Sorry, this movie sucks

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Don't Say A Word is in many ways a run-of-the-mill thriller. Michael Douglas and Famke Jannsen play a middle-class urban couple with a cute young daughter and the perfect American life. Douglas plays Dr. Nathan Conrad, a respected psychiatrist. On the day before Thanksgiving their lives are turned upside down when their daughter is kidnapped. The kidnappers don't want money, as such; they want Dr. Conrad's services. If he wants to see his daughter again, he must convince a psychiatric patient to reveal a long-kept secret.Director Gary Fleder (Kiss the Girls) owes a few debts here. This film borrows plot devices from Ransom, Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Negotiator, and What Lies Beneath. The biggest flaws of the film are its over-reliance on cliches and some grand implausibilities. The cliches are integrated well enough into they story line that they tend to work for the most part. The one exception has to do with a disappearing body. I saw it coming a mile away. Implausibility is not a fatal flaw in a film, but this one clearly pushes the limits with unanswered questions. One example that doesn't reveal too much will make the point. The villain has waited ten years to get this information, but gives Dr. Conrad a few hours. Sometimes implausible plot points are necessary to get where we want to go; this one seems to be a result of sheer laziness.In spite of these flaws, the film is not without redeeming value. The pacing of the film is nearly flawless, and the director does an excellent job with the editing and visual elements of the film. Performances are solid and occasionally inspired. Particularly noteworthy are the performances by the hero (Michael Douglas) and the villain (Sean Bean who played a similar type in Patriot Games). Skye McCole Bartesiak does an excellent job as the kidnapped daughter and Brittany Murphy is excellent as the psychiatric patient. This film was number one at the box office this past weekend and will probably continue to do well. It is not a great film; it might be a moderately good film. If audiences keep coming it will most likely be for the therapeutic value. Like most crime films and many Westerns, this film presents a model family whose lives are disrupted by a seemingly random act of violence. We sit on the edges of out seats and watch hopefully, as order is restored and good triumphs over evil. This is a message that touches our deepest longings for order and justice, and this is a message we long to hear, perhaps now more than ever.

Don't Say a Word (2001): Dir: Gary Fleder / Cast: Michael Douglas, Sean Bean, Famke Janssen, Brittany Murphy, Jennifer Esposito: The title indicates the advice I would give to anyone who had the misfortune of sitting through this formula drag. It symbolizes a threat or warning and the physical dysfunction of one of the characters. It begins in Brooklyn, 1991 with a robbery and theft of a jewel that is then stolen from the thieves. Michael Douglas plays a psychiatrist who is about to go home for Thanksgiving when he is assigned to a particular patient. He has a daughter, and a wife with one leg in a cast, but before long his daughter is kidnapped and his apartment is under surveillance. He must seek a number from his new patient but she has a past that Douglas must unearth. Directed by Gary Fleder who previously made another missing female thriller called Kiss the Girls. Perhaps he should take out a missing persons ad and call it a day. Douglas pulls through as someone struggling for answers out of a difficult medium. Sean Bean plays the standard villain similar to his role in Goldeneye. Also featured are Famke Janssen in a cardboard role, and Brittany Murphy who steals her scenes as the patient with her own traumas. While the film is well made technically in terms of its lighting and location work, it is still a pointless cliché filled thriller where the less said the better. Score: 5 / 10

Michael Douglas is a psychiatrist. The bad guys, led by Sean Bean, kidnap his little daughter and threaten to off her unless Douglas can somehow pry a six-digit number out of a recalcitrant paranoid patient, Brittany Murphy, who is hospitalized evidently forever because she's suffering from PTSD due to a childhood incident.Douglas doesn't really stretch his acting chops. I guess movie shrinks are rarely excitable anyway. Sean Bean, even when he plays a sympathetic role, seems built for villainous parts because the default setting for his features is a slightly mean frown. He must frown in his sleep. Famke Janssen make another good but impotent victim as Douglas's bedridden wife with one of her infinitely long legs in a cast. She's being threatened too, although she hasn't been kidnapped. That makes two threatened women, one of them a child. Count 'em. Bean and his pals give Douglas a limited time to extract the secret number from the deranged Murphy. The clock is ticking. Is this a thriller or what? Oliver Platt as a fellow psychiatrist -- whose girl friend is also under threat of death, making three women in jeopardy -- is fine, as always. He's great in supporting roles and didn't make enough movies.Brittany Murphy -- well, I have a problem with her. Not her looks or her figure. She's cute, tiny, and girlish, and when Douglas first meets her she sneaks a hand under her sweat shirt and asks him, "Want to touch?" I thought it was a highly artistic scene. But that name -- "Brittany." Brittany is not a woman's name. It is a cultural region of northwestern France, a former duchy, known for its seafood and for Mont St. Michel. This whole wretched business began with the celebrity of Brittny Spears, who couldn't even spell it right. A travesty. Girls should have names like Elizabeth, Linda, and Barbara. Not Brittany, Beyonce, or Gaga. Let's hear no more about Brittanies, unless we're talking gastronomy.Like all effective thrillers, this one ought to keep your mind occupied if not exactly engaged. Surveillance, treachery, throttling, lurid flashbacks, car pursuits, women in jeopardy, parents frantic with worry, and the like are standard stuff in thrillers, and there is some interesting shooting on Potter's Field, the graveyard for nameless dead bodies on Hart Island in the East River. I never knew there was a REAL Potter's Field. Actually, there might not be, but I won't bother looking it up.

