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Spoiler Points for Awake (2007) [R] 78 minutes
WIP™ Scale: $13.00
Film's Official Website • Film's Trailer
Click to read the non-spoiler review
Click to see photos from the Premiere of Awake
Spoiler Points:
• No sooner does Clay Beresford's anesthetic cocktail fail, leaving him 'awake' during his heart transplant, then does he begin to realize that something is up based on the conversation of his doctors. The first suspicious thing they do is ask stand-in anesthesiologist, Dr. Larry Lupin (Christopher McDonald) to go ahead and take a break leaving them alone with Clay (Hayden Christensen). Then they start to let the truth slip. They plan to kill him by injecting the heart with a low-residue chemical that will keep it from restarting once in place. Since his heart will be out, and no heart will be able to be found quickly enough, he'll die.
• As Clay projects out of his body he's able to run around and see what's going on, but not just in real life, but in the past as well. This lends credibility to the notion that he's not really projecting, rather he's just imagining he is in his mind. Why he puts on clothes, though, is a mystery!
Clay learns the following:
• Jack Harper (Terrence Howard) has been planning this for months.
• Sadly, the entire team is in on it, and the failure of the original anesthesiologist to show up is probably because he got cold feet about killing Clay.
• But why kill him. There's only one reason. Turns out that, of course, the simply sweet Sam Lockwood (Jessica Alba) whom he's just married the night before, is in on it too. She's been trying and trying and trying to get him to marry her for months so that when they kill him, she'll get half; or, at least, settle out for $100 million split four ways.
• Yeah, he didn't notice things that would have given this away.
The Ending:
• Fortunately, his nosey mother did notice some things. When Sam spills her purse and then leaves, nosey mom goes through her purse and finds mail addressed to Sam with a different last name. She begins to put two and two together: Sam knew all about how to make the vending machine work and she knew that the anesthesiologist wasn't the right doctor. She suspects that something is terribly wrong. When Dr. Harper comes to tell them the new heart failed, she doesn't lose her wits. So when Dr. Lupin comes to ask her to sign the papers to take Clay off life support, she waits. She calls her preferred heart surgeon, Dr. Neyer (Arliss Howard) who just happens to be on call and spills the beans on the gang. She then takes pills that take her own life so that Clay can have her heart. During her waning minutes of swan song, she enters Clay's limbo and explains things to him. She also reveals to him, as her heart is being put transferred and the first team of doctors and Sam are being arrested around the hospital, that he's 100 times the man his father was and reminds him of the night his father died. He was snorting cocaine and abusing his wife. Clay tried to intervene, and when he came after the boy, she hit him in the head causing him to fall over the stair railing to his death.
• Dr. Harper does keep the evidence of Sam's fingerprints on the syringe that contained the drug that stopped the new heart to give to the police. He is filled with remorse over what he's done. But she egged him on knowing that the plan would make them all rich. It seems that she never actually even sort of loved Clay. She only loved his money.
• Why she felt the need to kill him, who knows. Apparently, she's really in love with Dr. Harper, or so it seems, but why not just stay married a while and then get divorced or have a kid or something, why kill him to get the money? She proves to be a cold and callous person lost in the intoxicating dream world of the fabulously wealthy and those who aspire to possess the same wealth at any cost.
The Disappointment:
The disappointing thing is that we never get to find out what kind of person Clay becomes. Obviously, he'll be more cautious in the future, but this could cause him to shut down emotionally and become unavailable for any future relationships. His mother is dead, so he has no one to advise him—she actually was right on the money about everything: not to marry Sam and not to use Dr. Harper for the surgery. So, what impact will having lost her have on him. She was able to get along all these years without remarriage because she had Clay, but Clay has no one, and the people he trusted most all betrayed him. Is his life ruined regardless of having been saved again by his mother's heart? It would be nice to think that he won't be emotionally vacuous the rest of his life and that he'll find a new person and settle down to the love in life he richly deserves. Unfortunately, it's easy to see his life ending badly.
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