Don't Say a Word (2001)

Absolutely brilliant

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Don't Say a Word (2001): Dir: Gary Fleder / Cast: Michael Douglas, Sean Bean, Famke Janssen, Brittany Murphy, Jennifer Esposito: The title indicates the advice I would give to anyone who had the misfortune of sitting through this formula drag. It symbolizes a threat or warning and the physical dysfunction of one of the characters. It begins in Brooklyn, 1991 with a robbery and theft of a jewel that is then stolen from the thieves. Michael Douglas plays a psychiatrist who is about to go home for Thanksgiving when he is assigned to a particular patient. He has a daughter, and a wife with one leg in a cast, but before long his daughter is kidnapped and his apartment is under surveillance. He must seek a number from his new patient but she has a past that Douglas must unearth. Directed by Gary Fleder who previously made another missing female thriller called Kiss the Girls. Perhaps he should take out a missing persons ad and call it a day. Douglas pulls through as someone struggling for answers out of a difficult medium. Sean Bean plays the standard villain similar to his role in Goldeneye. Also featured are Famke Janssen in a cardboard role, and Brittany Murphy who steals her scenes as the patient with her own traumas. While the film is well made technically in terms of its lighting and location work, it is still a pointless cliché filled thriller where the less said the better. Score: 5 / 10

Despite what others say about the ridiculous plot, I liked this movie. Michael Douglas did a fantastic job as a passionate father willing to do anything to preserve the life of his daughter. His wife however (Famke Jansenn) really kicks some serious butt, for a lady on crutches. She's very intuitive and although being confined to a bed for most of the movie, she still manages to play an integral role. The main villain Patrick, didn't sound the part with his rather refined English accent, but he certainly played the part well through his manipulation of the Conrad family.Brittany Murphy did a stellar job in her role as a neurotic young lady who holds the key to the mystery of the movie, a numbered code. Finally, Jennifer Esposito, surprised me in that she's dropped dead gorgeous, but she proved to be as tough as nails and persistent in trying to find the connections between a number of unsolved deaths. At the end she takes a bullet for a worthy cause and is the x-factor hero, so to speak, of the entire film. Generally, the movie presents a nice mix of suspense and action to keep most thriller fans interested. It won't blow you out of your seat, but at least it will keep you thinking.

