Really Surprised!

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

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.

It's not a bad movie at all, a decent thriller in many ways. However the female detective's character is well annoying, aggravatingly annoying. She has total blinders on and cares only about solving her one case. Her reactions to things make very little sense. It's what kept me from thoroughly enjoying the movie but despite that it's worth a watch.The story is decent, not very original fairly predictable (although my standards of predictable are vastly different from most people so maybe you'll be surprised) and there are some very good performances by Brittany Murphy, Michael Douglas, Sean Bean and Famke Janssen and Oliver Platt.

Michael Douglas is a psychiatrist. The bad guys, led by Sean Bean, kidnap his little daughter and threaten to off her unless Douglas can somehow pry a six-digit number out of a recalcitrant paranoid patient, Brittany Murphy, who is hospitalized evidently forever because she's suffering from PTSD due to a childhood incident.Douglas doesn't really stretch his acting chops. I guess movie shrinks are rarely excitable anyway. Sean Bean, even when he plays a sympathetic role, seems built for villainous parts because the default setting for his features is a slightly mean frown. He must frown in his sleep. Famke Janssen make another good but impotent victim as Douglas's bedridden wife with one of her infinitely long legs in a cast. She's being threatened too, although she hasn't been kidnapped. That makes two threatened women, one of them a child. Count 'em. Bean and his pals give Douglas a limited time to extract the secret number from the deranged Murphy. The clock is ticking. Is this a thriller or what? Oliver Platt as a fellow psychiatrist -- whose girl friend is also under threat of death, making three women in jeopardy -- is fine, as always. He's great in supporting roles and didn't make enough movies.Brittany Murphy -- well, I have a problem with her. Not her looks or her figure. She's cute, tiny, and girlish, and when Douglas first meets her she sneaks a hand under her sweat shirt and asks him, "Want to touch?" I thought it was a highly artistic scene. But that name -- "Brittany." Brittany is not a woman's name. It is a cultural region of northwestern France, a former duchy, known for its seafood and for Mont St. Michel. This whole wretched business began with the celebrity of Brittny Spears, who couldn't even spell it right. A travesty. Girls should have names like Elizabeth, Linda, and Barbara. Not Brittany, Beyonce, or Gaga. Let's hear no more about Brittanies, unless we're talking gastronomy.Like all effective thrillers, this one ought to keep your mind occupied if not exactly engaged. Surveillance, treachery, throttling, lurid flashbacks, car pursuits, women in jeopardy, parents frantic with worry, and the like are standard stuff in thrillers, and there is some interesting shooting on Potter's Field, the graveyard for nameless dead bodies on Hart Island in the East River. I never knew there was a REAL Potter's Field. Actually, there might not be, but I won't bother looking it up.

"Don't Say A Word" is an entertaining "race against time" thriller with plenty of action, some good acting and a few neat twists. Visually, it's easy on the eye and its plot involves bank robbery, murder and kidnapping as well as an ordinary man who has to do something extraordinary in order to save the life of his child. The stakes are high and the tension grows steadily until things become even more desperate as time starts to run out. Interestingly, the story has a few different strands which eventually converge and the pace of the action is lively throughout.A gang breaks into a bank and steals just one high value item (a gem worth $10 million) but after making a clean getaway, it's soon discovered that one of the criminals has double-crossed his associates and has absconded with the jewel. The other gang members then hunt him down and kill him in a subway station.Ten years later, after having served their time in prison, the gang kidnap the 8-year-old daughter of Dr Nathan Conrad (Michael Douglas) who's a highly respected New York psychiatrist. Conrad is a specialist in dealing with teenage patients and the kidnappers demand that he elicit from one of his patients a 6-digit number which is buried somewhere in her troubled mind. Jessie Conrad (Skye McCole Bartusiak) is abducted early in the morning of Thanksgiving Day and Dr Conrad is given until 5.00pm to get the necessary information. If he fails Jessie will be killed.Elisabeth Burrows (Brittany Murphy) is a particularly challenging patient who has been institutionalised for many years and has displayed a confusing variety of symptoms. Conrad eventually gains her cooperation when he tells her that his daughter has been kidnapped and through his efforts, it's gradually discovered that her trauma originated in an incident, which happened ten years earlier when she saw her father being killed by the gang who'd committed the bank robbery. The significance of the 6-digit number then becomes clear, as it's a vital piece of information which could enable the gang to locate the stolen gem.Sean Bean gives a strong performance as the vicious gang leader and powerfully projects just how cold, clever and threatening his character really is. The way that he uses surveillance equipment to watch Dr Conrad's family before and after Jessie's abduction is also very scary as it quickly becomes clear that the gang can see everything that the family do at all times and Conrad's wife Aggie (Famke Janssen) is particularly vulnerable as she's bedridden with a broken leg.Michael Douglas is typically polished as an ordinary professional man who loves his family and then becomes desperate and fearful when his daughter's life is threatened and he's given an absurdly tight deadline within which to meet the criminals' unreasonable demands.Britanny Murphy is fantastic as the mentally disturbed teenager with a history of having violent outbursts and patterns of behaviour that have puzzled the professionals for some years. The power and intensity that she brings to the part is surprisingly strong and believable and makes her performance one that's definitely not to be missed.