
Limu Emu and Doug. Here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty, Liberty. Liberty. Savings vary unwritten by Liberty Mutual insurance company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts. Tired of holiday spending? Try TikTok's slash and free Pick products. Share your link and slash the price down to zero. Free items, free shipping. Open TikTok, search, slash free and start slashing. Today. It's much more exciting to me when you get, you know, a group of people who are, like, coming up to you and really, really excited about it. And then there are other people who walk out, just, I mean, literally saying it was the worst movie I've ever seen. Having those two extremes, to me, is you is the mark of the type of movie that I want to make. Alrighty, folks, we're here to review Wake Up Deadman. It's the latest Knives out mystery from director Rian Johnson, responsible for masterpieces like the Last Jedi. And Glass Onion, both of which you can view my prior reviews. Obviously, I love them. It is filled with stupid characters and stupid writing and Rian Johnson's a stupid, stupid man. We'll get to that in a moment. Wake up. The latest Knives out mystery from director Ryan Johnson. Okay, so gigantic cast. You look at this cast and you think, this could be like an all time great murder mystery, right? This could be an Agatha Christie murder mystery. You got Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc, the private detective. You have Josh o' Connor as John Duplentisy, who is a priest and former boxer. Good actor. He's good. Glenn Close. You have Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott. A veritable wealth of riches, a cornucopia, and somehow Rian Johnson blows all of it. I will say that the movie holds your interest. It holds your interest because it moves pretty fast, but it violates the same cardinal rule as Glass Onion. It's so dumb. It's so dumb. It's brilliant. No? And this drives me up a wall. If you're going to present a mystery like the original Knives. Yeah. You must present the clues to the viewer such that if they watch the first two act of the film and then the reveal happens in the third act, sure, they might have missed something, but all the clues are present. So you could have theoretically figured out who did what in the first knives out. This is actually there in the first knives out. Very unlikely you're able to figure out the mystery the first time you watch it. But once you know the answer, you could go back and re watch the first knives out. Despite all my criticisms of the film, and you could actually see how the mystery was constructed, my big critique of Glass Onion is that precisely the opposite was true. My twin sister committed suicide. You could watch the first half of the film and you would learn zero things that were really relevant to solving the mystery. Well, the same thing is true with regard to Wake Up Deadman as an actual piece of mystery filmmaking. It is lazy. It is lazy. Writing a good mystery writer provides you with all the goods, all the pieces necessary to solve the puzzle. Sure, they may be weird fitting pieces, sure they might be partially obscured, but if you really work hard, you're able to get to the end. If you watch the usual suspect, you're able to get to the conclusion. If you watch Sixth Sense, all the clues are right there on the screen. That is not true with Wake Up Deadman. Basically, there are a bunch of things that are not in evidence that are placed in the last third. And so you can be watching the film and have no idea how it's going to end. Not because you're being a bad viewer, but because the writer is lazy. He just wants you to be carried along on the entertainment value of the proposition without actually thinking about how it's constructed. It is not possible for you to get to the answer given the pieces of the puzzle, which means it's not really a murder mystery. It's just kind of more of a dramedy. And as a dramedy, on its own merits, it fails because as a dramedy, none of the characters are really interesting enough, except for perhaps Josh o' Connor's character and Daniel Craig to hold your interest. Josh Brolin, who plays the Monsignor Jefferson Wicks, is charismatic and interesting, but he's the murder victim and so he's basically out of the movie inside of the first third of the movie. Now we go to the the actual plot of the movie. Basically, Josh o' Connor is a young priest who's been deployed to this parish run by Josh Brolin's Monsignor Jefferson Witts, who is this charismatic and nasty right wing priest, is there basically to yell at all the people who come into his fold and to alienate them. The very basis of this movie is, is that religion is bad unless it's basically the opiate of the masses. That's really the view of religion. Rian Johnson clearly hates Catholicism. He clearly hates religion. His, his basic take on religion is that religion which sets