Spanish sci-fi actioner Awareness (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) has us wondering if there’s ever been a convincing cinematic portrayal of humans with psychic powers. It’s always very silly looking, people wearing constipated expressions as they concentrate really really hard with a hand outstretched, or in the case of this movie, people standing slackjawed as creepy CG effects make their eyeballs go green and cloudy. So simply by utilizing this concept, director/co-scripter Daniel Benmayor (whose only English-language movie so far is, egads, 2015 Taylor Lautner DTVer Tracers) starts in the hole and has to dig out of it. I wish I could say he succeeds.
The Gist: What is wrong with me and/or this movie that its protagonist possesses extraordinary psychic powers, yet I can’t help but wonder about the practicalities of his living in an old abandoned boat off the coast of Spain’s Ebro Delta? Awareness opens with a scene in which Ian (Carlos Scholz) projects false images of reality on a shopkeeper so his father Vicente (Pedro Alonso) can steal several bottles of booze, which implies that they’re broke, but how do they afford the upkeep of an immobile water vessel in a picturesque oceanside locale? They have electricity and TVs and the ability to watch old Bruce Lee movies and everything. They’re off the grid, in hiding because of Ian’s abilities, but also rather conspicuous. I mean, the boat’s pretty big. It doesn’t seem as if Ian can use his powers to keep their existence secret, but one assumes if the movie was so inclined to provide an explanation for this, it would, because it’s good at driving us crazy by pretty much making up the rules of its reality as it goes along. But it also would almost certainly be a dissatisfying explanation, since the movie is chock-full of dissatisfying explanations.
But I soldier on, because I must. After the booze thievery and a subsequent dumb action sequence in which Ian makes a cop crash his car by projecting a phony ice storm on him, we learn that our guy is haunted by dreams of his long-lost mother. He’s 18 and yearns for some normalcy. His dad just drinks and drinks and when he’s not drinking, he’s probably only pretending he’s not drinking. At this point, we learn that Ian and his pops are keeping a low profile because they’re trapped between two warring secret agencies, one of which is called, um, The Agency. It’s led by Adriana (Lela Loren), although it seems to be secretly led by a mysterious guy dubbed El Americano. Vicente insists to his son that The Agency just wants to capture him and make him a guinea pig. On the other side is The Awareness, a shadowy cabal of psychic-powered “Perceivers” who control the world like the Illuminati, here represented by a mysterious unnamed figure (Oscar Jaenada) who’s trying to recruit, capture and/or kill Ian, it’s hard to tell which.
So: Who should Ian trust? Nobody at all, perhaps, since his dad seems to be keeping things from him. Ian finds himself caught in a variety of pointlessly flashy action sequences as The Agency captures him and an ally, Ester (Maria Pedraza), helps him bust out and go on the run, in search of his mom and some answers. Along the way, Ian learns that he can not only be the subject of a quick-zoom closeup and creepy CG eyeball effect and therefore manipulate reality – e.g., walk into a bank with a piece of paper and pass it as a fat check – but he also can enter peoples’ minds and fast-forward and rewind through their memories. Meanwhile, there’s talk of a secret Perceiver guru known only as The Mule, and whether Ian “could manifest the Third Power.” Good golly, is this plot thickening.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Awareness clearly exists in the long shadows of new sci-fi classics like Inception and The Matrix, which puts it on par with third-rate movies we forgot existed like Push, I Am Number Four and Jumper.
Performance Worth Watching: By no fault of their own, every cast member lands somewhere on the silly spectrum here. But I guess there’s enough subtlety in Loren’s performance as her character wavers between doing what she’s told and doing the right thing.
Memorable Dialogue: This movie gets this week’s Who Writes This Shit award thanks to lines like “Just look at his neurotrophic factor! It’s off the charts!” and “I’m not your father, but you are my son.”
Sex and Skin: Brief rear lady nudity.
Our Take: Whether any of Awareness hooks you has to do with your tolerance for thrice-removed conspiratorial sci-fi tropes and stylishly nonsensical action. It’s down-to-its-DNA derivative visually and narratively. Benmayor is clearly trying to bridge the gap between The Matrix and Bruce Lee classics, staging complex fight sequences that look pretty good despite being more the product of editing than choreography, as endless legions of black-clad goons attack the anti-charismatic heroes one or two at a time, making it all the easier for the bad guys to fail. What the action lacks is any tension or sense of consequence; the screenplay is far too contrived in its strategic placement of exciting sequences amidst drab bits of angsty exposition and melodrama.
Writing alongside Ivan Ledesma, Benamayor concocts a halfway decent concept – a gifted man caught between two morally murky factions – but renders it mushy and indistinct. Big action centerpieces lack dramatic impact, and big reveals are unceremonious shallow speed bumps the characters encounter as the movie zooms along at a relentless pace, because if it slowed down a bit, we’d only be able to further revel in its myriad clichés, plot holes and lapses in logic. It’s all slick, empty and depressingly ordinary. It will enter your awareness and very quickly exit it.
Our Call: Dunno about you, but I’m sci-fried on this stuff. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.