There’s something to be said for silliness played straight, and writer-director Joby Harold’s debut Awake is a semi-marvel of poker-faced ridiculousness. An opening title card soberly informs us about “anesthesia awareness,” a paralytic state experienced by a small but statistically significant percentage of surgical patients. Unfortunately, we don’t get the numbers on how many of those poor souls overhear details of their own murder while lying on the operating table.
This is the bind that young millionaire Clayton Beresford (Hayden Christensen) finds himself in: as he’s being dissected by duplicitous surgeons, we hear Christensen’s voice on the soundtrack, an interior play-by-play meant to approximate the pain and terror of a fully-conscious heart transplant. To be kind: it doesn’t get there, but the device of having Clayton leave his unresponsive body and tear around the hospital unraveling the conspiracy that’s killed him works surprisingly well, as does a rather poetic postulation of death as repose in one’s childhood bed. The twist-happy screenplay holds together, and the actors around Christensen are better than they have to be: not only reliable hands like Lena Olin and Arliss Howard, but also a perfectly cast Jessica Alba, smartly playing with and against her looks.
Source: Eye.net
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