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'Awake'

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BY JAN STUART | jan.stuart@newsday.com

November 30, 2007

If you have an ax to grind with someone who harbors a morbid fear of surgery, you couldn't design a better revenge than taking them to see "Awake."

If the object of your mischief also happens to be a connoisseur of sly Hitchcockian chills, so much the better. The thumbprints of the late master of suspense are nowhere to be found on this trashily in-your-face thriller, which leans heavily for its effects on intense sympathy pain, improbable reversals and the mystifying star appeal of Jessica Alba.

Hayden Christensen goes under the knife as Clay Beresford, a filthy-rich New York businessman with a weak heart and a blind spot for his adoring girlfriend Sam (Alba). Clay marries Sam over the objections of his mother (played by Lena Olin, turning up the smarmy-matriarch heat to a low boil). Mom also objects to his chosen surgeon for an imminent heart transplant, an affable friend named Dr. Jack Harper (Terrence Harper) with a dubious record of "two mortgages, two ulcers and two divorces."

That latter accounting is rendered by mom's sour-grapes surgeon of choice, Dr. Neyer (Arliss Howard), an exceedingly self-important twit who claims to have operated on presidents but always seems to be available whenever the script requires him. Disregarding his mother in all matters of the heart, Clay goes with his own man, and ends up with a tippling anesthesiologist who is more anesthetized during the surgery than him.

The centerpiece of "Awake" is a heart operation with multiple birds-eye shots of Clay's beating organ, complemented by the crescendoing voice of Christensen screaming variations on "Oh, no, no, no, please God! Oh no, no, no, no! It's just pain, it's just pain!"

AWAKE (R). Hayden Christensen plays a wealthy young businessman who undergoes the heart-transplant surgery of your worst nightmares. Jessica Alba is the woman of his dreams, Terrence Howard the man with the scalpel. Everyone, including the audience, gets what's coming to them. 1:21 (language, an intense disturbing situation and brief drug use). At area theaters.