Eleven-year-old Joseph Cross—awww!—plays a precocious youth who decides to look for God so he can ask Him if his deceased grandpa is all right. Of course, the adults in his life don't understand his quest, and his friends think he's crazy. Naturally, this set-up gives screenwriter and director M. Night Shyamalan the opportunity to fill Cross' mouth with loads of soliloquies an 11-year-old would never deliver, culminating with a speech at the end about how his life was all "Ninja Turtle cartoons and Captain Crunch cereal" before his quest began. There are some charming moments, but Wide Awake is riddled with the inclusion of mono-dimensional characters who exist only to either listen to Cross' monologues or deliver monologues to him—or, in the case of Rosie O'Donnell's turn as a sports-nutty nun, break up the seriousness with comic relief. The icing on the cake, though, is Denis Leary's stiff performance as a doctor and loving father. The interest-generating theme of a boy coping with loss is made top-heavy with cuteness, causing it to collapse a quarter of the way through Wide Awake, never to recover. Cute movies being what they are, Cross does find God at the end.