Don't Say a Word is a wry and crowd-pleasing enough little thriller, a taut and engaging race-against-time piece covering some pretty affecting ground to do with a young woman having to confront some rather harsh demons as well as an upstanding husband and father having to confront more immediate issues which are brought into his life. Director Gary Fleder, here, proves he can tackle a thriller in every sense of the word, operating in what you must admit to being a workmanlike and engaging enough manner to supplement a recommendation. Being able to sit there and box tick where it is characters suffer epiphanies and will eventually come to garner the upper hand is not the point; watching a director carefully execute a concept thriller whilst balancing the basic but enjoyable plot mechanisms and manoeuvring the characters around in a thorough and competent enough fashion whilst adhering, in an entertaining manner, to both generic demands and conventions is what is enjoyably garnered the most out a film like this.The film runs on a workable premise linked to that of a specific number, a number that is hard to come by and a number which will garner its bearer access to that of a priceless ruby located out and around the New York City area. The catch is, that it's embedded within the mind of somebody whom very rarely is in the mood to tell it, indeed anything, to anyone at all; furthermore, the lives of certain people our eventual protagonist dearly loves will come to be in great danger, and his ability to obtain this number will dictate as to whether they survive. The protagonist is a certain Nathan Conrad, a doctor and educated psychiatrist; an easy glide across his office which harbours his credentials in the form of certificates and qualifications outlining his knowledge and experience within the field. In his office, he's calm amidst a delicate situation and keeps cool and methodical where others may have acted out in a different, more negative manner, when he enlightens, in an unpatronising manner, some stern speakings to a young high-schooler sent to the good doctor on account of stealing certain clothing garments belonging a female colleague at school. Out of the office, he's working up at a mental institute named Bridgville, partaking in a rapid-fire exchange about the ins and outs of various things within the field to an accomplice, thus highlighting both the general professionalism and clinical ability of his nature.Conrad will later come to have to deal with a situation of an even more delicate nature, that being when Sean Bean's professional thief Patrick Koster and his crew get out of prison following a ten year stretch linked to the theft of a ruby. It is not, however, the theft of a priceless ruby which incarcerated them, more-so the careless murder in a public place of a back-stabbing accomplice which sends them all down; their taking over of a Manhatten apartment overlooking Conrad's own sparking into life a chain of events linked to a young patient at Bridgeville named Elisabeth Burrows (Murphy), and more specifically, the aforementioned number she knows which will somehow bring about the ruby for Koster and crew. With Nathan's young daughter taken and imprisoned within the apprehended apartment to compensate for police interference, and Nathan's wife, in Famke Janssen's character Aggie, flat on her back and therefore incapacitated by way of a cast around a broken leg, our lead must face the fight of a ticking clock alone.The film keeps the villains basic but effectively nasty; Bean in particular taking glee at playing it lean and mean; an incarnation of a British gangster whom has somehow ended up performing heists at jewellers based in New York City with a ditsy array of criminal cohorts, a disparate group of your more typical movie bad-guys ranging from the hulking brute that says very little but is good enough to guard a hostage to the ugly, thin, wormy looking guy charged with slinking around on a motorcycle following the lead's every move. Even more bizarrely, one sidekick even appears to channel that of African-American hacker Theo, in John McTiernan's 1988 film Die Hard, a sports obsessed; rather loud mouthed and perhaps overly cynical technological whizz brought along for all the stuff related to laptops and monitors. The film additionally covers a female police detective named Sandra Cassidy (Esposito), someone sharp in seeing what others seemingly do not; her observations on a dead body an object lesson in homicide evaluation to her male cohorts. While the presence of a strong female character in this regard dutifully makes up for the fact the only other woman even close to the action is Famke Janssen stuck in a bed-placed position, the film struggles with her overall placement in regards to proceedings; as if starting at the end as to how she becomes more inherently involved in the film was focused upon before the effective working backwards so as to try and tie her in more and more.Fleder keeps things moving along in a smooth and sharp manner, so much so that we are engaged in each of the respective characters' plights and involved enough to, on one or two occasions, be somewhat affected by the transitions and realisations certain characters must drag themselves through when the time demands it. We come to dislike the baddies just as much as we come to sympathise with the supporting Murphy, her subplot seeing her forced into the role of the victim during one's childhood and neatly going on to echo the role of Nathan's daughter when she herself is caught up in the middle of all this; both of whose plights are effectively caused by the same lone individual and the greed that person accentuates- it coming to endanger those whom they love concurrent with those others hold just as dear as the effect ripples down. The film is a smooth, workmanlike ride through thriller territory.