Don't Say A Word" qualifies as utter hokum but good fun. This stylishly-lensed, white-knuckled suspense thriller asks us to put up with a plot so contrived that it literally defies credibility. Basically, a gang of relentless jewel thieves abduct Jessie (Skye McCole Bartusiask) the 8-year old daughter of an affluent Manhattan psychiatrist, Dr. Nathan Conrad (Michael Douglas of "Traffic"), and holds her for ransom. The gang doesn't demand money. Instead, these calculating, cold-blooded, ex-convicts want our resourceful hero to ferret out a secret mired in the mind of an apparently catatonic, 18-year old damsel-in-distress, Elisabeth Burrows (Brittany Murphy of "Summer Catch"), prone to bouts of extreme violence. Our antagonists need a six-digit number, so they can locate a ruby worth $10-million. Elisabeth's felonious father abetted bad guy Patrick Koster (Sean Bean of "GoldenEye") and his crew when they stole the gemstone ten years ago. During the getaway, Elisabeth's dad double-crossed them, stashed the ruby, and fled. When they caught up with him, he refused to divulge where he had the ruby, so they killed him, but were caught and imprisoned. Now, they are back on the streets again and after Elisabeth.Were this chain of events not improbable enough, remember these villains have just finished a ten-year stretch in New York's notorious Attica Prison, and they still want that damned stone! The premise of "Don't Say A Word" partially mimics the recent Martin Lawrence comedy "Blue Streak," except Lawrence emerged as the hero, whereas Sean Bean and his ruffians are indisputably the bad guys. Originally, N.Y. Transit authorities arrested Koster and company for knocking off Elisabeth's dad in a crowded subway station while she witnessed his murder. Vividly ingrained in her mind is the memory that nobody tried to help her dad. Now, the only remaining lead these desperate hoodlums have to the whereabouts of the ruby is Elisabeth herself. Cleverly, she has managed to hole up in a variety of mental facilities over the intervening decade and eluded them. How can somebody with no medical expertise whatsoever dupe experts and stay in at least 20 institutions? "Don't Say A Word" never satisfactorily resolves this question. Nevertheless, Dr. Conrad catches her faking right off the bat. Deciding to come clean, Elisabeth warbles a tune like a mythical Greek siren trying to lure a sailor to his death on a rocky seashore: "I'll never tell." She knows more is at stake than her implied mental instability and suspects Dr. Conrad knows about her secret, too.Incredibly, our heroic psychologist finds himself up against a wall with a nerve-racking, eight-hour deadline to pry the valuable secret out of a reluctant Elisabeth before the villains kill his daughter. The outlandish but adrenalin-laced Anthony Peckham & Patrick Smith Kelly screenplay borrows elements from the Bogart classic "The Maltese Falcon," the Martin Lawrence comedy "Blue Streak," and the graveyard scene in Sergio Leone's "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly." Sadly, the writers don't do a seamless job of integrating different story lines, so a police investigation subplot appears added as an afterthought. Finally, our villains behave like larcenous Boy Scouts. They come up with every available audio and video surveillance device to make Big Brother salivate, and they install them wherever our heroes might conduct business. Like all encompassing evil, these fiends strive to be as omniscient as possible. They wire Dr. Conrad's luxurious apartment house and the grim mental institution where Elisabeth is held. The writers neglect to tell how these guys obtained their sophisticated equipment. Did they steal it? Or how they could gain access to an apartment complex with security guards? "Don't Say A Word" unfolds with a flashback set in 1991. Koster and his team of high-tech thieves break into a safe-deposit box at a posh New York bank and pocket a priceless ruby. At least, Patrick thought he had it, only to discover moments afterward that his slippery-fingered accomplice has pulled the old switcheroo on him. Eventually, they catch him in the subway, and Elisabeth's dad dies when they force him in front of an on-coming subway train. Later, after they get out of Attica, Koster and his cohorts track Elisabeth down in a mental asylum run by Dr. Louis Sachs (Oliver Platt of "Bicentennial Man"), one of Nathan's oldest and closest friends. Sachs accuses Nathan of selling out and moving up-town to earn the big bucks. Our wily villains strong-arm Sachs, and he browbeats the unsuspecting Nathan into accepting the poor girl's case pro bono on Thanksgiving Eve. Nathan's last minute favor for Louis ticks off his wife Aggie (Famke Janssen of "X-Men"); she is confined to a bed with her broken leg in a plaster cast. We learn Aggie broke her leg during an off-screen skiing accident. However, Aggie's infirmity doesn't prevent the agile Janssen from getting into trouble later on in the action. Aggie's no-holds-barred battle with one of Patrick's nastier henchmen is simply terrific! I'm not overly fond of kidnap capers involving small children. My chief complaint about "Don't Say A Word" is the little girl. First, we know nothing deadly can occur to her, because she looks far too cute and adorable. Second, you know her brave dad will save her, because "Don't Say A Word" is strictly a popcorn movie. Third, Hollywood doesn't make movies that show adults torturing children. As a result, this inherent lack of drama undercuts the suspense. Now, teenagers are an entirely different story. The villains can rough them up, but they aren't about to muss a little girl's hair. Only when the kidnap caper is a comedy along the lines of O'Henry's "The Ransom of Red Chief," where the child creates more chaos than the adults can endure, do I like them.Ultimately, "Don't Say A Word" doesn't surpass director Gary Fleder's audaciously subversive debut thriller "Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead" (1995). Altogether, what "Don't Say A Word" lacks in authenticity, Fleder more than makes up for with gripping, edge-of-the-seat anxiety.