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Don't Say a Word
Despite solid production values and some interesting performances, the 2001 psychological thriller Don't Say a Word is eventually weighed down by a convoluted story that takes too long to come together and some heavy-handed direction.
The film stars Michael Douglas as Dr. Nathan Conrad, a psychiatrist who is making breakfast for his bedridden wife on Thanksgiving morning and learns that his 8 year old daughter has been kidnapped. When the expected ransom call comes, the ransom can hardly be considered expected: Conrad is given approximately eight hours to get inside the head of a catatonic mental patient named Elizabeth (the late Brittany Murphy) to retrieve a six digit number that is locked inside Elizabeth's conscience somewhere.
Anthony Peckham's screenplay, based on a novel by Andrew Klavan, aggravates from jump because it starts with a bank robbery and then skips ten whole years before we meet Dr. Conrad and Elizabeth and we really have no clue what these two people, who seem to have brought together by fate, have to do with the bank robbery that opened the film. They do come together eventually but the connection takes forever to materialize.
There are some silly things that happen during the course of this story that definitely had this reviewer scratching his head, primarily the reveal that the hostage was being held in the same held in the same building where she lived? Why would you go to all the trouble of kidnapping someone and then just hold them a couple of floors up in the same building? I was also troubled by exactly how serious Elizabeth's condition was...the intensity of her illness seemed to change from scene to scene and even the slightest possibility that this girl might be faking sucked a lot of the credibility out of this story.
Gary Fleder's overheated direction telegraphs a lot of stuff before it happens and methodically spoonfeeds us the story making the movie a very long-winded journey. Douglas is solid and Murphy seems to be having a ball playing the nutty Elizabeth, but it's the confusing story that eventually does this one in.
Despite solid production values and some interesting performances, the 2001 psychological thriller Don't Say a Word is eventually weighed down by a convoluted story that takes too long to come together and some heavy-handed direction.
The film stars Michael Douglas as Dr. Nathan Conrad, a psychiatrist who is making breakfast for his bedridden wife on Thanksgiving morning and learns that his 8 year old daughter has been kidnapped. When the expected ransom call comes, the ransom can hardly be considered expected: Conrad is given approximately eight hours to get inside the head of a catatonic mental patient named Elizabeth (the late Brittany Murphy) to retrieve a six digit number that is locked inside Elizabeth's conscience somewhere.
Anthony Peckham's screenplay, based on a novel by Andrew Klavan, aggravates from jump because it starts with a bank robbery and then skips ten whole years before we meet Dr. Conrad and Elizabeth and we really have no clue what these two people, who seem to have brought together by fate, have to do with the bank robbery that opened the film. They do come together eventually but the connection takes forever to materialize.
There are some silly things that happen during the course of this story that definitely had this reviewer scratching his head, primarily the reveal that the hostage was being held in the same held in the same building where she lived? Why would you go to all the trouble of kidnapping someone and then just hold them a couple of floors up in the same building? I was also troubled by exactly how serious Elizabeth's condition was...the intensity of her illness seemed to change from scene to scene and even the slightest possibility that this girl might be faking sucked a lot of the credibility out of this story.
Gary Fleder's overheated direction telegraphs a lot of stuff before it happens and methodically spoonfeeds us the story making the movie a very long-winded journey. Douglas is solid and Murphy seems to be having a ball playing the nutty Elizabeth, but it's the confusing story that eventually does this one in.