Close Your Eyes

Ridicuously Bad Premise falls Flat on its Sutured Head

by

 Morgan P Salvo


Some movies aren’t very good. Some are bad. Some are absolutely wretched. This movie falls into all these categories. There even needs to be a new category for dredge like this to be stored in, perhaps due to its medical theme, a euthanasia bin. But ask me how I really feel…
Awake’s premise is that a person undergoing surgery has a symptom called Anesthesia Awareness—staying conscious during the procedure. Okay, cool, this sets up a decent concept of dread and terror. But there will be none of said dread or terror. Just banal plot and supremely stupid dialogue. We wallow in soap opera city and then revisit it again via flashbacks.
Clayton (Hayden Christensen) is a high powered CEO who can cut super slick cutthroat corporate deals but can’t tell mommy about his fiancé, hot chick Sam (Jessica Alba). The stereotypical fear of not being as good as deceased Dad and the Oedipus complex runs absolutely transparently rampant through this piece of shit/celluloid. Clay has a heart condition, rare blood type and a best friend Jack (Terrence Howard) who’s a surgeon he fishes with in the East River, a bonding moment establishing embarrassingly nothing. Jack is dying to do the surgery. However, Mom (Lena Olin) enlists family friend, (Arliss Howard—usually cool but wasted in this) the most skilled surgeon on the planet. Family tension and squabbles ensue, plot twists ensue, hell, everything ensues, then just irritates, due to the unbelievable predictability of the plot twists and the negligence of conveying any kind of tension.

Case in point: Clayton gets his anesthetic cocktail although paralyzed can still hear and feel. We get to experience his freak-out through, surprise! his narration. Annoyingly obvious was while being treated to open heart surgery footage trying to stop the screaming in his head…I said to myself “dream sequence…beach…Sam”. Done. We only get one good operation pain scene. After they crack his ribs open he seems not to feel anything. Guess he went all mind over matter .Then Clay hears while he’s on the table that everyone in the operating room is conspiring to kill him with a bad heart transplant. Upset, he “leaves his body” (in some kind of limbo) and follows all the characters to unravel the hideous plot against him. So we get to revisit the boring scenes we already saw, spelling out nothing new. There are torturously unwatchable scenes with Mom and Sam in the waiting room exposing horrendously archaic dialogue .As soon as the major plot twists unfold, the story meanders , then gets caught up in the soap opera it started and can’t seem to leave. Meanwhile, we, the audience have already solved all their problems for them – it’s called leaving…leaving the damn theatre!
The following is a spoiler (but then how is that possible?): When mom unravels the scheme after her son is pronounced dead (like three times) she kills herself IN THE CAFETERIA so her surgeon can give her son the correct pulsating transplant organ while he’s still on bypass machine. The ultimate schlock is when mom-phantom and son-phantom have a little, shall I say, “heart-to-heart” talk.
This movie sucked on the highest level possible, not even worthy of straight-to-video dreck. It’s virtually impossible to bring all the flaws to light. Why was this movie made? Why was it released? I am sorely perplexed. So were the other three people in the theatre.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that Awake is “so bad it’s good.” Movies like this should at least be laughable-bad, this one couldn’t even do that. If they insist on making movies this horrid why can’t they at least show Jessica Alba naked?
I call these movies “paycheck movies.” One wonders why else would all these actors even consider a role in garbage like this. “Awake” belongs in their “before I was famous” shameful past file.
Help! I ‘m in a movie theatre and cannot leave! I want to yell at the screen STOP! I must be under some new form of Anesthesia Awareness… paralyzed because I had to write a review--- No escape! AHHH! Finally it’s over! Excuse me while I pick up my wounded formaldehyde-injected brain from the aisle…

AWAKE
Starring Hayden Christensen,Jessica Alba,Terrence Howard,Lena Olin
directed by:Joby Harold
 zero (count 'em) stars