Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery — Delightfully devious

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for violent content, bloody images, profanity and crude sexual content

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang

Writer/director Rian Johnson certainly hasn’t lost his fiendishly macabre touch.

 

Although it runs a bit too long, this third entry in the Knives Out series is another gleeful descent into depraved behavior, with a stellar cast dropped into the middle of a twisty whodunit. Orchestrating its slow unraveling, as before, is Daniel Craig’s idiosyncratic private detective, Benoit Blanc.

 

Under the watchful gaze of Police Chief Scott (Mila Kunis) and Father Jud Duplenticy
(Josh O'Connor, right), Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) examines an unexpected clue.

Blanc’s hair has grown longer, and he has left his droll Southern witticisms behind (and they’re missed), but he still cuts a commanding figure in costume designer Jenny Eagan’s debonair outfits.

But we don’t meet Blanc until the second act. Employing his usual penchant for non-linear storytelling, Johnson first introduces us to ex-boxer turned devout young priest Jud Duplenticy (John O’Connor), who regards himself as “young, dumb and full of Christ.” He narrates earlier events while writing … what? A witness statement? A confession? A memoir?

 

Duplenticy lives with the burden of having killed a fellow fighter during his boxing days, the shame of which drove him into the priesthood. But his temper still gets away from him at times, most recently resulting in a “reprimand” that finds him sent to Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, in upstate New York’s Chimney Rock (shades of Stephen King!).

 

He’s assigned to assist firebrand Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), who rules this tiny parish with a blend of charismatic smarm and thundering, shock-and-awe sermons. In short, he’s a sadistic bully … and proud of it.

 

The primary members of his flock — those who tolerate or cater to Wicks’ whims, or (worse yet) believe in his God-given powers — include:

 

• staunchly faithful church-goer Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close);

 

• tightly wound lawyer Vera Draven (Kerry Washington);

 

• town doctor Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner);

 

• bestselling author Lee Ross (Andrew Scott);

 

• aspiring politician Cy Draven (Daryl McCormack);

 

• wheelchair-bound concert cellist Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeney); and

 

• circumspect groundskeeper Samson Holt (Thomas Haden Church).

The Peanut Butter Falcon: Utterly captivating

The Peanut Butter Falcon (2019) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, brief violence and occasional profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.23.19

Precious few films deserve to be mentioned alongside Mark Twain’s richly evocative, character-driven prose.

This is one of them.

Determined to take advantage of Rule No. 1 — "Party!" — Zak (Zack Gottsagen, left) and
Tyler (Shia LaBeouf) dip rather too enthusiastically into a jug of moonshine bestowed by
an obliging store owner.

The comparison runs deeper than tone and atmosphere. Writer/directors Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz deliberately evoke the spirit of Samuel Langhorne Clemens as their endearing, deeply heartwarming tale proceeds. It’s easy to imagine Twain having concocted just such an intimate,  transformational fable, had he settled in the swampy, reed-filled inlets and quiet sandy beaches of North Carolina.

Nilson and Schwartz’s mythical saga has a similar sense of otherworldly timelessness, ingeniously leavened with a dollop of contemporary social consciousness. The script — and precisely crafted dialog — never put a foot wrong.

The result is utterly charming.

Zak (Zack Gottsagen), a young man with Down Syndrome, chafes in a nursing home for senior citizens in the final stages of life: the only facility willing to accept him, after being abandoned by his original family. Despite an inherent optimism and outward cheerfulness, he’s restless and miserable in an environment clearly not suited to his needs.

This doesn’t go unnoticed by Eleanor (Dakota Johnson), an empathetic volunteer who has tried to be a friend; at the very least, she’s closer to his age than anybody else. Zak appreciates the effort, and promises that she’ll be one of the privileged few invited to his next birthday party.

Zak’s only joy comes from endlessly re-watching an old promotional videotape starring his longtime hero: a professional wrestler dubbed the Salt Water Redneck (Thomas Haden Church). More than anything else, Zak dreams of traveling to Florida, in order to enroll at his idol’s wrestling school.

Elsewhere, personal tragedy has left Tyler (Shia LaBeouf) unable to cope with the world. At the loosest of ends, sleeping rough and incapable (unwilling?) to hold a steady job, he survives solely by stealing the caged catches of other crab fishermen. But that’s a dangerous gamble, when everybody similarly scrambles to stay alive; Tyler runs afoul of rival fishermen Duncan (John Hawkes) and Ratboy (Southern rapper Yelawolf), who threaten to kill him.

Zak, no stranger to escape attempts, finally succeeds one night with some assistance from his roommate, Carl (Bruce Dern, enjoying a late-career Renaissance playing feisty old coots). Alas, the effort leaves him clad solely in briefs. Stumbling barefoot and shirtless in the dark, he finally hides beneath the tarp in a dockside skiff … which happens to belong to Tyler, who has just compounded his problems with a stupid and spiteful act.

Forced to flee by boat into the reedy inlets, with Duncan and Ratboy in vengeful pursuit, Tyler is well away before he discovers the stowaway.

Max: A fairly good dog

Max (2015) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG, and quite generously, despite brutal behavior and considerable peril
By Derrick Bang

To quote the Joni Mitchell song, Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got, ’til it’s gone.

Case in point: Whatever happened to real-world, family-friendly adventure films?

