Don't Say a Word (2001)

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Blistering performances.

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.

A contrived and uninteresting thriller that reveals everything that's wrong with Hollywood. The letdown here is the script, a nonsensical piece of writing that sees various parties scrabbling after a secret code that can be used to unlock a priceless ruby. It's ludicrous in the extreme and never believable for a second.The late Brittany Murphy appears as the world's most unconvincing mental patient, apparently suffering the effects of witnessing something horrific as a kid. Embarrassing is a good word I'd describe to use her performance. Michael Douglas is the everyman hero and rather dull with it, while the likes of Famke Janssen are wasted in supporting roles. Sean Bean is the only strong link in the cast, and he's relegated the cliché British bad guy role.There's no action to divert from the poor writing, apart from a few silly moments in which Douglas somehow manages to best younger, fitter opponents in hand to hand combat. For a far better kidnapping thriller, I recommend RANSOM.

A sad, unfortunate fact about this movie is that the 2 young female stars Brittany Murphy and Skye McCole Bartusiak (who plays the daughter of Michael Douglas) both died in a young age.Anyway, this is a conventional thriller, nothing extraordinary. Although the critics hated it, it manage to become a commercial success doubling its budget in box office.The plot is flimsy and fragile: The daughter of a psychiatrist is kidnapped, and her kidnappers want from his to "extract" a secret from a young woman who is imprisoned in a mental institution, that could lead them to a valuable object they tried to stole some years ago.It starts slow but soon some action picks-up but it becomes exaggerated and coincidental maybe even absurd.Michael Douglas does what he cans to save the movie but doesn't seem enough.Overall: If you can catch it on TV watch it, but never think of paying a single dollar/euro/whatever for it.

... a good one, at least. This is ho-hum squared and larded with unbelievable situations - how did Sean Bean know, how could he POSSIBLY know, that the girl would 1) survive and 2) be put into the care of Michael Douglas, and 3) know exactly where Douglas lived and 4) that he could gain access to an adjacent apartment. Okay, he manipulated Douglas's involvement via a fellow shrink but it was still a gamble, Douglas COULD have declined the gig. Ignore all this improbability and you're left with a revenge story that leaves the Count Of Monte Christo a bad nowhere. Bean had been stiffed ten years previously and was out for comeuppance. Looked like he was about to come up smelling or roses but alas, you know the drill. Reasonable time-waster.