Why am I smiling? Because I kept my name off the credits on IMDB.

You might be bored on a Thursday night. Flipping through the paper, you might see an ad for Awake and think, hmm, I could definitely be down with an hour of Jessica Alba (or Hayden Christensen) in their skivvies. You would be wrong. America has released its answer to Shakalaka Boom Boom. It is Awake, the worst movie of the year, and I’m ashamed to admit I saw it.

How bad is this movie? I already walked out of this flick in Hindi, with Sonali Bendre shrieking over a botched eye operation. Fisher Stevens, the fake Indian in Short Circuit, is brought in for gravitas. Poorna Jagannathan wisely spends her entire role with her face covered by a surgical mask. Random outsiders wander in and out of sterile operating theaters at will. A double transplant is accomplished with no more than five people in the operating room, because there’s no money for extras.

The trailer gives away the entire brain-dead plot, which you figure out about five minutes into the movie. But just in case you’re not already a mouth breather, Hayden Christensen spends forty-five minutes in extended voiceover, explaining the plot as it’s happening. Shot: surgeon slices into patient. Hayden: ‘He’s cutting me open!’ Shot: Hayden’s eyes tremble. Hayden: ‘I’m still awake!’ You know, just in case you don’t get it.

This movie has all the classic signs of suckage — Christensen (the new Keanu Reeves), and the overhead shot where the lead clutches his head and screams, ‘Nooooooooooo!’ into the heavens. That line, and ‘That’s really fuckin’ obvious!,’ are stand-ins for the audience reaction. You’re watching a piss-poor daytime soap which bears no connection to medicine or reality, hoping there’s some kind of Vanilla Sky vendetta payoff in the end. But, nothing. It ends the same way it begins — sheer suckage.

A New York audience would have laughed this flick out of the theater. There would be hissing. At the Mercado in Santa Clara? They applauded. Applauded. And Rogert Ebert loved it. Is Bill Gates a pr0n star? Do you see monkeys sprouting wings and flying out of my bum? At least RottenTomatoes stayed true. 82% rotten. Now you’re talkin’.