My quick rating - 5.3/10. Wake Up wastes no time introducing its group of young activists, who sneak into a giant furniture superstore after hours to make an environmental statement. Their master plan involves masks, vandalism, social media, and apparently very little consideration for how stores actually close at night.
Seriously, half of these kids would have been spotted long before the doors were locked.
The film opens with them hiding throughout the warehouse-sized store, and right away you have to accept a fairly large suspension of disbelief. If you've ever worked retail, your first thought might be, "There is no way these idiots made it past closing." But horror movies have never been particularly interested in practicality, so I rolled with it.
Meanwhile, we're introduced to a security guard, Kevin (Turlough Convery), who gets dumped onto the night shift after throwing a workplace tantrum. As horror movie setups go, this is roughly equivalent to seeing a shark swim into frame twenty minutes before someone decides to go surfing.
The activists themselves aren't exactly easy to root for. Their months-long plan appears to have involved very little actual planning, and every decision they make somehow manages to make the previous decision look smart by comparison. At several points I found myself wondering whether the writers were intentionally parodying these characters. The movie certainly feels self-aware enough to know how ridiculous some of their choices are.
Thankfully, once everything goes sideways, Wake Up becomes a lot more fun.
The doors lock for the night, and suddenly the group realizes they are trapped inside. You know, the thing doors famously do after a store closes. Watching their shock at this development gave me almost as much entertainment as the actual horror elements.
Then our disgruntled security guard starts turning the night into his own personal hunting expedition.
From there, Wake Up settles into slasher territory. The kills are brutal, the tension is solid, and the giant store makes for a surprisingly effective playground of death. One standout sequence involves the characters covered in neon paint while navigating near-total darkness. It looks fantastic, even if the movie had already established conditions that made the scene questionable. Horror logic wins again.
The biggest weakness is predictability. Almost every major development can be spotted well in advance, and the film rarely attempts to challenge slasher conventions. If you've watched enough horror movies, you'll probably find yourself accurately predicting who survives, who doesn't. And roughly when things are going to go very badly.
Still, Wake Up executes its familiar formula well. The production quality is strong, the setting works, and Convery makes for a memorable threat. Most importantly, the movie sticks the landing. Rather than reaching for a safe, feel-good Hollywood ending, it goes in a darker direction than I expected and feels far more appropriate. The final moments even sneak in one last wickedly dark joke before the credits roll.
Wake Up may not reinvent the slasher genre, but watching a group of painfully overconfident activists realize they chose the absolute worst security guard on Earth to annoy provides plenty of entertainment on its own.
https://jackmeat.com/wake-up-2024/
