After two installments of his “Knives Out” franchise skewered old and new money, director and writer Rian Johnson targets religion in his third, a gloomy and clunky outing that may test fans’ faith in the filmmaker.

“Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery” gets a new starry cast to orbit Daniel Craig’s foppish detective Benoit Blanc, mixes operatic overacting with sly humor and bites off more than it can digest attempting cultural satire. The pacing is off, too. You won’t exactly need to be nudged awake but it gets pretty soggy there for a while in the middle.

Blanc takes his sweet time to appear, which means that the first half of the movie is carried by the young Catholic priest Jud Duplenticy — a name Johnson apparently thinks is witty — who is sent to a troubled New York parish calle

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