Awake

3:05pm Thursday 3rd April 2008

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Awake (15) ** - Hayden Christensen, Jessica Alba, Lena Olin and Terrence Howard.

THIS bizarre and confused "suspense" thriller with a trashy novel style plot centred around the premise that anaesthesia awareness occurs as often as one in every 700 patients.

When super-rich capital investment firm chief Clay Beresford (Hayden Christensen) goes under the knife for a heart transplant, it is not only his mother (Lena Olin) and lover (Jessica Alba), who happens to be her personal assistant, left to agonise in the hospital waiting room.

Anaesthetised but fully conscious he finds himself wide awake during a heart transplant and able to feel every agonising single incision.

Very nice!

Not only that but Beresford soon realises that something is seriously awry about the surgery.

To escape the pain, Clay has an out-of-body experience and uncovers a dastardly plot against him.

Without giving anything away to spoil the story, with a defter hand this may well have been a far better film but the pace and performances certainly don't help.

Despite its fairly original idea, Awake is more likely to send you to dreamland.