{"id":47445,"date":"2025-04-28T12:00:22","date_gmt":"2025-04-28T16:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=47445"},"modified":"2025-04-27T20:16:38","modified_gmt":"2025-04-28T00:16:38","slug":"wake-up-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/28\/wake-up-2023\/","title":{"rendered":"Wake Up (2023)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u2019s destruction of the earth and its fuzzy little animals by shooting up the floor models with paintball guns while wearing neon-colored animal heads.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I\u2019m 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\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>Turbo Kid, and 2018\u2019s\u00a0Summer of 84, both whip-smart and darkly fun (and funny) films. This\u2026 is sadly not either of those films. In fact, the further in time I get from having seen\u00a0Wake Up, the less I remember of it, and I\u2019m not sure if that\u2019s a byproduct of my aging brain, or a function of my mind\u2019s self-defense system.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s never going to get the deposit back for the weekend primitive hunting excursion that he\u2019s about to have to miss thanks to these darn kids. While our boy Kev makes great use of the warehouse store\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Aside from one of the guys pining for one of the gals, I couldn\u2019t tell you a thing about any of the heroes\u2019 \/ victims\u2019 personalities. The title of the film alludes to its protagonists being \u201cwoke,\u201d although none of them are as deep into what they\u2019re 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\u2019 naive intentions a little harder, a\u2019 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\u2019s nest, and what we wound up with was a dream that we woke up from and won\u2019t even\u00a0 remember that we ever had in a week\u2019s time.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s hoping that these truly talented filmmakers wake up and give us something worth fighting for in their next outing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s destruction of the earth and its fuzzy little animals by shooting up the floor models with paintball guns while wearing neon-colored animal heads.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[58,477],"class_list":["post-47445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-action","tag-horror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47445"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47446,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47445\/revisions\/47446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}