Welcome to my 2026 project honoring the first quarter of the 21st century. In this extremely lax project I watch a movie from each year to hopefully give myself some insight with what has changed within cinema during this century. At the very least I’ll have watched 25 interesting films and paired them with a dinner inspired by the movie, the place its from, and maybe a little bit of nostalgia for the past 25 years. You can watch along with me or find out what’s up next by checking out the full list of movies.
Today’s feature is from the year 2025, we are headed to the America to contemplate murder most unholy in…
Movie: Wake Up Dead Man
Year: 2025
Director: Rian Johnson
Country: United States of America
The Elevator Pitch: A young priest is transferred to a church with an eccentric and cruel Monsignor who is murdered in such a way that only detective Benoit Blanc can solve it.
How Was the Movie?:
I’m going to start by saying that I did really enjoy the film overall but I think like Glass Onion, I just didn’t love it. I think there’s two types of Rian Johnson scripts, the tightly wound ones that leave almost no space to breathe where every element points laser focused at the theme OR ones that go on sprawling journeys that fill in the world and this one unfortunately is the second type. While I always appreciate a fun ride it doesn’t always actually come together for me which leaves me very annoyed.
What I will say is that like always the acting, costumes, lighting, and editing in Wake Up Dead Man is basically beyond reproach. The scenes of Grace ransacking the church play out like an 80’s music video fever dream and they basically had me rolling off the couch cheering.
The actual meat of the story, the theme and the main character of Jud are superb. The interplay of dialogue between Benoit and Jud as they work through their complex feelings on religion and its place in society are probably just sorely needed for most of the audience and I’m always the most pleased to see movies and other media that can move beyond on the “is god for real???” question.
However, it’s the “details” aka pretty much everything else that really made me come to not enjoy this film as much as I wanted to. The fact that the characters all exist as red herrings and basically none of them have enough development to where I actually believe any of their motives to the actual murder itself which is so ridiculous it sounds faked left me a little cold. It more like the murders in Johnson’s TV series, Poker Face than the murders of the first two Benoit Blanc films. I supposed in the end I don’t mind that a murder might be to explain an idea to an audience but I actually like when the murderer has a for-real motive and not a motive that we pulled out of thin air and goes against everything we’ve been shown about a character. I’ve got my own way this could be fixed subtly but it also leads into the other part of the film I didn’t like which is this film is overly long with too many side quests and the set up at the beginning of Jud writing a note to Benoit takes too long to become meaningful. I just found myself saying “it’s okay this is going somewhere” which is what I say when I’m watching a mediocre movie.
I think most of the praise for this movie is about its central themes and acting which are both fabulous and it’s an easy watch but I just found it so lacking in anything to say BUT the main theme of religion as a possible force for truth and love in the world. I know a lot of people need to hear that but I don’t so I just sat through the movie and then had to contend with the fact that none of these people had the motives OR skills to commit this crime.
Also Andrew Scott’s character is my least favorite and I feel bad typing that out!
Despite all my complaints it’s still a good movie and I might return to it in a few years and see if my opinion changed (it didn’t about Glass Onion but I find the movie oddly charming anyway, and way more quotable as well than this one). I did really like it! I promise! But the unfortunately high bar it had to clear was Knives Out and in the face of that it didn’t make it.
TL;DR This movie was Last Jedi for me. Big highs and big lows, it’s pretty good but it needed 1-2 more script passes. I hope Rian Johnson makes 20 more of these if wants to though because they’re all fun.
What was for Dinner?:
Okay so technically these are the leftovers from the dinner and I don’t have a picture of the actual dinner because what happened was I ordered KFC for delivery and they accidentally messed up our order, gave us someone else’s food, and then it took 90 minutes to get the correct order so we simply uh, ate the wrong order. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten KFC before and it was actually pretty good! For the leftovers we had a bucket of drumsticks and I made potatoes and a salad to turn it into a full meal and that was fantastic also. Frying chicken is one of those things that I think is best left to people with commercial frying machines because it just goes so much better than deep frying in your own house – maybe that’s a controversial opinion.
I would probably order from KFC again if I had a specific craving for fried chicken. It wasn’t anything particularly special but it was crispy and good and the chicken was falling off the bone. You don’t really get a ton of fried chicken in Estonia so it’s kind of a special treat.
Anyway I’m as surprised as you are that this is the last of the 26 movies in this project. Hopefully this series was pretty fun and you’re already getting ready for next year where we explore movies from A to Z in our 2027 project (list coming soon). See you there!