By Bob Polunsky
Movie Critic

“Awake” is irritating, but you won’t look away. The film is too personal because it deals with calamities that – Heaven forbid! – could happen to anyone in real life. Supposedly, anyway.

The film isn’t very good, but it has an urgency that grabs you and makes you want to see how it ends. Once you know the basic premise – provided you aren’t already plagued by the same health problems the movie’s hero has – you’ll stick with it to the very end.

The title refers to a heart patient undergoing a heart transplant and unable to tell anyone that he can hear the doctors talking about him while they prepare him for surgery. He can feel the cold scalpel on his bare chest and realize what’s happening to him on the operating table. But he is unable to speak. The doctor doesn’t realize his patient is still awake in spite of the anesthesia.

A disclaimer (really a warning) tells us that this predicament is a real-life surgical event known as “anesthetic awareness.” Although rare, it can happen, and “Awake” uses it as the focal point of a complicated story of personal relationships that develops with a sense of doom, gloom and superficial acting.

The main character is Clayton Beresford (Hayden Christensen). He is engaged to Samantha Lockwood (Jessica Alba), but keeps the engagement a secret from his mother, Lilith (Lena Olin). Samantha works for Lilith and knows that Lilith would never approve of her.

To complicate matters further, Clayton has a heart problem. He needs a transplant desperately, but his cardiologist and best friend, Jack Harper (Terence Howard), hasn’t found a donor to match Clay’s blood type.

Samantha doesn’t want to wait for a donor. She wants to get married now, prompting Clay to tell his mother about her and their engagement. In the next scene, Mama tries to buy Samantha off. But Clay is adamant about getting married, and, shortly after the ceremony, a donor with the right blood type is found. Clay and his bride confidently go to the hospital for the transplant, and Clay insists that his friend, Jack, do the surgery.

The movie makes a detour at this point to unveil disturbing complications that would make an ordinary man take stock of the situation and, most likely, stop the operation. It seems that Jack has some malpractice suits against him that have not been resolved. Clay dismisses them because Jack is his best friend.

But that’s not the only complication that foreshadows Clay’s doom. His anesthesiologist, Dr. Larry Lupin (Christo-pher McDonald), is late for the heart transplant because he was attending a wine-tasting party. It sounds more like a Marx Brothers comedy twist than an important dramatic point, but the plot moves forward in spite of itself. The scene in which Clay feels that scalpel on his chest changes the picture.

The acting is irrelevant. “Awake” is actor-proof, and the entire cast seems to realize it.

Studio rating: R

Bob says: “A Medicare nightmare” HH