A boy and his dog: The bond takes awhile to establish, but once Justin (Josh Wiggins) and
Max learn to trust each other, they're inseparable. Which is a good thing, because events
in Justin's neighborhood are about to get rather nasty...

By which I mean, films that a) aren’t animated; and b) don’t involve witchcraft, fantasy or science-fiction. In other words, stories that could — theoretically — happen to the rambunctious kids who live a few doors away.

Once upon a time, such efforts were a Hollywood genre staple. Early Disney live-action dramas perfected the formula: Consider the French slum children who foil a bank robbery, in 1963’s The Horse Without a Head; or the kidnappers who meet their match in a love-struck teenager (Hayley Mills), an FBI agent who’s allergic to cats (Dean Jones) and a wandering Siamese tomcat, in 1965’s That Darn Cat. (Don’t waste your time with the dreadful 1997 remake.)

Earlier still, avid fans thrilled to the adventures of Rin Tin Tin, Lassie and their various youthful companions. Nor should we overlook plucky little Benji, who saved two kidnapped children in his 1974 movie debut. (Sadly, Benji’s various sequels weren’t nearly as satisfying.)

Of late, though, such films haven’t merely become endangered; they’re all but extinct. I can’t think of one more recent than director Danny Boyle’s larkish Millions, and its saga of a 7-year-old British lad who stumbles onto a heist taking place just as the Euro is about to become the coin of the realm. And that was back in 2004.

All of which makes Max a welcome relief from the spell-wielding teens, post-apocalyptic heroines and animated toys/animals/robots/fairies that invariably get summoned when parents look at their moppets and say, “Okay, what shall we watch tonight?”

Director Boaz Yakin deserves credit for trying to revive a moribund genre, and he chose wisely with respect to the military service dog at the heart of this (mostly) engaging tale. At its best, Max is heartwarming, suspenseful and just amusing enough.

But Yakin and co-scripter Sheldon Lettich never quite get the tone right. Their script is clumsy and occasionally sloppy about details; their two-legged protagonist spends too much time being an unforgivably obnoxious little toad; and the general level of peril is way over the top for their film’s generous PG rating. Nasty, gun-toting weapons smugglers and the Mexican Mafia? Seriously? Whatever happened to bungling bank robbers?

We Bought a Zoo: Lions and tigers and anxiety ... oh, my!

We Bought a Zoo (2011) • View trailer
Four stars. Rating: PG, for no particular reason
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.28.11


Writer/director Cameron Crowe, absent from the screen for far too long, has returned with the season’s sweetest, gentlest family film.

The care of exotic animals can't be learned from books, despite Benjamin Mee's
(Matt Damon, center) effort to do so. To his growing frustration — and the
tolerant amusement of zookeepers Robin Jones (Patrick Fugit) and Kelly Foster
(Scarlett Johansson) — poor Benjamin keeps revealing his ignorance. And so
he begins to wonder: Can willingness and hard work ever be enough?

We Bought a Zoo is adapted from journalist Benjamin Mee’s engaging 2008 memoir, which boasts the much more irresistible title of We Bought a Zoo: The Amazing True Story of a Young Family, a Broken Down Zoo, and the 200 Wild Animals that Change Their Lives Forever. The setting has shifted from England’s Devonshire to the California countryside, and the Mee family has been compressed a bit, but Crowe has retained the saga’s essential plot points and — most of all — its heart.

Thanks to an engaging ensemble cast of misfits, eccentrics and one incredibly adorable child — along with Crowe’s always excellent ear for dialogue — the result is an easygoing, crowd-pleasing charmer.

Sadly, it may get lost in the holiday glut of noisier, flashier competition. That’d be a shame, because Crowe’s film is the perfect all-ages alternative to the third Chipmunks flick (too dumb for adults) or Hugo (probably too high-tone for children, much as I hate to admit it).

Benjamin (Matt Damon) introduces himself, via a voice-over montage, as a veteran Los Angeles newspaper reporter with a thrill for adventure and the skill to finesse a story from reluctant and dangerous subjects. Unfortunately, nothing could have prepared him for the biggest adventure of all: functioning as a single parent in the wake of his wife Katherine’s untimely death ... still a raw, recent wound as this film begins.

This tragedy has left the family at forlorn loose ends, with Benjamin wondering — on a daily basis — if he’s doing anything right. Seven-year-old Rosie (the beguiling Maggie Elizabeth Jones), wise beyond her years, points out that he hasn’t lost his hair like some of her classmates’ fathers. She does this while carefully making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the next day’s school lunches: one of many details that Benjamin invariably overlooks during early-morning chaos.

Fourteen-year-old Dylan, alas, is a different story. He’s an angry, withdrawn kid whose artistic talent leans toward shocking depictions of gory decapitations. He also has been expelled from school, which gives Benjamin an excuse to attempt the impossible: eradicate Katherine’s memory entirely, by moving to someplace where he won’t be surrounded by constant reminders of their giddily happy times together.

Benjamin and Rosie subsequently take a house-hunting excursion with a newly minted Realtor (J.B. Smoove) who nervously wears his inexperience on his sleeve, but nonetheless has his heart in the right place. He therefore advises caution when Rosie, paging through scores of listings that aren’t quite right, sets her heart on a rustic home surrounded by 18 acres of California countryside (actually Thousand Oaks), nine miles from the nearest store.

There’s a catch, and a big one: The home comes attached to the dilapidated Rosemoor Animal Park, complete with scores of exotic animals and a dedicated but long-unpaid staff.