The Minute You Wake Up Dead seems to have been structured entirely on the basis of its supposedly indelible twists. There are basically three of them in director Michael Mailer and Timothy Holland’s screenplay, with two leading into the film’s second and third acts, respectively, and a final one arriving just ahead of the closing credits crawl. In theory, the second of these twists is sort of ingenious, rewriting what we believed this movie was doing and reframing the actions of a certain character. At the same time, any reason to care about the story or its characters had not yet made itself known, meaning that the twist is sort of meaningless, actually. It all reveals itself to be literally meaningless by the time that third twist arrives, anyway.
At first, the film is simply the strange mystery of a series of phone calls that reach Russ (Cole Hauser), a stock expert whose bad investment has rippled through his small town and created a lot of enemies for the man. The phone calls come from one individual, asking an ominous question: “Where will you be the minute you wake up dead?” This refrain is repeated so many times throughout the film that its final use, from someone else with a clearly different voice, is basically delivered as a joke about how much it has been said. The wording of the question is more or less evocative of nothing in particular, but it gets under the skin of its recipient, who quickly comes to wonder whom he can trust.
His close circle is now very small, indeed. There are only Delaine (Jaimie Alexander), a waitress with whom he is romantically involved, and Fowler (Morgan Freeman, sleepwalking through the dialogue), the local sheriff, who was also affected greatly by that bad tip but, seemingly as a professional courtesy, at least hasn’t held much of a grudge. The mysterious calls turn into a more literal mystery when Delaine’s father, who is also Russ’s neighbor, dies in the middle of the night under strange circumstances. Here is where the first of the three twists must be outright given away, as Mailer and Holland have other surprises in store for us: The death of Delaine’s father was arranged by the daughter to cash in on a life insurance policy.
She has even hired a bumbling and dunderheaded assistant, in the form of ogling co-worker Lucius (Darren Mann), to help her in this. The problem is that Lucius is already in hock to a few threatening types, led by Jody (Tony Demil), who demand a larger sum than either Lucius or even Delaine has. Desperate times call for desperate measures, which lead to other acts of desperation as the screenplay twists away from Russ and toward a sympathetic view of Delaine. As written, though, she is a frustratingly inconsistent character, and Alexander, as a performer, struggles to fill in the blanks.
This entire story, though, is a house of cards, resting uneasily upon that second twist, which is genuinely bonkers and arrives in the film’s best scene (a conversation punctuated unexpectedly by a gun fired from the last hand we expect). It’s obvious, though, that the filmmakers did not quite think through this entire scenario very well, considering the aftermath of the twist leads to a series of utterly incompetent decisions by characters who suddenly become idiotic (not to mention that third twist, which reveals the involvement of a pointless tertiary character in all this). As a thriller, The Minute You Wake Up Dead is often as imbecilic as it gets.
Photo courtesy of Lionsgate
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