Star rating: **
Dir: Joby Harold
With: Hayden Christensen, Jessica Alba, Terrence Howard

Fancy the pictures tonight, dear? What would you like to see: action, comedy, romance, open heart surgery? Catering for that ultra-specialist market that likes to watch operations and lose themselves in utterly unbelievable plots is Joby Harold's medical thriller.

Blue-blood businessman Clay (Hayden Christensen) is the unfortunate patient suffering "anaesthetic awareness": he's meant to be unconscious during surgery but is in fact paralysed and awake. Athough excruciatingly painful, this turns out be quite handy since he has a mystery to solve while on the operating table.

Fluttering in and out of his consciousness, your consciousness and the movie are girlfriend Sam (Jessica Alba), doctor pal Jack (Terrence Howard) and a domineering mother (Lena Olin). The story is so far-fetched you have to admire the sheer cheek of anyone trying to pull it off.

Though debut writer-director Harold tries desperately to make it work, the huge slabs of expositional dialogue required to keep the audience just this side of sanity quickly drag the film to a crawl. A must-see for medical students, but the squeamish might want to give it a bypass.