Daniel Craig loves playing Benoit Blanc. While he rose to fame portraying the latest (and second best, after Connery) James Bond, there’s a clear affinity for Detective Blanc’s Southern-twanged creative colloquiums that Craig flaunts whenever he and Rian Johnson team up on another “Knives Out” installment. Now the duo is back for Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, a gothic tale about the murder of a volatile Catholic priest and the secrets at the heart of his small-town congregation. While it doesn’t quite invoke the same highs as prior installments, Wake Up Dead Man still offers a wonderfully entertaining murder-mystery case that reestablishes Blanc as one of cinema’s best characters from the past decade.

Paradoxically, despite being the constant in every “Knives Out” film, Blanc is rarely its emotional center. Keeping in line with past fictional whodunit detectives, he solves the case while elevating the role of an “innocent” whose safety is in doubt. Taking over this time from Ana de Armas in Knives Out and Janelle Monáe in Glass Onion is Josh O’Connor as Jud Duplenticy, a priest who embraced religion to atone for a fighting accident in his youth. His bishop (Jeffrey Wright) has sent Father Jud from Albany, New York, to a small-town church whose leader, Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), rules with an iron rosary.

Wicks’s style is less peace and love and more fire and brimstone, spewing incendiary remarks and taking delight whenever his sermons prompt a walkout. The monsignor also doesn’t take too kindly to Duplenticy’s gentler approach to Jesus and forgiveness, viewing it as a counterbalance to the radicalizing tactics he uses to maintain control over his flock. Shortly after a confrontation with Wicks, the man is found dead in his private chamber with a hellish-looking dagger in his back, and a video recording of their argument makes Duplenticy the primary suspect. That the crime seems impossible further deepens the mystery, but that’s exactly the challenge Benoit Blanc relishes. He aids the local police chief (Mila Kunis) in the investigation while serving as Duplenticy’s guardian angel detective as new twists about Wicks’s family and prophecies about his resurrection test whether Blanc is dealing with forces beyond the mortal world.

Between Knives Out and Poker Face, Johnson has successfully roped much of Hollywood into joining his franchises, and Wake Up Dead Man’s suspects are no exception: Martha (Glenn Close), the church’s zealous second-in-command; Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), a local doctor reeling from a divorce; and sci-fi writer Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), whose literary career has hit such a rut that he’s built a literal moat around his house. Musician Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny) has donated much of her personal funds to the church, and aggrieved lawyer Vera Draven (Kerry Washington) has long nursed a grudge over having to care for her illegitimate brother Cy (Daryl McCormack). The latter views Wicks’s culture war spiels as a chance to boost his political profile.

Whereas the first two films skewed class privilege and tech billionaire idiocy, Wake Up Dead Man calls out religious extremism for how it keeps small-town America in a state of algorithm-generated outrage. Ironically, much of that paranoia is aimed at Duplenticy, despite his embracing of the Bible’s positive values and teachings. Craig might be the brains of this film, but O’Connor embodies its heart, and their interplay is where the script really crackles. The Challengers star is passionate yet conflicted as he attempts to prove his commitment to the cloth in a setting where scripture has been reduced to its harshest elements. This passion intrigues and frustrates Blanc, who hints at a troubled past with religion. Yet he also recognizes a larger deceit at play regarding the nature of Wicks’s death and how coordinated conspiracies by other parties seek to turn him into a holy symbol.

Even if you can guess who committed the deed, the “how it happened” part will still keep audiences in suspense. However, compared to Knives Out’s Harlan family and Glass Onion’s Disruptors, the suspects here feel quite generic. Some like Close and McCormack fare better than others, but overall, these churchgoers are too spread out across the narrative to leave much of an impact. This is Johnson at his most straightforward, presenting the crime and characters with touches of Edgar Allan Poe and Agatha Christie but making the plot twists more about the murder itself rather than any commentary on the genre. In other words, a simple case, but no less entertaining.

That Blanc doesn’t arrive until at least the 45-minute mark doesn’t negate its appeal. Instead, it proves just how entertaining this story is even without the detective’s involvement, though Craig’s energy boosts the film to another level. Really, the big mystery isn’t whether Wake Up Dead Man is good, because it certainly is. It’s why Netflix doesn’t give the movie a longer theatrical release, as that, rather than streaming, is where Benoit Blanc deserves to continue his adventures undeterred.