The premise behind the movie is that Clay Beresford (Hayden Christensen) is suffering anesthetic awareness, meaning that he has failed to fall asleep properly during surgery and is therefore, lying awake although paralyzed as his surgeons cut into him. This alone would make for a fascinating story and has both in film and television, most notably on Nip/Tuck. However, Harold sacrifices the inherent fear of such a problem by having Clay crawl out of his own body and begin a journey through his past in which he discovers that his new wife (Jessica Alba) and his doctor (Terrence Howard) have plotted to kill him in order to use his vast inheritance to pay off their medical malpractice suits.
The rest of the movie consists of Clay walking around the hospital, utterly impotent and talking to anybody who can't listen to him...because he's not really there. Finally, his mother, after seeing two pieces of mail with different names on them in his wife's bag somehow miraculously deduces exactly what must have happened and kills herself, leaving another potential donor heart that can be used to save Clay after they sabotaged the first.
There is a quick coda in which disembodied mother and son talk to each other about repressed memories of murder and child abuse, heretofore unmentioned. Then the film ends with a voice over by the doctor who tried to kill Clay in which he announces that the only thing that matters is that "He...is...awake." (direct quote from the subtitles).
The only thing that really mattered to me at that point was that this movie was over. The really terrible thing was that the fact that he was "awake" had nothing to do with the plot of the movie. This film could have happened just as easily if he had been properly anesthetized and probably would have benefited from the restrictions that would have placed on Christensen's whining, unintentionally comical voice overs.
No comments:
Post a Comment