Don't Say a Word

Rating:
Summary: desperate
Review: I feel that the movie was base, convoluted and violent without serving any purpose. I feel that it is a same that Michael Douglas would have to stoop to this degree and I feel he is an exceptional actor.

Rating:
Summary: Who wrote this movie?
Review: Some of the worst writing in years. Michael Douglas's banter with
his daughter (at the beginning of the film) is painful!!!!
Every cliche in the book is thrown into a movie that is anything but suspenseful.
I am hoping this at least launches Brittany Murphy's career..she
can always be counted on for a solid performance. The movie does surprisingly little to flesh out her character. We get flashbacks and catatonia.
The now infamous "I'll never telllllllllll" line was greeted by gaffaws by the audience...She won't tell, but i will, this movie is a stinker!

Rating:
Summary: Don't Say A Word When a 1000 Flashbacks Will Do!
Review: Michael Douglas' new thriller may not be the most suspenceful film of the year but definitely is an exciting diversion using all the standard suspence/thriller components. Brittany Murphy plays a teen with blocked memory terrified by watching her father killed by thugs he betrayed. Murphy deserves an Oscar nomination for her emotional range of vulnerability. She makes the viewer care about what is happening/has happened to her, more than Famke Janssen as the broken legged wife/mother or Jennifer Esposito as the homicide detective one step behind. Douglas's Conrad, moves the father from frustration and panic at his daughter's kidnapping to resourceful bravado in face of the menacing thugs. The plot twists and moves like a wild roller coaster but like the ride ends up neat and tidy with good triumphing. The background unfolds thru multiple flashbacks in bright color contrasted with the glooming green of the mental hospital or the eerie blue of the denouement. The sheer quantity of the flashbacks and quick cuts back and forth were some aid to suspence but eventually became distracting. The NY Times Reviewer, Green, notes that NYers cheered when the NY skyline including the Trade Center was shown. In Phoenix, there were no cheers but I sensed an emotional wave run thru the audience, at least this viewer.

Rating:
Summary: Don't Say a Word
Review: This is a great movie. It has the suspense and quality that you expect from any film with Michael Douglas. The young lady that portrays Mr. Douglas's daughter is marvelous, and the main "bad guy" is done exceptionally well. You feel the main character's frustration as this story develops. One sad note... I saw this on 9/29/01, and there is one scene that has the WTC towers on the skyline. Be sure to see this film.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Trailer
Review: What talents the people have for trailer-making to make me actually want to see a Michael Douglas movie. After seeing the first of a million showings of the trailer and the famous "I'm not going to tell" tagline, I was instantly hooked at wanting to see this movie. Ahh yes, it helps that Douglas does not appear to have a young love interest as the main theme, too.

Rating:
Summary: One Who's Willing to Be Quiet...
Review: Judging from the previous readings and trailers about this movie, i'm assuming Michael Douglas is feeling right at home in this "The Game"-esque type thriller, that will have so many people on the edge of their seats (including myself). One thing that will make me want to see it, is Douglas' co-star, Brittany Murphy, who shows in by the trailers alone, an almost Oscar-caliber performance as one of his mental patients, who holds the key to getting his kidnapped daughter back. With a great plot and incredible actors, this will be worthy to sit in the dark and get scared about.

Rating:
Summary: Another movie about the upper class fighting crime
Review: This is just another boring movie about a rich guy who takes a bite out of crime. He and his wife use their superior intellect to beat the bad guys.

Off course, 99 percent of the police play only a minor part, showing up at the end to carry the dead bodies away.

This plot has been done before a million times. This is not an interesting movie.

Rating:
Summary: disjointed mess.......
Review: I thought it might be interesting given that I like both Douglas, although he has a tendency to get involved in many roles that are really retentive. I also like Bean's work and so I thought why not see what is happening in this one.
With the opening sequence I thought I might have made a good choice. Then the screen says that it is now 10 years later and we see Dr. Nathan Conrad on his way home from work. After he chats with his wife about their turkey the next day, which is Thanksgiving, he receives another call from the lockup from a fellow shrink.
This is where things start to go wrong. First of all, when he sits down with Elizabeth, who has been in psyche lockup for the past 10 years, he immediately is taken by how she is not presenting with diagnosis from past or present. That is our first clue that things are not exactly as the other shrink indicates. Then it really gets messed up. The following morning his daughter has been abducted and the race starts. First of all, I am going to assume that 'you have till 5" is only for control purpose by Patrick or is it because the red diamond, which I assume also is a diamond because a red ruby that size would not be worth $10 million in any gem shop.....is going to self destruct because it is has been 10 years of searching for it? Who knows. We are also lead to believe that the entire apartment is bugged in less than one day? with his wife flat on her back with a cast on her leg all the time it is being bugged? Did she not think it odd that someone was bugging it? And many other things that do not add up. Meanwhile, they have dragged a body from the river and we now have a detective trying to sort out the missing woman. In the end the doctor determines that he must get Elizabeth out of lockup so they can now go to where it all happened. When they show in slow flashbacks what happened 10 years before in the subway, we see her father pushed down in the tracks and then ultimately stumbles directly into the path of the oncoming train. And most importantly the three who did this, and who are still after her now, were apparently arrested by the platform police at the time. There were apparently many onlookers when it happened. So why are they free? Are we lead to believe the police just released them and told them not push anybody else in the path of a train?
Finally when he figures it out where the doll is, that contains the ruby, he receives yet another call from Patrick who tells him he has three minutes? And the doctor tells him he has the item and no more clock running. That is what I would have told him to begin with. When Patrick asks where he says "You know". Well if he knew all along why didn't he just go get it?
Bottomline is that it lays an egg all the way thru.
I give Douglas and Bean credit for sticking it out. If they felt as frustrated with the plot line, they at least did not show it on the screen.

Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable Character-Driven Thriller
Review: Dr. Nathan Conrad (Michael Douglas) is a highly trained and highly paid psychiatrist. His patients usually consist of those wealthy enough to afford his fees, but he cannot turn down his friend's request for help. Dr. Louis Sachs (Oliver Platt) is desperate for someone to break through with a female patient who recently killed someone and could end up jailed in a mental institution for the rest of her life. What Nathan doesn't know when he agrees to help is that locked inside Elisabeth's mind is a series of numbers that Patrick Koster (Sean Bean) is more than willing to kill for...

Don't Say a Word wasn't particularly original, but I thought that all of the actors in the film did a superb job, which pushed the movie up from a three star rating. Michael Douglas has long since perfected the role of innocent bystander who is sucked into a nefarious plot and manages to turn it all around, but I also truly believed that he created a bond with his patient and, while he cared for her, he cared for his daughter a great deal more. Brittany Murphy was riveting as the disturbed Elisabeth and I love her vocal inflection when she says "I'll never tell." Sean Bean was also wonderful in his role as the kidnapper/killer/thief and is constantly underrated, if I do say so myself. The weakness in this movie is the plot seems pretty contrived and easy to figure out. You know exactly how the movie will end before you even start watching it, but you want to see how they manage to get there. There were also some jarring inconsistencies that bothered me while I was watching the movie such as why Patrick killed Elisabeth's father before he told him where the diamond was (and in front of so many witnesses, too!) and why Detective Sandra Cassidy (Jennifer Esposito) was always at the right place, at the right time - every time the movie cut to her and her role it was jarringly out of place and felt like it wasn't a part of the story. Anyway, aside from small complaints like that, this is a fine movie to watch late at night from home. Enjoy it as a rental.

Rating:
Summary: Predictable and trite, but not without merit
Review: I don't like watching Michael Douglas act, because I can't recall the last time I ever saw him demonstrate credible range. Even when his character is entirely different than a character from another of his movies, I still feel like I'm watching the same character.

I didn't see this movie in the theatres because I thought the marketing for the movie was ludicrous. I remember thinking, when I saw the ads on buses and television, "You've got to be kidding me."

But my roommate convinced me that it was actually a decent film, so we rented it. I don't know if this was a faithful rendering of the book, but the movie itself was formulaic and predictable, from Platt's role, to the final ending. It also left a number of questions unanswered. How did Murphy's 8 yr old character know which coffin her father was in? Unless I missed something huge, that would have to be one incredibly talented child. Also, how exactly did Bean's character know that there was a six digit number stored in this girl's brain? We can surmise that he read the newspaper article that said that the girl was found wandering around on Hart island, and from that he assumed that she knew - but that's still an assumption, and a broad one at that.

There are some action devices employed in film that I have grown vomitous over, and a few are used here. (They shouldn't be, given that this was supposed to be a taut thriller.) Douglas steals a cell phone from an innocent citizen, when all he had to do was refuse to answer his own phone when the bad guys called him, and then he steals a boat, when perhaps some of his $200 an hour salary would have greased the boat owner's palms. Besides, how did he start the boat? I might have had my head turned, but dang, these guys that steal boats in movies have some amazing skills that you wouldn't think they possess.

The detective in the film seemed to exist only to fire a few shots at the end and give Douglas's character a chance at survival. Her acting was abysmal, and the scene with Platt's character was disastrous. Not to mention why the aforementioned bad guys broke their word to him regarding his girlfriend. That made NO sense whatsoever - and what made even less sense is that the broken word plot point was dropped right there. It didn't go any further. We never found out why.

This would get a 2 but for one thing: Brittany Murphy. With a few minor and forgiveable exceptions, her acting gave the movie its only real verisimilitude.