Review: Don’t Say a Word




A band of crims headed by bank robber Sean Bean storm child psychiatrist Michael Douglas’ home and hold his temporarily bedridden wife Famke Janssen and daughter Skye McCole Bartusiak hostage. They want Douglas to tap into the mind of a disturbed young woman (the late Brittany Murphy) and within eight hours, extract a 6-digit number believed to be in her head, that will help them get to some loot that was lost/hidden after a heist some years ago (a crime for which they have just been released). If he does not do this within the allotted time, the kid gets it between the eyes. Janssen, for her part, gets to do a sexy variation on Jimmy Stewart in the climax of “Rear Window” as she tries to avoid the gang’s surveillance detection in order to save her family, all with a broken leg. Oliver Platt plays Douglas’ shrink friend, and Jennifer Esposito is a determined cop on the trail.



Efficient, enjoyable, well-acted 2001 thriller directed by Gary Fleder (“Kiss the Girls”, “Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead”) doesn’t quite add up at a moment’s reflection, but few thrillers do. It might be rather calculated and manipulative, but so are most thrillers, and that’s not always relevant anyway. When it works, you don’t really care that it’s all a bit gimmicky and over-plotted, you don’t notice it until afterwards, and by then, you’ve already had a fun time. This one gets the job done, silly as it sometimes is, especially the rather dopey climax. Bit of a shame that, being released in the US in late September 2001, audiences and (particularly) critics were probably not in the mood for a tense thriller set in NY, but it still managed to do OK on both fronts.



Douglas and Murphy are particularly strong, the latter playing a girl who may genuinely be nuts or suffering post traumatic stress. Or she might be feigning mental illness as a means of hiding out. Bean and Platt are certainly well-cast. Esposito, however, is completely heavy-handed and annoying, playing one of the dumbest and least effective cops I’ve seen in a while. She’d get better at the cop gig over the years, but something just wasn’t right here. Scripted by Anthony Peckham and Patrick Smith Kelly (from a book by Andrew Klavan), it’s certainly never boring. At least in this thriller, Douglas isn’t screwing around on his wife and no one’s bunny gets boiled! Think of it as kind of like “Nick of Time” meets “Ransom”, if that mixture sounds fun to you, you might enjoy this. It’s pretty solid.



Rating: B-

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