Awake (2007): C-

Jake Lloyd may have suffered vitriolic slings and arrows for his stilted performance as young Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace, but his successor in the role, Hayden Christensen, wasn’t any less nondescript a screen presence. Further confirmation of that assessment arrives in the form of Awake, in which Christensen sleepwalks through a ludicrous thriller as Clay Beresford, a wealthy corporate bigshot who is forced to undergo a heart transplant to save his life. Rebelling against his mother’s (Lena Olin) clinginess, Clay secretly marries his girlfriend Sam (Jessica Alba) and chooses to have the procedure done by Dr. Harper (Terrence Howard), a malpractice suit-inundated surgeon who had previously saved his life and is now his best friend. Once under the knife, Clay finds himself beset by “anesthetic awareness,” a horrific condition in which he’s paralyzed but fully aware of what’s going on around him, thereby allowing him to learn that Harper plans to kill him. Writer/director Joby Harold effectively drops a big fat twist into the center of his story, which helps make up for the lethargy of the first half’s build-up to surgery. Yet once said surprise is introduced, Awake once again finds itself at loose ends, failing to generate any palpable tension from its scenario, as well as positing absurd conceptions of the afterlife and offering up monotonous inner dialogue from Christensen that makes one want to assume a state of mind opposite to the film’s title.

Comments

[amira]

I just watched this terrible movie. I love this review, and I got a pretty good laugh reading that last sentence.