Gen Z TikToktivists sneak into a Home Goods / IKEA clone called Home Idea overnight, in order to livestream their rage against the machine, wherein they protest the company’s destruction of the earth and its fuzzy little animals by shooting up the floor models with paintball guns while wearing neon-colored animal heads.
I’m not gonna lie, when I first heard about this film, I was eager to see it. The previews promised social satire and slashery fun from some of the people behind two very memorable genre entries- 2015’s Turbo Kid, and 2018’s Summer of 84, both whip-smart and darkly fun (and funny) films. This… is sadly not either of those films. In fact, the further in time I get from having seen Wake Up, the less I remember of it, and I’m not sure if that’s a byproduct of my aging brain, or a function of my mind’s self-defense system.
The premise here is not terrible- a gaggle of Gen Z TikToktivists sneak into a Home Goods / IKEA clone called Home Idea overnight, in order to livestream their rage against the machine, wherein they protest the company’s destruction of the earth and its fuzzy little animals by shooting up the floor models with paintball guns while wearing neon-colored animal heads. Said do-gooders then come face-to-mask with a security guard who’s watched the last thirty minutes of Predator ten too many times, and bloody hijinks ensue. A good time should have been had by all, but the whole thing unfortunately feels uninspired.
The suspense in the film is decent- or it would be, if you cared about any of the protagonists. As it stands, the teens really only serve as fodder for our villain, Kevin. While played with intensity by House of the Dragon’s Turlough Convery, Kevin comes across as less of a scheming Jigsaw angry that his brother / coworker just slipped and cracked his noggin open during a scuffle with these home (goods) invaders, and more of a woods-bro angry that he’s never going to get the deposit back for the weekend primitive hunting excursion that he’s about to have to miss thanks to these darn kids. While our boy Kev makes great use of the warehouse store’s space to set up a kill zone, none of those kills are anything to write home about, even though there was one nifty sequence involving hunting the kids in total darkness while they were doused in day-glo paint and illuminated only by a black light. Trippy.
Aside from one of the guys pining for one of the gals, I couldn’t tell you a thing about any of the heroes’ / victims’ personalities. The title of the film alludes to its protagonists being “woke,” although none of them are as deep into what they’re doing as they want to appear. If the film had leaned a little more into that- either trying to make us care about them caring about a world victimized by late-stage capitalism, or pulling a 180 and making us roll our eyes at the teens’ naive intentions a little harder, a’ la the city slickers we got to see eat their just desserts in films like Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil, then maybe Wake Up could have been more fun. Sadly, the film makers played it all a bit too safe, seemingly not wanting to stir up either side of that political hornet’s nest, and what we wound up with was a dream that we woke up from and won’t even remember that we ever had in a week’s time.
Here’s hoping that these truly talented filmmakers wake up and give us something worth fighting for in their next outing.