Brittany Murphy and Michael Douglas in "Don't Say a Word."

MOVIE INFORMATION

With 10 as a must-see, we give this film a: Stars: Michael Douglas, Sean Bean and Famke Janssen Director: Gary Fleder Rated: R, with profanity, nudity and graphic violence Length: 110 minutes

ROCHESTERCRITIQUE

Having seen this film, how would you rate it? 10 5 9 4 8 3 7 2 6 1

By Marshall Fine
Gannett News Service

(September 27, 2001) -- They've found a new way to recombine the DNA of the kidnap thriller in Don't Say a Word, creating an unusual amalgam of the far-fetched and the humdrum.

In other words, you'll find this movie hard to swallow -- if you can muster that much interest in the first place.

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, 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" -- and uncontrolled 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 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.

Oh, and he has to do it 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) 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.

Don't Say a Word is a potboiler that never surprises and rarely even inspires a racing pulse. It's hard to be a thriller when you can't buy a thrill.