: Awake
This is an odd film. It came out a few years ago and the premise sounds so unpromising I had little interest in seeing it. It actually isn’t as bad as it sounds. The idea is a young man goes in for heart surgery but the anesthesia only paralyzes him: he can still hear and feel everything that happens to him. Such a premise seems tremendously limited: are we in for two hours of a patient screaming as his heart is transplanted? How can this idea be turned into an actual story? Well, it spoils things slightly to reveal some more plot, but it makes the film far more appealing: basically, during the surgery, the man learns he’s the victim of an elaborate murder plot. Unfortunately, he’s paralyzed and can’t do anything about it, but at least we’ve got a conspiracy to entertain us. What follows could be called clever or convoluted, depending on your perspective: it didn’t quite work for me and comes across as silly, but mostly that has to do with a poor script and even worse execution. This could have been made into a half-decent thriller; some of the ideas have real promise. Unfortunately, the set-up and execution is heavy-handed, the performances are weak, and the whole thing collapses under its own weight in the end. Still, it was not as bad as I expected, which surprised me greatly, though my expectations were dismally low.
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