Awake – Mark Burns

A soft thriller, perhaps intended for viewers with weak hearts.

Medical thriller melds with young romance and mothering in this weird little drama.

Clay (Hayden Christensen) is New York’s investment capital wunderkind, a Bruce Wayne-style righteous billionaire trying to live up to his late father’s memory. He’s engaged to the lovely Sam (Jessica Alba), though the mini-magnate must protect his romance by hiding it from his judging mother. This proves a piddling concern as related to his weak heart: He needs a transplant to live. When a donor finally becomes available, he’s rushed into surgery. But the anesthesiologist botches the dope, paralyzing Clay while leaving him sensitive and aware. There on the table, he lies helpless overhearing conspirators plot his murder.

The tale enters Hitchcock territory with its fine premise of psychological torment. Clay can do nothing to protest the pain as he’s cut open and can only delve into memory to puzzle out the conspiracy as his murder unfolds. The seed of a sharp thriller is here, but it never sprouts.

Story is dominated early on by cute romance, mom issues, dad issues, doctor empathy and generally establishing Clay as a sympathetic character. It’s almost a separate movie, a touching little romantic drama involving a terminal lover that seems neatly wrapped by the time the climax comes around. Rookie auteur Joby Harold, who wrote and directed, spends so much time establishing this context that he almost pockets the surgical crux as an aside. In effect the film becomes back-to-back episodes of a prime-time soap.

Harrowing surgery proves blunt. Clay escapes into cozy internal reminiscences as he tries to block out everything. Jolts that return him to reality are barely that. His agony under the knife is expressed through fairly flat interior monologue and outside commentary that merely echos the process. Delivery is partly to blame, as Christensen is not a deep enough actor to make the sell. The patient’s deductions are dull as well, as they reveal nothing that hasn’t already been solved by the moviegoer, making it an exercise in watching him catch up, which is not particularly riveting.

There is precious little weaving and faking in this storyline. Even when there is, the film’s reveals don’t arrive via sharp Hitchcockian twists but rather through broad, gentle turns, steering the deer of truth into view in time to gently apply the brakes of surprise.

Inevitability absorbs the punch of at least one late revelation, and the overall predictability of the story leaves few unanswered questions to keep a hold on curiosity. Unnecessary aspects of Clay are brought to light to flesh out his character but prove distracting, while quick resolutions oversimplify other dramatic elements that could have better explored the film’s themes.

Little is done visually to heighten the suspense. Surgical scenes are kept detailed but clinical, never veering to gore. This is a merciful choice, yet Harold too frequently abandons the process for fuzzy flashbacks and flat exchanges.

In the end, it isn’t a bad debut for the new director. But it’s a simplified tale, and not nearly as chilling as it should have been. Consider it a soft thriller, perhaps intended for viewers with weak hearts.

Fair soft thriller • R • 84 min.

August Rush – Jonathan Parker

There’s nothing wrong with a little magic. Unfortunately, August Rush has none.

A young orphan looks for his parents by using the power of music in the pretentious and boring melodrama August Rush. Director Kirsten Sheridan (Patterns) gives us an amazingly contrived love story that asks us to achieve some sort of new limits on our suspension of disbelief.

Evan Taylor (Freddie Highmore) is an 11-year-old music prodigy who escapes his upstate orphanage for the boisterous streets of New York City. It seems Evan’s coming to being was the result of a magical one-night-stand between virtuoso cellist Lyla Novacek (Keri Russell) and Irish rocker Louis Connelly (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). Since then, both Lyla and Louis have given up their music, only to be mysteriously drawn back into playing and back to New York, as Evan — now using the pseudonym August Rush — develops his musical gifts. Son searches for parents, mother searches for child and lover searches for lover — all sickeningly pulled together by the power of music.

From the get go, we know this movie is going to take itself too seriously. In the opening scene, we hear a voice-over from our protagonist, who talks about how music is all around us; all we have to do is listen. Not unlike “the force” in Star Wars, I suppose. But even Luke Skywalker has a better sense of humor than little August; and this is modern day New York, not a galaxy far, far away. August is a musical prodigy who, through some of the most amazing coincidences this side of — well, Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phantom Menace — manages to fulfill all of his most unrealistic goals and dreams just by playing his music.

It’s not just the fairy-tale ridiculous writing that makes this film so unbearable. It’s the execution. Every performer — save for perhaps Terrance Howard as a helpful child services case worker — seems blankly mesmerized by the mystical powers of the goings on. Russell and Meyers are downright wooden, Highmore is odd and Robin Williams is inappropriately creepy as a modern day Fagin to a young gang of street musicians, with August as an Oliver Twist.

But to reference Charles Dickens and George Lucas is to give this film too much credit. Suspension of disbelief is required for any fairy tale, and even the most contrived of situations can be magically explored given the right presentation. There’s nothing wrong with a little magic. Unfortunately, August Rush has no honest magic, and it’s an all-around bad show.

Poor drama • PG • 112 mins.

American Gangster – Jonathan Parker

Super-powered by the acting and charisma of the two A-list stars, this is an exemplary take on a story line we can’t get enough of.