Don't Say A Word" qualifies as utter hokum but good fun. This stylishly-lensed, white-knuckled suspense thriller asks us to put up with a plot so contrived that it literally defies credibility. Basically, a gang of relentless jewel thieves abduct Jessie (Skye McCole Bartusiask) the 8-year old daughter of an affluent Manhattan psychiatrist, Dr. Nathan Conrad (Michael Douglas of "Traffic"), and holds her for ransom. The gang doesn't demand money. Instead, these calculating, cold-blooded, ex-convicts want our resourceful hero to ferret out a secret mired in the mind of an apparently catatonic, 18-year old damsel-in-distress, Elisabeth Burrows (Brittany Murphy of "Summer Catch"), prone to bouts of extreme violence. Our antagonists need a six-digit number, so they can locate a ruby worth $10-million. Elisabeth's felonious father abetted bad guy Patrick Koster (Sean Bean of "GoldenEye") and his crew when they stole the gemstone ten years ago. During the getaway, Elisabeth's dad double-crossed them, stashed the ruby, and fled. When they caught up with him, he refused to divulge where he had the ruby, so they killed him, but were caught and imprisoned. Now, they are back on the streets again and after Elisabeth.Were this chain of events not improbable enough, remember these villains have just finished a ten-year stretch in New York's notorious Attica Prison, and they still want that damned stone! The premise of "Don't Say A Word" partially mimics the recent Martin Lawrence comedy "Blue Streak," except Lawrence emerged as the hero, whereas Sean Bean and his ruffians are indisputably the bad guys. Originally, N.Y. Transit authorities arrested Koster and company for knocking off Elisabeth's dad in a crowded subway station while she witnessed his murder. Vividly ingrained in her mind is the memory that nobody tried to help her dad. Now, the only remaining lead these desperate hoodlums have to the whereabouts of the ruby is Elisabeth herself. Cleverly, she has managed to hole up in a variety of mental facilities over the intervening decade and eluded them. How can somebody with no medical expertise whatsoever dupe experts and stay in at least 20 institutions? "Don't Say A Word" never satisfactorily resolves this question. Nevertheless, Dr. Conrad catches her faking right off the bat. Deciding to come clean, Elisabeth warbles a tune like a mythical Greek siren trying to lure a sailor to his death on a rocky seashore: "I'll never tell." She knows more is at stake than her implied mental instability and suspects Dr. Conrad knows about her secret, too.Incredibly, our heroic psychologist finds himself up against a wall with a nerve-racking, eight-hour deadline to pry the valuable secret out of a reluctant Elisabeth before the villains kill his daughter. The outlandish but adrenalin-laced Anthony Peckham & Patrick Smith Kelly screenplay borrows elements from the Bogart classic "The Maltese Falcon," the Martin Lawrence comedy "Blue Streak," and the graveyard scene in Sergio Leone's "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly." Sadly, the writers don't do a seamless job of integrating different story lines, so a police investigation subplot appears added as an afterthought. Finally, our villains behave like larcenous Boy Scouts. They come up with every available audio and video surveillance device to make Big Brother salivate, and they install them wherever our heroes might conduct business. Like all encompassing evil, these fiends strive to be as omniscient as possible. They wire Dr. Conrad's luxurious apartment house and the grim mental institution where Elisabeth is held. The writers neglect to tell how these guys obtained their sophisticated equipment. Did they steal it? Or how they could gain access to an apartment complex with security guards? "Don't Say A Word" unfolds with a flashback set in 1991. Koster and his team of high-tech thieves break into a safe-deposit box at a posh New York bank and pocket a priceless ruby. At least, Patrick thought he had it, only to discover moments afterward that his slippery-fingered accomplice has pulled the old switcheroo on him. Eventually, they catch him in the subway, and Elisabeth's dad dies when they force him in front of an on-coming subway train. Later, after they get out of Attica, Koster and his cohorts track Elisabeth down in a mental asylum run by Dr. Louis Sachs (Oliver Platt of "Bicentennial Man"), one of Nathan's oldest and closest friends. Sachs accuses Nathan of selling out and moving up-town to earn the big bucks. Our wily villains strong-arm Sachs, and he browbeats the unsuspecting Nathan into accepting the poor girl's case pro bono on Thanksgiving Eve. Nathan's last minute favor for Louis ticks off his wife Aggie (Famke Janssen of "X-Men"); she is confined to a bed with her broken leg in a plaster cast. We learn Aggie broke her leg during an off-screen skiing accident. However, Aggie's infirmity doesn't prevent the agile Janssen from getting into trouble later on in the action. Aggie's no-holds-barred battle with one of Patrick's nastier henchmen is simply terrific! I'm not overly fond of kidnap capers involving small children. My chief complaint about "Don't Say A Word" is the little girl. First, we know nothing deadly can occur to her, because she looks far too cute and adorable. Second, you know her brave dad will save her, because "Don't Say A Word" is strictly a popcorn movie. Third, Hollywood doesn't make movies that show adults torturing children. As a result, this inherent lack of drama undercuts the suspense. Now, teenagers are an entirely different story. The villains can rough them up, but they aren't about to muss a little girl's hair. Only when the kidnap caper is a comedy along the lines of O'Henry's "The Ransom of Red Chief," where the child creates more chaos than the adults can endure, do I like them.Ultimately, "Don't Say A Word" doesn't surpass director Gary Fleder's audaciously subversive debut thriller "Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead" (1995). Altogether, what "Don't Say A Word" lacks in authenticity, Fleder more than makes up for with gripping, edge-of-the-seat anxiety.