Awake

“Anesthesia awareness” is the phenomena where a patient put under general anesthesia still maintains a sense of awareness and pain during the course of surgery, an awareness undetected by the surgeons. As they say, this is the stuff that horror films are made of. Unfortunately, Awake is not much of a horror film. Actually, it’s not much of anything. Clayton Beresford Jr. (Hayden Christensen) is a young man who has everything; heir to untold wealth, seemingly loyal friends, and a lovely girlfriend (Jessica Alba). He also has the Ice Queen (Lena Olin) as a mother … and a bad ticker. But welcome news arrives when a replacement heart is located and Clay is soon prepped and put under the knife, and as the anesthesia kicks in (but doesn’t exactly) our hero comes to the painful awareness that all is not as it seems. The script is loaded with soap-opera mechanizations, out-of-body loopiness and faux-medical flapdoodle that is blatantly preposterous even to the layman. Even worse, the film never really explores the high-concept hook that the premise dangles on.