Review: 'Wake Up Dead Man,' the third 'Knives Out' whodunnit, has Daniel Craig solving a murder and pondering the mysteries of faith

Benoit Blanc — the dapper, drawling detective that Daniel Craig plays for the third time in the delicious “Knives Out” sequel “Wake Up Dead Man” — has a great “impossible murder” on his hands, further complicated because the person on the scene helping him may in fact be the killer.

Though Blanc is the first person writer-director shows us in the movie, he doesn’t come into play for a good 40 minutes or so. To get there, we start with the narrator, Father Jud Duplenticy, played by Josh O’Connor. Father Jud, a former boxer who punched out a deacon, is assigned to a remote church in upstate New York, Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude. That church is ruled with an iron hand by Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), whose fire-and-brimstone sermons are a far cry from Father Jud’s gentle pastoral view of the Roman Catholic Church.

The core of the parishioners seem to favor Mons. Wicks’ approach. Those include: Vera Draven (Kerry Washington), a sharp-eyed attorney; Dr. Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), the town’s physician, who’s in a funk since his wife left him; Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny), a cellist who thinks Wicks’ prayers can cure her chronic pain; Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), a formerly successful science-fiction author who’s turned into a conspiracy-mongering conservative; and Cy Draven (Daryl McCormack), Vera’s stepson and a cynically internet-savvy Republican political candidate.

There’s also Wicks’ always lurking assistant, Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close), who sternly oversees the church’s records and helps him keep discipline over the flock. Her one weakness is her love for the church’s groundskeeper, Samson Holt (Thomas Haden Church), who would rather watch a baseball game than listen to Wicks berate newcomers over their sinful ways.

Father Jud aims to make some changes, to bring some New Testament tenderness to Wicks’ Old Testament fearfulness. The ensuing conflict takes a grim turn when, in the middle of Mass on Palm Sunday, Wicks is stabbed to death in a small storage room near the altar, a space where it seems impossible for anyone to enter or leave without being noticed. The first one to get to Wicks is Father Jud, and soon he becomes the only suspect that the local police chief, Geraldine Scott (Mila Kunis), has on her list.

Here’s where Blanc enters the picture, and from there it’s an exhilarating mystery — a game, as several characters call it, in which Blanc combs through the evidence, picks through people’s alibis and unravels the dark secrets of every parishioner.

Johnson is also playing a serious game here, in which Jud and Blanc discuss and sometimes debate the differences between faith and science, between giving oneself over to a higher power and devoting oneself to reason and empirical data. Those moments make “Wake Up Dead Man” more than just a fun murder romp, like “Knives Out” and its first sequel, “Glass Onion,” but give the audience some deeper questions to ponder than just “whodunnit?”

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‘Wake Up Dead Man’

★★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, November 26, in theaters; starts streaming December 12 on Netflix. Rated R for … Running time: 149 minutes.