PREMIERE'S REVIEW (posted 12/3/07)

You won't see the twist coming, thanks to a clever and precise piece of casting, but that's the best compliment that can be paid to Awake, a plotty and unfocused medical thriller from first-time director Joby Harold that would probably be more at home in the January dump season where the ambitious failures have a fighting chance.

Hayden Christensen stars as Clay Beresford, a spoiled, 22 year-old Manhattan billionaire — he claims he's never ridden the subway or been to Brooklyn — whose Achilles' heel is a diseased heart that must be replaced. His high-society shrew of a mother, Lilith (Lena Olin), understandably flips her wig when, in the run-up to Clay's crucial heart transplant surgery, he begins embarking on the one activity that all doctors warn against for heart patients — rolling in the hay with Jessica Alba.

Alba is Sam, the working-class sunshine in Clay's grey, high-rise existence, and her function is to coax him out of his cocoon of privilege and snobbery and ease him out of the clutches of his overbearing mother. Sam and Lilith each have a counterpart in the form of two doctors who are competing to perform Clay's high-profile operation (this kid is rich enough to be on the news a lot). One of them, lined up by Lilith, is a stone-faced, top-flight surgeon — "I've written textbooks on this procedure" — and the other is an angelic, debt-saddled doctor played by Terrence Howard. Clay's thinking is more in line with choosing Howard, so he makes his choice, and the action of Awake quickly moves to the day of the surgery.

Thanks to the film's sobering opening titles, we already know it will deal with "anesthesia awareness" — in which patients accidentally maintain a state of consciousness throughout surgery, even though the body is paralyzed. This occurs during Clay's operation, but it has more or less nothing to do with the movie's plot. This isn't a malpractice thriller; it's about certain parties maybe not wanting Clay's surgery to go so well, and the anesthesia accident scene functions like a mini-torture porn movie sandwiched in the middle of a very different film. As the bone saws and chest-breakers begin to whir and crunch, an internal monologue by Clay — "Wait, shouldn't I be asleep?" — turns into an internal screamalogue, and the results will likely please only a small community of medical gorehounds.

Director Harold, faced with the problem of keeping Christensen busy in the movie even though the main action occurs while he's under the knife, eventually resorts to the absurd tactic of having him emerge off the table in the middle of surgery and start walking around, only to find out he really didn't (exactly like Patrick Swayze in Ghost). He's soon running through the hallways trying to get people to see him and respond to him, and solve his own soon-to-be-murder. Harold's bind as a filmmaker is understandable, and if they were handled properly, these scenes with Clay could be eventually written off as dream-delusion, but instead of discarding the device neatly once it's served its purpose, Harold steers into it, allowing the movie to get more trippy and bizarre than it has any right to be. Without giving too much away, the third act of Awake actually seems to borrow some ideas about limbo and shared consciousness from Star Trek: Generations. That's a bridge too far for a find-the-killer thriller that's so thin it struggles mightily to get to 80 minutes.

— Ryan Stewart