If Glass Onion wasn’t quite the deserving follow-up to Knives Out that many of us had hoped it would be (it was more focused on the bigger rather than better), it was at the very least a deserved victory lap. Writer-director Rian Johnson’s 2019 whodunnit brought us back to the starry, slippery fun of the 70s and 80s, when films like this would be a dime a dozen and it was a surprise hit, making almost eight times its budget at the global box office.
Johnson’s threequel, Wake Up Dead Man, is the second as part of his Netflix deal (one that cost an estimated $450m) and arrives as the whodunnit genre has found itself close to oversaturation on both big but mostly small screen. Yet as many murders as there might have now been in buildings or residences involving couples and strangers of questionable perfection, nothing has quite captured that same sense of kicky, sharp-witted fun that Johnson had shared with us way back when.