Good idea, but lots of dumb things in this movie

(1) If you're purposefully putting your patients in a coma to sell their body parts, why be so unsubtle as to do two people in a row on successive days? This is idiotic considering that the day before you turned into a vegetable the best friend of one of your very own doctors, who you also know was extremely suspicious of the circumstances. Wouldn't the idea be to ensure these induced comas occur as inconspicuously as possible?

(2) Bujold's Susan character wasn't a feminist so much as a cantankerous, raw-nerved bitch. Sure, Michael Douglas's character was an annoyingly smug tool, but all he did was ask her to get him a beer for God's sake. If this is enough to trigger her then why the hell did she move in with him in the first place? What, because "An Unmarried Woman" was a recent success they couldn't resist riding that wave and sprinkling in painfully obvious feminist messages?

(3) The speech given by Dr. Harris (Widmark) attempting to justify why murdering their own patients was in some way principled was completely nonsensical. I suspect that Crichton was trying to emulate the brilliant sermon given by Ned Beatty in "Network," but it failed badly. Apparently, the indecisive herd is dumping the "important" decisions of society on capable professionals like the great Dr. Harris (if he doesn't say so himself). Without these sage doctors, the bleating masses would never be able to settle on acceptable criteria for euthanasia, abortion, transplantation, etc. Practical-minded pros like Dr. Harris are obliged to step up and relieve their confusion. "Society" can't afford to wait around forever, after all. Yeah, sure. No doubt Tom Selleck's mother would've accepted the "big picture" and have been just fine with her son being sacrificed so that a billionaire could have his right lung. Crichton should've dispensed with this bullshit and made money their true motivation, which probably it was anyway.

(4) When the janitor is mumbling discreetly to Susan that he knows "how they do it," she acts confused as to what he's talking about. "How they do what?," she inquires like a complete idiot. At this point in the film she already suspects that patients are being murdered! Given her intense paranoia, the filmmakers expect us to believe that she wouldn't know immediately exactly what he was referring to?? Please. The guy disappears, and in the very next scene we see her trekking off to the basement, despite the viewer having seen little to no indication she had the slightest clue she had tuned in to what he was talking about. This is bad filmmaking, probably the result of a bad editing decision.

(5) Covering a janitor head-to-toe in mop water and electrocuting him is a good way to make his death look like an accident? Yeah, that lunch time drinking will get you every time.

(6) If the head nurse, or body part auctioneer, or whatever she was, at the Jefferson Institute had grown a mustache, she surely would've been twirling it. That character was over-the-top laughable in its own understated way. Again, "Coma" seemed to be imitating other recent films, in this case the possessed nanny from "The Omen."

(7) What a complex conspiracy this was! We have Damian's nanny orchestrating the body part auctions, we have the computer guy, we have security guards, we have unethical and murderous doctors, we have all the drivers hustling body parts off to the airport, we have assassins, etc., and we're expected to believe this throng of people could all keep their traps shut about an illicit business that would guarantee each and every one of them a life sentence and subsequent express train ticket to hell? Yeah, sure.

Good idea, bad movie. I can suspend disbelief for the sake of a good movie, but despite a decent superficial polish this movie was not well made. Crichton should've hired a plausibility consultant.