Don't Say A Word

DON'T SAY A WORD

Rating: B+

Formulaic but tautly-assembled thriller whose final act doesn't live up to the film's early promise.

Michael Douglas plays a compassionate psychiatrist who lives with his wife and daughter in the warmest, fuzziest apartment suite in all of New York. As we're shown shot after shot of Douglas spending "quality time" with his young offspring, we come to two realizations: All this phony sentimentality is turning our stomachs, and we'll bet dollars to donuts the kid is gonna get kidnapped. For some reason, Douglas doesn't realize this until he wakes up one morning and finds the brat nowhere to be found. Then he receives a call from the K.I.C. (kidnapper in charge, played by Sean Bean) telling him if he wants his daughter back, he better retrieve a six-digit number from a certain woman (Brittany Murphy). There are, alas, two catches: Murphy is a psycho chick® currently locked up in the loony bin; and he only has until 5:00 pm to complete his mission. The worst part is you know even if Douglas busts his hump to meet the deadline, the number's probably just going to sit on the kidnapper's desk for the whole next week anyway.

Thus, in a short time, we have all the essential elements for a good Hollywood thriller - the hero's loved one is safely in jeopardy, there's a race against time, and there's a psycho chick who holds the key to the puzzle if only she could be coaxed into releasing it. What could possibly go wrong? Well, a lot it turns out, but not before we're treated to a pretty good buildup along the way.

Famke Janssen is also in this movie, sort of. She plays Douglas's wife, but she spends the majority of the film lying in bed with a cast on her leg. How'd you like to be paid millions of dollars to lie in bed all day? Some critics complain that women in Hollywood films are portrayed as useless and ineffectual whenever there's a problem to be solved. Here, this concept is taken to the extreme - the only reason she has a broken leg is to completely remove her from any possibility of actively helping Douglas regain his daughter. It's as if the writers were bent on penning a "Michael Douglas against the world" movie, then realized at the last minute that if he lives in domestic harmony with a daughter, he probably ought to have a wife, too. Just for decoration. I can imagine the last minute script meetings as the writers desperately thought of ways to keep the wife from getting in the way of the movie:

"She could be a loving mother by day, high-priced call girl by night."
"It's been done."
"How 'bout she's working late at the office?"
"Nah. Then we'd have to build an office set."
"Let's give her a broken leg."
"That's lame. That's corny. I like it. On to page two..."

There's one sequence when Douglas madly pilots his Land Rover through the streets of the city, cutting off cars, running red lights, and plowing through hordes of pedestrians. Supposedly, this shows his frenzied desperation as he literally races against time, but I honestly didn't notice any difference from the behavior of the typical SUV driver. If they really wanted to make this scene stand out, they should have had him doing these things in a Volvo station wagon.

The film succeeds at maintaining a riveting pace as it interweaves three separate elements of the story occuring simultaneously. As Douglas struggles to crack Murphy's noodle, Janssen lies around in bed, and police detective Jennifer Esposito frantically puts the plot pieces together from the outside, it looks like everything's leading up to one bang-up finale. The kind you tell your grandchildren about. The kind your grandchildren tell you about. And then... Bleh. The movie becomes, if not predictable, overly familiar, as good storywriting gives way to the standard Hollywood mandate that everything must come down to hand-to-hand combat between the hero and the villain, and the villain must die in the most cruel but poetically justifiable manner imaginable. After the twentieth time you've seen this, it starts to get old. Here it's a shame, because the film could have been something special, particularly if more was done with the secret number trapped inside Murphy's head. Ah well, until I start writing screenplays professionally, we'll all just have to make do with the usual pablum.