House Idea, a kind of retail superstore similar to Costco or IKEA, is targeted by six young activists to protest the animal cruelty in making the furniture sold in their store. They enter the store right before closing, hide until all the doors are locked and the customers are sent home, and then trash the place with animal blood and spray paint.
Kevin (Turlough Convery) is a security guard recently put on the night shift with his brother Jack (Aidan O’Hare). Kevin nearly lost his job after losing his temper with unruly customers. The night shift is his last chance to prove he doesn’t deserve to be fired.
After discovering the vandalism the activists left behind, Kevin and Jack confront them. However, a brutal accident sends Kevin over the edge. With Kevin no longer worried about losing his job, he begins hunting the activists and killing them one by one. Their only chance is to try and survive until the store opens in the morning.
From Canadian directors Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell also known as RKSS (Turbo Kid, Summer of ’84, We Are Zombies), Wake Up feels like a drama strewn together by a few moments of horror.
The film focuses more on Kevin struggling to keep his job while Jack succumbs to his vices while trying to keep Kevin in check. It also devotes an unbelievable amount of time to the activists destroying the store. The problem is they’re all stupid, boring, and forgettable.
Wake Up was written by Alberto Marini based on an original idea by Martin Soudan, but the problem is none of these activists have any depth. Some of them want to screw each other and many of them come from wealthy families, but they mostly come off as intolerable brats.
During their mission, even after the film you don’t know what they were trying to do besides trash everything, you’d think they’d try to be somewhat stealthy. Ideally, you would try to get in, vandalize to your heart’s content, and get out before anyone notices. These a-holes stop 20 minutes into the movie to have a damn food fight. Ethan (Benny O. Arther), the supposed activist leader, then says something along the lines of it’s okay to have fun while accomplishing the mission.
One of the female activists eventually slaps on a pair of rollerblades and their last hurrah is a paintball fight. It all feels like some backward heist planned out by a 13-year-old.
Even after Kevin starts killing the activists, Wake Up never really introduces any clever kills or adds any sort of tension to these young kids being hunted. There’s a moment in the bathroom where Karim (Tom Gould) is hiding from him in one of the stalls. Karim leaves his shoes in the stall for no reason, crawls under three stalls, and then gets a handmade spear javelin thrown into his back.
Most of the kills involve a knife stabbing someone in a predictable spot; the back, the gut, or the eye. Someone is slammed against a wall repeatedly until they just die. Somebody else gets choked. One dude gets stabbed and then his neck is broken. Every death feels run of the mill.
The most creative part of the film is when the remaining survivors are lured into a freezer to retrieve a wounded friend they thought was dead. When they arrive, neon paint is dumped on them and the lights go out. They’re then hunted by Kevin unable to see, but the audience sees everything because the paint has a black light effect.
The ending isn’t super satisfying either. None of the characters are likable, but even then the direction they go in is questionable. The final sequence is also bizarre like it was only done to make the filmmakers laugh.
Turbo Kid is an incredibly fun film, but RKSS has never really been able to make anything as good or as decent since. Wake Up could have been a ton of fun if the kills weren’t so dull and if the characters weren’t strictly one-layered assholes. Everything feels halfway developed here; the beginning of something worthwhile with a middle and end involving no imagination or creativity whatsoever.
