Netflix’s Awake – An Unintentionally-Hilarious Watch (Early Review)

With a title like Awake, it’s kind of ironic as the jokes pretty much right themselves as it will become abundantly clear. Also, the term so-bad-that-it’s-good has been thrown around to describe subpar films whose various faults offer some entertainment value for audiences to overlook these faults, intentional or not. This film is sure to be perceived as such by some audiences, however, it’s not even bad enough to be entertaining and is simply just sad to watch over the course of its 90+ minute running time. A disaster film in more ways than one, countless other better film come to mind as it uses elements from these films, resulting in a derivative mess with dull characters that goes absolutely nowhere before ending with a whimper. While the film may be a sci-fi drama on paper, it is actually an unintentional comedy as the bad dialog makes it more hilarious than thrilling. As an emotional connection with the characters was never there, this was the only thing it had going for it.

The story here has more or less been done countless times in countless films with each dressing them a little bit differently. This time, Awake sees a former soldier and single mother named Jill (Rodriguez) forced to protect her family, including her young daughter Matilda (Ariana Greenblatt), after a mysterious incident has wiped out all electronics and most humans’ ability to sleep. Matilda was unlike most others as she could still sleep which unfortunately made her a target of those looking for a solution to the worldwide sleep issue. Though as far as Jill was concerned, all she was interested in was protecting her family for whom she has had a troubled history with. As Jill didn’t really have much of a plan on how to proceed, neither did the film, using this time for some forced melodrama involving the family along with plenty of awkward tonal shifts that just made for an overall awkward and not to mention hilarious watch. That being said, there may have been some adversity for them to face but it was dull and lacked any stakes to care.

While some of the awkwardness is due to the characters’ growing lack of sleep over the course of the film, it doesn’t excuse the horrible dialog that only detracted from the drama of the story as it was hard to ever take any of the characters seriously. Though the story eventually led to some sort of endgame, that also went nowhere as Awake seemed to lose steam. The lack of any kind of exposition whatsoever hurt the film as a whole, favoring to view its world through the lens of the family. Not offering much in the way of answers or doing any kind of work building to something, it’s hard to feel the true gravity of what was happening and care about anything the characters had to go through (but the fact that they were thin and the choppy editing didn’t help either). Meanwhile, the world’s collective lack of sleep was a ticking time bomb that would inevitably go off and even that was incredibly silly and disappointing which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise considering the lead up to that point as the film ended with a whimper.

In terms of performances, Awake was fine which isn’t saying much but the script and direction certainly didn’t do it any favors. Rodriguez was fine despite being miscast as Jill, a single mother of two (she looked the same age as her teenage son Noah (Lucius Hoyos)). She can definitely take charge when she has to though she was handcuffed by the bad dialog, making for a character that was difficult to ever take seriously while her tired acting was painful (though everybody’s was). Although Anderson and Leigh, especially the latter, were wasted in minor roles, the best part of the film was Greenblatt’s scene-stealing performance as Matilda, the only truly awake character in the film. Her line deliveries were hilarious, however, she could only do so much.

At the end of the day, Awake is a colossal misfire not worth staying awake for.

still courtesy of Netflix

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Keith Noakes

The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.