I wasn’t really looking for it, but off the top of my head I thought they did a pretty good job of showing us her thought process when she showed up to arrest the priest: yeah, for everyone else in that church, none of them could get to that little room and stab the guy in the back before Duplenticy got there and got blood on his hands — but Duplenticy could, and so she figured that Duplenticy did, and she said so.
And I think his voice was a little off, while we’re at it. Not quite the silly affectation we loved in his earlier movies.
I liked it. I thought it moved slower than the other two, but I don’t know where it stands among the 3. I’ve seen the other two a few times so I’ll have to watch this a few times more to assess. I feel these movies’ second viewings, when you’re not trying to figure it out, is almost like watching a different movie.
I think my favorite thing about them is that they are fair mysteries. Hard, sure. They’re not Murder She Wrote or something. But fair. And even if you figure out who, you don’t necessarily know the how and why big picture stuff.
I don’t know if I’m reading too much into it or if everyone here is happy to say, uh, no, that was super obvious, but: the whole plan by a devout Christian was to go along with a hoax where a bearded figure pushes an obstacle away from his tomb and seems to miraculously come back from the dead, because the whole point is: that’s how someone who believes in spreading a Christian message would act rather than let the truth come out about a mundane sinner of a preacher, amirite?
The movie comments on that. Cy is telling Jud his plan for how, with his inheritance, he and his father could build an empire. Jud says, “Like Star Wars?” and without missing a beat, Cy says, “Yeah, like the rebels!”
Which is the exact level of self-reflection the real-world Cys are capable of.
and IIRC, didn’t Jud make a sort of ‘wait, what?’ expression?
I thought that interaction was a nod to The Last Jedi, which of course Johnson infamously directed.
I watched this last night on Netflix, and it was okay. I felt it was the weakest of the three (but Glass Onion was my favorite of the series so far, so I guess I’m a bit of an outlier.) It wasn’t as funny as the first two, and Benoit Blanc seemed pretty unessential to the plot. It would not have taken much to write him out of the film entirely, and just make the younger priest the protagonist detective. Which, honestly, I would have been fine with - I liked the character a lot, and thought the actor did great in the role. I’d be down for a spin-off series where Actually Christian Priest goes up against various pharisees and false prophets trying to use his religion to cover up crimes. But I went into the film expecting it to be about a flamboyant private detective with a not-entirely-convincing southern accent who exposes and humiliates various right-wing caricatures, and this wasn’t quite that.
I watched this last night with my mom, who is a Catholic and last time I checked, a Trump fan (although she may be getting over him). It made me feel uncomfortable! But she did enjoy it.
I need some help with the plot:
So like…I fell asleep for a couple of minutes. The very minutes where Martha was explaining how everything went down. I got the point that Prentice had swallowed the jewel, and I got the point where Samson was in the coffin to the end but uhm, can anyone tell me what happened to Wicks between getting out of the morgue and ending up on Doc’s basement floor?
I’d re-watch but I don’t have Netflix here.
Martha wasn’t motivated by hiding the jerk priest’s sins, she was motivated by the threat the jerk priest was presenting towards her parish. She says as much at one point, that if it had just been infidelity, the church could have gotten past it. But he was planning on destroying the church (just the local one, not, like, all of Catholicism) by publicly calling out his closest supporters, including the woman whose donations were the only thing keeping the doors open, and then fucking off to DC with his illegitimate kid to get into politics. Killing him prevented him from destroying the parish, and staging a fake ressurection would generate enough renewed interest in the parish that it would draw in new people to the church, preventing it from being shuttered by the diocese when the money fell off and attendance completely dried up.
Wicks ended up on the floor under the coffin (we see it very briefly during Martha’s confession)… they took Wicks out and Sam got in. How the body ended up at the Doc’s? I assume the Doc brought it there unseen to dissolve in the vat of green acid goo (that’s what the vat was there for), though I don’t think they mentioned that explicitly.
The groundskeeper gets out of his tomb and meets Doctor Jeremy Renner. They load Wicks’ corpse into the doctor’s car, who will then drive it to his home and dissolve it in the acid bath in his basement. He gets greedy, though, and kills the groundskeeper, intending to keep the gem for himself. Martha learns that the groundskeeper is dead, and immediately intuits that the doctor is double crossing them. She shows up at his place, pretending to be ignorant of the betrayal. The doc plans to poison her, so he can keep the gem for himself, but she pulls a Princess Bride and switches the tea cups. Doctor Renner poisons himself, and Martha dumps him into the chemical bath.
I missed exactly how Wicks ended up only partially submerged in the acid bath, though.
There’s a shot of Martha placing his hands around the doctor’s neck, so she could still stick to the plan that Wicks was resurrected and then killed the doctor (for his sins I guess.)
They didn’t mention it. Martha posed the corpses to make it look like Wicks was strangling the Doctor, maybe to make it look like whatever the crime was only included the two of them? That part of the story wasn’t convincing to me, unless I missed some exposition.
Do we still need to use spoilers, if the whole thread is just one spoiler post after another? Can we say “HEREFORTH THERE BE SPOILERS” and dispense with the tag?
Yes, please!
Aight, Ima do it.
HEREFORTH THERE BE SPOILERS!
The original plan, I think, was to frame Jud. Martha was certainly calling him a murderer and gaslighting the shit out of him from the beginning, and the theory that he was the only one capable of committing the murder was pretty solid. Wick would rise from the dead, be caught on camera, and disappear forever, presumably into heaven. Jud would disappear into supermax.
But when Samson was dead, she knew it was either Jud or Doc who killed Samson; and when Doc said everything had gone according to plan, she knew Doc had killed Samson, and planned to kill her. So she switched it up. She switcherood the mugs and killed Doc, and then had to account for his death; so she staged a scene where Wicks had risen from the dead and killed Doc in vengeance (which is, to her credit, entirely in character for jolly old St. Wicks). An autopsy would reveal Doc’s doping, so the acid bath removed that evidence. If they reautopsied Wicks and found the dope in his system, so much the better: proof that he’d been murdered by the doctor.
She maintains the miracle of resurrection, albeit in a much grislier fashion, and sets up a tableau that points the finger away from her.
Wait, so her plan involved the police and everyone involved actually believing that Wicks actually rose from the dead?
And we’re supposed to believe that she would have gotten away with it if not for this meddlesome priest?
Yes. Or not so much that the police literally believed he rose from the dead, but that they couldn’t explain it and other people believed it to be true, and came to the church to increase the flock.
The cops don’t need to believe any supernatural explanation for the plan to work. They’d likely assume that Wicks staged his own death, and is hiding out in Mexico or something. If they assume he was never actually dead, they’re going to stop looking for his murderers and start looking for co-conspirators, which also gives them a bit more cover.
The parishioners are already primed to accept any explanation that validates their faith in Wicks, so they’ll go right along with it.
A video of the murder victim walking out of his own tomb would make it hard to stick a murder charge on Jud, which might have been part of Martha’s plan. Shift suspicion onto Jud so that nobody looks too closely at the actual perpetrators, but leave an out so an innocent man doesn’t spend his life in prison.