Awake is a 2019 thriller about a man with no recollection of who he is, learning that he’s wanted for a series of murders.
Literally slammed into while driving on a dusty back road, a man – soon given the moniker John Doe (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) – is violently run off the road and into a ditch. He wakes not long after in bandages, unsure of who he is or how he got there. His nurse, Diana (Francesca Eastwood) believes he’s got retrograde amnesia, even as he begins to suffer thrashing seizures. But the real problem is what the police find in the truck of the car he was driving – a dead woman. And she isn’t the first.
So we’ve been here before, at least with memory loss, the movies long a home to the condition, here director Aleksandr Chernyaev and writer Elana Zeltser spinning it sort of as a Jason Bourne-esque thriller with a mass murderer instead of a super secret agent. Of course, things aren’t what they seem and our hero, thought to be a maniac, must work to clear his name, even if doing so means breaking the law. Aggressively. That puts Doe, who escapes the hospital – taking Diana as hostage – on the run as he struggles to piece together just what in the hell is going on. On his tail are FBI agent Frank Ward (Malik Yoba) and Sheriff Roger Bower (William Forsythe), old pals who believe they know who they’ve got in their sights, Bower himself tainted by a damaging past.
Things move pretty quickly and Chernyaev doesn’t try to mask any of this in any kind of mystery, keeping the whole thing rather pedestrian and more so, barely convincing. Unlike say a Coen Brothers film, where unlikely chaos happens to ordinary people in sudden escalation, Awake (Retitled from Wake Up) has little that makes sense when it comes to what these characters do. Instead, things play out more out of need than believability with Diana especially making choices that feel entirely forced. Just as damning is Ward, an FBI man who is like an overripe archetype blowharding his way through movie like a boulder down the side of a cliff, his character all huff with no depth.
The story itself is more compelling, the wonder of just who John Doe is gaining traction the more it drives on with Meyers doing the best of the lot as a man haunted by images of abused and dying women who all seem to know him. But did he rape, torture, and strangle them? It’s a question that at least has enough compulsion about it to see where it will end up, even if nothing orbiting it has all that much logic to it. It’s not helped by Eastwood, who is normally an actor I genuinely like, having praised her before, here delivering dialogue with nearly no weight behind it, which is frustrating because with her in the cast, I had the highest of hopes.
She’s not really to blame though, the film all too obvious from the start, unfolding like a kid’s game of tic tac toe. It’s devoid of action, there is barely a thread of tension, and little of what’s said has any punch, all things the genre demands. None of that would be bad if the film were smarter, challenging me at least to try and guess what is happening, but unfortunately, there’s really nothing to think about.