‘Wake Up Dead Man’ Defines Justice Differently

There are only so many ways to surprise in the construction of a murder mystery, which is why the set-up of Wake Up Dead Man is understood from the start and goes so far as to cite its sources: Here is a locked-room murder, a la John Dickson Carr's The Hollow Man, and, as we all know, there are only four ways to commit a theoretically possible locked-room murder. If you don't know, the movie will teach it to you. By nature of the genre, the ending of the movie is understood as well: As a romance ends with a happily ever after and a comedy—at least Shakespearean style—ends with a marriage, every whodunnit will end with who did it. Even the ways you can be surprised are understood: It was the person who hired the detective! All of the suspects were in on it! It was the murdered person herself!

For all the exhaustion of franchising, a murder mystery is the ultimate, perhaps least cynical, form. The burden of the traditional murder mystery series is to do something new each time, complicating the twists and turns of the mystery enough so that the surprise of who did it in the end is, well, a surprise, and not so obtuse as to be unguessable. The latter point is, depending on the viewer, not a necessity; I am personally happy simply noticing the writer's sleight of hand for including relevant details, and rarely think actively enough to select a suspect or concoct a possible solution. It is also better for a mystery to err on the side of complication because after all, the hero detective in a murder mystery is necessarily smarter than everyone else in the room, including the audience. Make that detective charming and believable enough, and you can't resent them, or the narrative, for winning every single time.