moral standards and demands things of you, is bad. Only morons believe it. The original story is nonsense and trash. And basically, if it offers you any value, it's only the value in having kind of a good hearted, low level psychologist. And if you have somebody who's sympathetic to you and offers you a feeling of absolution, that this is the only thing that matters in religion, everything else is completely a waste of time. And at one point, Daniel Craig's Detective Blanc actually says that. He says to the young priest, the reason that you fell into religion is you felt guilty over the fact you were a boxer and you killed somebody in the ring. And therefore you sought a sense of absolution that you could only find in a church. And that is the message throughout the movie. Everybody who is deeply religious is a bigot or a charlatan. Everybody who follows the priest is corrupt and bad. Virtually everybody who is presented as a true villain of the piece is radically right wing. And Rian Johnson isn't making any bones about this. Like, clearly he is aiming for this. If you go character by character, everybody is either a sort of ignorant tag along. Like, for example, Thomas Hayden Church, who plays Glenn Close's husband in this. He's sort of an innocent tag along or a vicious right winger. So, for example, Josh Brolin's Wicks, he himself gets up there and he spews a bunch of kind of raging right wing rhetoric about how the world is a threat to the church and you have to fight the world. And then it shows a bunch of YouTube videos of him and they're all labeled with essentially Andrew Tate, like YouTube labels. He's supposed to be bad because he's a right wing priest. That's why he's bad. As opposed to Josh o' Connor's priest, who basically has nothing valuable to say other than I feel your pain. The Bill Clinton view of Catholicism. Then you have Glenn Close, Monsignor Witts, playing Martha Delacroix, who's a devout church lady and she is right hand woman to Jefferson Wicks, who is the son. There's like a whole backstory where Jefferson Wicks is the son of a disgraced young woman who herself is the daughter of the monsignor in the church. Basically, he's also really, really rich and he converts his entire fortune into a diamond, but won't give it to his poor daughter because he's a bad priest, right? He's. He's a terrible priest because again, any standards are terrible. And. And so he deprives her of her fortune. She ends up dying and the son can't find the fortune because the. The grandfather hides the fortune, but the young secretary knows where the fortune is. And later she becomes glam. Close. If all this is confusing, that's because it's deliberately meant to be. We'll get to more on this in a moment. First, it's often said freedom isn't free. And that's true, of course, freedom has to be defended. What isn't said enough is that online freedom isn't free either. It also has to be defended by technological force. Encryption. Strong encryption can protect your right to privacy online and defend you from hackers. So how do you get this encryption? With our sponsor, ExpressVPN. Internet providers track and sell your data. Hackers Prime Public Wi Fi governments monitor your every move online with ExpressVPN. Their powerful encryption reroutes 100% of your online activity through secure servers, making your data invisible to prying eyes. Honestly, I've been on the road a lot this year and every time I'm on the road I'm deeply reliant on my ExpressVPN because I'm on public WI fi or at a coffee shop or at an airport or something. And I don't need anybody else browsing my data. Don't just take my word for it. They invited the world's top auditors, PwC and KPMG, to verify their revolutionary trusted server technology. It's the only system that physically can't store your data because it runs entirely on volatile memory. While other companies profit from invading your privacy, ExpressVPN goes the extra mile to protect it. Find out how you can get up to four extra months by scanning the QR code on screen, clicking the link in the description box below, or by heading on over to ExpressVPN.com Ben YT Jeremy Renner, who is a town doctor, also a quasi right wing figure. There are a few references to that. You have Andrew Scott playing Lee Ross, a best selling author who's a complete throwaway. I mean again, this cast is a complete throwaway. There's so many great actors here who are just thrown away. Andrew Scott is in another movie called Blue Moon this year in which he plays Richard Rogers. And he's tremendous, he's a really great actor and they just throw him away here. He's a right wing author who's been drawn into the orbit of the monsignor, but really has no part to play in pretty much anything. He's just kind of standing there the whole movie. Nothing that he does is integral to the plot. You have Kerry Washington, who plays a tightly wound lawyer, who is the victim in all of this