Awareness Parent Guide

For as long as he can remember, Ian (Carlos Scholz) has been the sidekick in his father Vicente’s (Pedro Alonso) petty criminal enterprises. Ian is particularly useful because he has supernatural powers and can make other people see what he wants them to see. It’s a lot easier for Vicente to boost a few bottles of liquor off the shelf if the shop owner can’t see him wandering out with them in his arms or see the empty space the bottles used to occupy. Their last scam got a little too much attention, though, and Ian cropped up on the Agency’s radar. The Agency, a shadowy, semi-governmental secret organization has a particular interest in someone with Ian’s unusual skills: another individual with similar abilities, Perceptor (Oscar Jaenada) will undoubtedly try to recruit or kill Ian soon, and they want to bring him down. But Ian has reasons to doubt the story the Agency is telling him… and soon, he finds reason to doubt a lot more than that.

There are a lot of things I’m not sure about with regards to this movie. I’m not sure if the writing was two hours of parboiled inanity or if it just didn’t survive the translation from Spanish to English. I’m not sure if my profanity count is quite accurate because the movie is so boring I kept zoning out and thinking whimsically of other things. And I’m not sure if anyone else is going to want to watch this movie, but I’m pretty confident that I’d like those two hours back.

Without anything new to offer the super-saturated superhero genre, Awareness plays with congealed old stories like a disinterested raccoon pawing through last night’s trash. All media is essentially borrowing from other stories, but this movie isn’t particularly subtle about it, and worse, the film doesn’t know what to do with the pieces it’s got anymore than the raccoon would.

Awareness is a poor choice for family audiences, primarily due to the intense violence and ludicrous body count (almost exclusively faceless background goons, but they run through those guys like corndogs at the county fair), but also due to the profanity and heavy drinking on the part of Vicente. More to the point, however, the movie is a boring, jumbled mess, and even your teens aren’t going to want to wade through the garbled cliches of the plot to get to the comparative oases that are the film’s moderately interesting fight scenes – scenes which then immediately wear out their welcome and drag on entirely too long. There’s just no winning for the audience in this film, nothing to stand out and make the film tolerable in spite of its many, many aggravations. Frankly, I think it would probably be more fun to watch those racoons digging around the dumpsters.