...the action becomes more exaggerated, more coincidental, and more absurd, yet it never becomes any more exciting.
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Michael Douglas always seems to be getting in trouble. If it´s not on the streets of San Francisco, it´s in the wilds of the Amazon or the Nile. From shining through in Wall Street traffic to fatal attractions with perfect murders, the guy´s basic instinct is constantly something approaching a war of the roses. Heck, he can´t even play a game without finding himself falling down.
Only this time out his difficulties come not from snakes, fakes, crocodiles, or thugs; they come from a bad script. A really bad script. Not even a drove of extras on the DVD can save 2001´s "Don´t Say a Word" from getting the best of this poor, trouble-prone actor.
As usual, Douglas has to remain grim-faced throughout most of the film. And he has good reason. He probably realized the story line had been done before, and it was going nowhere fast. In "Don´t Say a Word" we get a prologue that begins ten years earlier, in 1991. A group of baddies are about to hold up a bank. We know they´re baddies because their leader is Sean Bean, and Bean hasn´t played a good guy in years. Even his Boromir in "Lord of the Rings" is suspect. Plus, we know they´re up to no good because the color of the screen is iron-blue, and whenever directors want to portray something sinister they change the screen color on us. Well, journeymen directors like Gary Fleder do, at any rate. His films have mainly been made-for-TV affairs like "Falcone" and "L.A. Doctors," as well as movies like "Things To Do in Denver When You´re Dead"; Fleder´s best feature to date was "Kiss the Girls." Anyhow, moving on, Bean´s a fellow named Patrick Koster, and he and his cronies heist a $10,000,000 red diamond. Directly after the robbery there follows the old double-cross and switcheroo.
Fast forward a decade. Douglas plays a New York City psychiatrist, Dr. Nathan Conrad, a happily married man with an eight-year-old daughter. We know this is a Douglas picture because his wife looks about half his age, and he´s got a kid young enough to be his grandchild. The wife, Aggie, is played by Famke Janssen and the daughter, Jessie, is played by Skye McCole Bartusiak. In fairness, however, Ms. Janssen is only about twenty-some years Douglas´s junior, which in Hollywood´s reverse dog years hardly seems to matter. I´ve also noticed that as Douglas has gotten older he´s both looking and sounding more like his dad. This has nothing to do with the movie, but I thought I´d throw it in to take your mind off the plot. So, Nathan works with teens, see, and he´s called into a hospital´s emergency mental clinic to treat a disturbed eighteen-year-old woman, Elizabeth Burrows (Brittany Murphy), who appears to have become homicidal. Interestingly, his merely taking her pulse is more dramatic and more suspenseful than the entire opening bank job. I don´t know if that was intentional or if the filmmakers have their priorities muddled.
It´s not long before the audience realizes the young woman holds a mysterious secret and that it has something to do with the long-ago robbery. Then, the trouble starts. The girl, it appears, knows a set of numbers that have something to do with where the diamond is currently hidden, and the baddies want the number. Therefore, they do what any intelligent set of evildoers would do: They kidnap Nathan´s daughter and threaten to kill her if the doctor doesn´t get the young woman to cough up numbers. They give Nathan until that afternoon at five o´clock to find out the information or they´ll kill the little girl. Why five o´clock? Why after waiting ten years do the villains have to have the information so quickly, even though no psychiatrist in the world would be capable of prying loose such data from a mentally ill patient so fast? And why do the villains insist that Nathan figure everything out for himself rather than just tell him what he needs to know, like how the young woman has come by the numbers? As far as I can tell, it´s all entirely for the sake of the plot. If there´s a time pressure involved and a mystery to be solved, even contrived ones, the audience is supposed to worry all the more. Sure, they seem like a bunch of cheap tricks, like putting the child in danger, but you didn´t hear it from me.
What´s more, all of this takes forever to unfold, with red herrings galore. The creeps tell Nathan he must not go to the police, or they´ll murder the girl, and they´ve got cameras and microphones on him and his wife every minute. Dial tones, repair men, odd noises, everything is a possible danger to Nathan, and most of the time they turn out to be harmless. Nathan has to go it alone. What are the odds? Well, if you´re Michael Douglas against a team of expert hoodlums and cutthroats, the odds are pretty good, actually. About half the film is dedicated to this setup, and that´s as far as I´m going to take you.
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[release]9510[/release]