because she has been forced to take on the son of Monsignor Wicks, who of course has an illegitimate child. That's how you know that he's really bad, because he's a hypocrite. He's not just a right wing guy, he's also a hypocrite who fathered a child from some whore mother of his own. That person is played by Daryl McCormick. The son of Jefferson Wicks is of course an aspiring right wing politician. And so everything that he does is driven by his desire for power and his desire for glory. So the whole town is set up as this really right wing town under the auspices of this monsignor who's a right wing figure. They're all judgmental, they're all terrible, they're all evil. Some of them are participating in murder. The ones who are not terrible and evil are victims of the terrible, evil right wingers and all the rest. So that is the politics of the film. And again, the politics of the film is so scornful of traditional Catholicism, at no point do you get a real defense of Catholicism in any real way. Again, the only value of religion in this particular movie is that a religious person could theoretically make a lady feel better after she led a terrible life and then she's dying. That's pretty much the feeling of the movie. Near the end of the film, Josh o' Connor's character offers Daniel Craig the ability to come to a mass. And Daniel Craig says, there's nothing I would less like to do. Which I think is Rian Johnson's generalized perspective. So that's the politics of the film in terms of filmmaking. None of the performances stands out enough that you remember any of them. Again, the cast is just huge and everybody's a throwaway. The only characters you're gonna remember coming out of this are Daniel Craig, Josh o', Connor, Glenn Close and Josh Brolin. Everybody else is a complete throwaway. It appears that the budget on this film was $152 million. 152 million. Do you have any idea how much money that is? That is so much money. And maybe Netflix makes back their money on subscriptions because again, star studded cast, Big P and a budget and all the rest of it. But this is a lockbox mystery in A small town requiring no real special effects. Where did that money go? What? I mean, I assume some of it went into Daniel Craig's pocket. And again, I assume people like this movie. But it's 144 minutes. It's 2 hours and 24 minutes. It's overlong, it's overstuffed. Nobody gets their fair shake. None of the clues lead to the final conclusion. You can understand the clues and still not get to the final conclusion. It's lazy. It's just lazy, which is the hallmark of Rian Johnson. Rian Johnson is a lazy writer. When he comes up with these ideas, he does not bother to try to construct a story such that one domino follows another. He doesn't try to link up the pieces of the puzzle. He doesn't even try to present you with the pieces of the puzzle. He knows that if he does, he's afraid you'll outthink him. And so instead, he just hides the entire puzzle except for, like, two pieces. And then in the last third of the movie, he brings forth all of the pieces you've never seen and fills them in. And this drives me crazy, because if the thing is supposed to be clever, it should either be clever in its dialogue. It isn't. It should be clever in its character construction. It isn't. Or it should be clever in its plotting. It isn't. And even the end of the movie makes very, very little sense, like a tag on the end as to what happened with this fortune that's sort of at the center of all of this, that's been converted into the diamond. And instead of using the diamond to do something good or worthwhile or use that fortune to make people's lives better, the diamond is just sitting inside a statue at the end. It makes no damn sense. It's bad. It's a bad movie. I wish I could say that it were not a bad movie, but this has become typical for Rian Johnson, who really, I think, has a deep and abiding dislike of his own audience. He's all about just, can I subvert the expectations of my audience? He doesn't care about whether the audience expectations are good or useful. All he truly cares about is subverting the audience. I'm not sure there's a more overrated filmmaker working today than Rian Johnson. Honestly, it's astonishing how overrated he is. Well, I have my opinion. If you watched all that and now you still want to watch Knives out again, I'm not saying they're not points of entertainment. There are. They're moments, but they're buried in two and nearly a half hours of just kind of junk. It's good, right? All right. No counting for taste. I want you to know. Hey, Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday. Because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means a half day, you know, give it a try@mintmobile.com switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month. Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of network busy taxes and fees, extra cement Mobile Com.