One can’t help but wonder whom Morgan Freeman pissed off to be forced into an appearance in The Minute You Wake Up Dead, a preposterously stilted thriller from Lionsgate Film heading to on-demand services and, if you’re unlucky, a theater near you.

In director/writer Michael Mailer’s misguided stab at a sort of neo-Southern Gothic thing, Yellowstone’s Cole Hauser plays Russ...something, a former resident of whatever tiny Southern town who went off to the big city to make good and came back a financial consultant. When we join Russ, he’s become a social pariah for a bad stock tip that cost numerous townsfolk all kinds of money. He starts getting threatening phone calls asking, “Where will you be the minute you wake up dead?” Ruh-roh, though, because the town sheriff (Freeman) won’t take the threats seriously—his brother, whom we never meet, also lost money, and he’s bummed on Russ, too.

Then come the murders, most notably the father of the beautiful waitress from the town diner (Jaimie Alexander, aka Sif from Marvel’s Thor films) who might know more than she lets on. Russ believes the killer was looking for him since he screwed over the town and all, but since he did do that, it could be just about anyone behind the killings. But some mysteries are more mysterious than they seem and blah blah blah blah blah.

Hauser gives it the old college try through hammy lines about sin and sinners and sincere stabs at intensity that sadly fall flat. Alexander does the same, though they could both be in better films. The real problem, though, is that Mailer and co-writer Timothy Holland have stacked their film with so much melodramatic nonsense that none of their actors stand a chance. Have a Southern character? Make ‘em say things like, “daddy,” and “reckon” and “don’t rightly know.” Need a patsy type character whose take on a Southern accent is borderline offensive? Bring in Darren Mann from Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and tell him there’s no such thing as too big.

Freeman’s appearance particularly stings, though, in the way that’ll make you wonder whether he owed someone something, he did the film to get access to another project he actually wanted or they somehow just threw so much money at him he couldn’t afford not to do it. Regardless, for the first half of the film, we never actually see him act with any of the others. When we do finally see the principal cast in the same frame, it’s for something dumb (no spoilers, but it’s a completely unnecessary layer that feels tacked-on). Even so, he’s Morgan freaking Freeman, so he represents the one bright shining point of the whole thing.

What’s left is painfully slow to unfold and not particularly satisfying in its conclusion. If you like laughing at bad movies, your ship has come in. If you want something half-decent, don’t let the Freeman siren song lure you to the rocks of death, tempting as they seem once you’ve sunk your time into this dreck.

2

+Morgan Freeman sure can act

-There are no non-Freeman redeeming qualities

The Minute You Wake Up Dead

Directed by Mailer

With Hauser, Alexander, Mann and Freeman

VoD, R, 130 min.