Knives Out Threequel brings fun back to detective franchise

Wake Up Dead Man ★★★★★

- Benjamin Lee

If Glass Onion wasn't quite the 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.

The writer-director Rian Johnson's threequel, Wake Up Dead Man, is the second as part of his Netflix deal (one that cost an estimated £333m) and arrives as the whodunnit genre has found itself close to oversaturation.

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 shared with us way back when.

His first Knives Out film premiered at the Toronto film festival to one of the most buzzed audience reactions I can remember, a thrill I was able to feel once again as he returned to unveil his latest chapter, a rip-roaring return to form that shows the series to be confidently back on track and heading somewhere with plenty more places to go on the way.