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Don't Say A Word... |
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Movie Review: Don't Say A Word
Starring: Michael Douglas, Sean Bean, Brittany Murphy, Famke Janssen,
Oliver Platt, Jennifer Esposito,
Skye McCole Bartusiak,
Director: Gary Fleder
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Don't Say a Word is one of those thrillers
that seems to have most of the elements of a top-notch nailbiter, but can't seem to put
them all together. So, instead of developing a growing sense of dread, this movie believes
that occasional, quick bursts of staple action are necessary to keep audiences awake. In
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place of consistent psychological tension,
we are saddled with shoot-outs, chases, and fight scenes - all of which make the final
product come across as more hackneyed and less credible than the average thriller.
The film opens with a jewel theft that occurred 10 years ago in Brooklyn that ends in a
double-cross. Skipping to the present, it homes in on Dr. Nathan Conrad (Michael Douglas),
a New York psychiatrist trying to get home on the afternoon before Thanksgiving. He
first must stop, however, |
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at a mental hospital where a colleague
(Oliver Platt) has asked him to look at a particularly troubled patient named Elisabeth
Burrows (Brittany Murphy).
Although she's catatonic, she talks to Conrad. But her gibberish -something about him
"wanting what they want" -- anduncontrolled outbursts offer few clues to her
problem.
The next morning, Conrad prepares breakfast for his 8-year-old daughter (Skye McCole
Bartusiak) and his |
bed-ridden wife (Famke Janssen), who has a
broken leg. But as he goes to rouse his daughter to go to the Thanksgiving Day parade, he
discovers that she's missing from the apartment -- and that the chain on the front door
has been cut.
Before he can call the police, however, he gets a call from the kidnappers, who offer an
ultimatum. If he wants to see his daughter alive, he must go back to Burrows and extract
from her a number that is locked |
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in her memory. To do so, he'll have to get through to a woman who
has spent a lifetime shuffling between mental institutions, who is barely coherent and who
doesn't trust doctors to boot.
He has to do all this in less than eight hours or his daughter will die. Douglas has the
adrenalized jitter of a truly desperate man (though for a doctor, he's a mean kick-boxer),
while Sean Bean (as kidnapper Koster) |
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reprises the flinty villain role he played
in Patriot Games and Goldeneye. But they and the rest of the cast are going through the
motions here, unaided by the alternately fussy and routine direction of Gary Fleder.
Douglas certainly has had plenty of moments to shine in his career, but this isn't one of
them. He plays it pretty straight and boring, leaving nothing to let him stretch his
acting abilities. Following along the same lines, Bean, another fine actor who rarely gets
to break out of the bad |
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| guy role, plays
a cookie-cutter villain with nothing more than his menacing looks and voice to keep him
going. Murphy's performance as the complex Elisabeth has been. talked about as Oscar
bait-but we are not sure why. What starts off as an intriguing portrayal of yet another
mentally disturbed character--her other being her role in Girl, Interrupted, which was
much more interesting--dissolves into a lost-little-girl syndrome. Actually, the two
characters that stand out are Bartusiak as the spunky daughter and Jennifer |
Esposito (Summer of Sam) as a detective hot
on the jewel thieves' trail.
Word starts off with such a bang, you immediately get involved and think it may actually
be a good movie. Director Gary Felder takes us right into Conrad's happy world and then
turns it upside down when Conrad realizes what he must do to get his daughter back. It may
be hard to believe Patrick, after spending the last 10 years in jail, would know that |
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Elisabeth holds the key to finding
the gem, but the cat-and-mouse game Elisabeth plays with Dr. Conrad is fascinating. This
plot device could have been taken into so many different directions, especially since
Douglas and Murphy have a very interesting rapport. Even the subplot involving the little
girl and her attempts to escape, while her mother, with a broken leg, tries desperately to
find her,could have been taken further. But the film goes ahead and ends predictably, and
we're left saying how much better we could have made it.
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