Awake (Review)

Going to the movies when nothing good is playing is a poor excuse to visit the cinema. "What'd you see?" someone asks, and you respond, "Battlefield Earth," adding the qualifier "because nothing else was playing."

That's like eating gum for breakfast because you don't have any eggs in your fridge (yes, it's exactly like that).

So why did I agree on Friday night to see Awake? Not because nothing else was playing, but because my girlfriend, still recovering from a tonsilectomy, asked me to. Still, that alone wasn't enough to make a cold-hearted bastard like myself agree. No, it was Roger Ebert's three-star review of the film that proved the tipping point.

See, I read Ebert's reviews like your moms does Reader's Digest Condensed Books, and he postulated that the reason he enjoyed the movie was because he hadn't seen any advertisements for the film, nor the film's poster (Jesus, look at it up there; that's a crime), which he claimed gives away a crucial plot point. I read (the first paragraph of) that review around the time the movie was being advertised for release here in Korea, and, imagining that I might enjoy the film were I to go in fresh, I stopped reading it right there.

Make no mistake, the plot twist, which comes midway through the picture, is unexpected. It's also original. It's shocking, and set up very well. It is not, however, effective, because it makes an intriguing movie completely dislikable.

Dislikable because you suddenly hate pretty much every character you've been introduced to, including the protagonist, whom it's hard to feel pathos for when you keep thinking about how much of a dumb fuck he is.

(Spoiler warning from here on. I don't think I'll get many complaints.)

Awake stars Hayden Christensen (NOOOooo! Although he was pretty okay in Jumper) and Jessica Alba (whose nipple you can see beneath a wet undershirt, close up, for a couple of seconds, so maybe that alone is worth the price of admission). Christensen plays Clay, the son and heir of a

(shyness that is criminally vulgar)

business magnate. Alba plays Sam, his fiancee, though Clay's protective mother doesn't know about their engagement. Terrence Howard -- who is slowly turning into the new millenial Samuel L. Jackson, i.e. a very good black actor who won't turn down any role, no matter how shitty (see: Brave One, The) -- plays Jack, the surgeon who first saved Clay's life when he had a heart attack, and who later befriended him when he discovered that Clay needed a heart transplant.

The movie begins by informing us that out of the millions of patients who receive general anesthesia every year, roughly 30 thousand experience what is known as "anesthetic awareness," a phenomenon where a patient undergoing surgery is aware of what is happening to him or her, and feels the pain of the surgery.

Yowza. I joked to my girlfriend that it was a good thing we'd gone to see the movie after her operation.

That's a good premise for a movie, I suppose, but only in theory. See, in practice, you can't have a film about a guy having his chest cut open, his heart removed, and everything else that occurs during a heart transplant, because that would be too unsettling for an audience to bear. Admittedly, the 10 or so minutes that the movie actually devotes to this concept had me feeling pretty uneasy.

The rest of it had me feeling pretty pissed off, and the only reason I'm writing this review instead of watching season 4 of The Dark Tower 2.0 (aka Lost), is because there could have been a good movie in there somewhere had the tone been different.

Clay marries Sam on the night he finds out he's to have his heart transplant the next morning. He's rushed to the hospital where his mother, adamant that Dr. Jack, who has several pending malpractice lawsuits, doesn't perform the surgery. Clay's mother insists her doctor friend, Jonathan Neyer, who has had his "hands inside presidents," handle the operation, but Clay balks*. He's in good hands. He's got his girl, his best friend, and his Orange Crush. Fuck you, Mom, and your stuffy old medicine man.

Youth gone wild. Can't tell them nothing.

Maybe you should have listened to your moms, Clay, because it turns out the whole thing's a scam. Sam, Dr. Jack, some English bird, and Fisher Fucking Stevens (shoulda left the cineplex when THAT credit appeared on screen) want Clay dead so Sam can get his inheritance and the quartet can split the pie four ways.

Clay -- because he's AWAKE -- hears all this. I dunno, but if my chest were open I'd be like

OHSHITOHSHITOHSHITFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKAHHHHHHAHHHHHHHWHATTHEFUCKKILLMEKILLMEKILLMEEEEEEEEEE!!!

Anyway, Shooter McGavin busts them all (I'm dead serious), and Clay's moms OD's on pills so that her doctor friend, Jonothan Neyer, can remove HER heart and give it to her son.

The operation is performed, while, in the spirit world, Clay tells his mother he won't leave her. That's when Clay's moms reminds him that Clay's pops was a coke-sniffing spousal abuser whom she deaded with a fireplace poker, and Clay had ereased that memory since he was young.

Ugh.

The coup de grace, however, comes at the end. Dr. Jack, who opens the film with narration calling Clay his friend, ends it feeling sorry for the guy he tried to kill. To tell you the truth, I feel sorry for everyone involved in this monstrosity. Because there are no happy endings here. Jesus, Clay wakes up with a new heart that will last as long as the first generation iPods, his moms is dead, his fiancee conned him for his money, his best friend did the same, and now he remembers that his pops was a deadbeat.

Almost awesome enough for me to give it 2 *_*

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* by which I mean he acts stubbornly, not that he makes an illegal motion while one or more runners are on base.