Denzel Washington plays a powerful drug lord, and Russell Crowe is the cop out to get him in the thrilling drama American Gangster. Super-powered by the acting and charisma of the two leads, director Ridley Scott (Gladiator, Thelma & Louise, Alien) presents a true story with soaring results.

Frank Lucas (Washington), a serious-minded hood in late 1960s’ Harlem, climbs to the upper heights of New York’s mobster-dominated drug business, indeed even higher than the mafia. His key to success: cutting out the middleman and getting his heroin directly from Thailand on military planes returning from Vietnam. Richie Roberts (Crowe) is a straight-laced cop, who, after graduating law school, heads a federal crime squad aimed at taking down New York’s illegal drug trade. Frank climbs a ladder of mobbed-up success with all its fortune and secrecy, while Richie mucks around through family and workplace problems while trying to break the city’s heroin epidemic.

Eventually, these two must meet, the characters and the actors. Therein, comes the double whammy of an otherwise routine plot. We know these two characters are on a collision course. Even more exciting is our knowledge that these two actors — arguably the two biggest and best dramatic actors in Hollywood today — must eventually end up on the screen together. The climactic meeting is certainly powerful enough to leave satisfied smiles on our faces. Plus, the tension and drama on the way there is more than worth the ride.

Few moviegoers can watch this type of New York mob story without thinking of The Sopranos, which has now surpassed Coppola’s The Godfather trilogy and Scorsese’s Goodfellas as the book on modern mob screen storytelling. Indeed, we know this plotline on both sides: the successful mobster, the struggling cop. Will good win out?

Despite the standard storyline, success stories — and that is really what these are — that give us an inside look at the mob world and a peak at big city police corruption always manage to suck us in. Better still when they are well told, as this one is. Exemplary, when they are motored by such powerful performances by such A-list actors in their prime.

Great drama • R • 157 mins.

Across the Universe – Mark Burns

If you like conceptual art and far-out eye candy you might like the film, but if you seek substance you’d do better to stay home and listen to the original tracks.

Jude (Jim Sturgess) is a Liverpudlian youth who ditches the dockworker’s life for a ship headed to the States. Once ashore, he finds his way to Princeton, where he quickly befriends rebellious Ivy-Leaguer Max (Joe Anderson). Over Thanksgiving, he develops a crush on his new pal’s sister, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood). Eventually the trio ends up in New York City, where they stumble into the thick of counterculture. Their bohemian apartment proves a crossroads for wandering souls, and their new circle of friends gets swept up by the chaos of the time even as Jude and Lucy fall through kaleidoscope-eyed love.

As history swirls, each character is meant to serve as a window on one facet of the era. While Jude’s romance with Lucy holds anchor, a lesbian copes with embracing her sexuality; a draftee contends with enlistment and war; and musicians wrestle with the intrusion of fame and money. The lovers serve as separate windows as well, as Jude awakens to artistic expression and Lucy finds purpose in political activism.

Virtually all is told through song, evolving with the Beatles’ style from innocent dance-hall pop to political activism and woozy psychadelia. The catalog swims in MTV-drunk reels, across some 30-plus songs and fragments performed by the actors and complemented by a motley cast of musicians including Bono and Martin Luther. Joe Cocker’s powerful rendition of “Come Together” is the brightest cover in this medley, but others’ turns, such as Dana Fuchs’ very Melissa-Ethridge-sounding take on “Helter Skelter,” prove overreaching.

Singing actors, on the other hand, prove fairly flat. Given a grounded setting and more earnest focus, the actors might have done well enough to invoke the indie charm of Once. Unfortunately, they aren’t so musically deep. Director Julie Taymor’s attempt to place all song in the context of a grand musical number or overproduced montage trumps the voices in many scenes.

Taymor (Frida) seems hungry to visualize the Beatles’ music and makes a zealous go of it, effectively making her film a vibrant string of videos. “Strawberry Fields” proves one of her better achievements as a dramatic crux, and “I Want You” is interpreted well to make a particularly bold statement.

Moulin Rouge seems an inspiration for the best of this film’s flighty, musically thick fun, but Universe doesn’t deliver the same consistent energy. It’s not quite as visually dense and lacks the characters to drive the fun. The hallucinogenic trip of Eddie Izzard’s animated “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” segment, for instance, is flat-out addling. An early “Helter Skelter” foreshadowing sequence overlaid on waves reeks of cheese. When not experimenting with dance choreography or trippy effects, Taymor opts for image overlays that hark to PBS telecasts of Broadway musicals. That, and she suspends naked people in water a little more often than she needs to.

It’s an appropriate image, though, as this is essentially what the writers have done to their actors. Dialogue is barely enough to bridge songs together, and character development is dinky, yielding little spark in the central romance and easy apathy for the fates of the two-dimensional characters. The story is sold short by a director clinging too tightly to letting interpreted Beatles’ lyric tell all, resulting not only in an un-enthralling love story, but also a pointless California tangent and a civil rights struggle angle that lasts only the length of “Let it Be.” Such breezy summation has more holes than a hippie’s memory. In that sense, maybe they’re on to something.

Across the Universe is conceptually brave despite questionable execution: it’s more Yoko Ono than John Lennon. If you like conceptual art and far-out eye candy you might like the film, but if you seek substance you’d do better to stay home and listen to the original tracks.

Fair musical • PG-13 • 131 min.