Don’t Say A Word **1/2
Directed by: Gary Fleder
Starring: Michael Douglas, Famke Janssen, Oliver Platt, Sean Bean, Skye McCole Bartusiak and Brittany Murphy
Written by: Andrew Klavan (novel), Patrick Smith Kelly and Anthony Peckham
Rated R (violence)
Well, I’m back. This is my first review in nearly half a month, so let’s hope I haven’t grown rusty.
Don’t Say A Word is a thriller. Well, it looks like one, anyway. It has grit, rain, creepy phone calls, paranoia, all the things that should be in a thriller. But, it’s lacking two key elements: thrills and tension.
Here’s the synopsis (yeah, my style is coming back to me now...): Dr. Nathan Conrad (Douglas) is happily married to his wife Aggie (Janssen) and is madly in love with his daughter, Jessie (Bartusiak). Conrad is a psychologist who is known for his ability to work with teenagers. He’s in his own practice now, but he used to work for the State of New York. On Thanksgiving Eve, he gets an emergency call from one of his former colleagues, Dr. Sachs (Platt). Sachs needs Conrad’s help in reaching a girl named Elizabeth. Elizabeth has been in institutions for the past 10 years, beginning shortly after her father died. Her records show mental illness after mental illness – post-traumatic stress disorder, paranoid schizophrenia, catatonia. Not a healthy girl, but non-violent, until just the other day, when she nearly killed a man with a razor blade. Without Conrad’s help, she’ll be drugged up and locked away for the rest of her life. But, as Conrad soon discovers, she might be faking most of her illnesses. He has little time to worry about that, however, as the next morning, he discovers that his daughter has been kidnapped! He gets a phone call from Patrick Koster (Bean), and receives instructions. Get a number out of Elizabeth’s head, and you get your daughter back. Don’t say a word to the police. None of this is a surprise, as we’ve seen the trailer for this movie.
As I said before, this movie looks like a thriller. But, it doesn’t feel like a thriller. Conrad is working under a strict timeline. He gets Koster’s phone call at 10 am, and he has until 5 PM to get the number. But, the pacing is all wrong. I never got the sense that time was running out. Yes, a thriller should build slowly, but it shouldn’t keep the same pace the whole way through. It spent the right amount of time on the build-up, and then kept on truckin’ at the same pace the whole way. Which meant that you were able to spot the ‘thrills’ coming a mile away.
The last half of the movie just felt contrived. Yes, it’s a movie, suspension of disbelief, etc., etc. But, the unexpected should fit within the framework of the universe that the film creates. Se7en worked because we believed in John Doe. We didn’t know how he was able to do what he did, but we believed he could do it. Psycho worked because we believed that Norman Bates was just that insane. We’re given little bits of information about the antagonist’s past (Doe’s diaries, Bates’ mother). We don’t get the same thing with Koster. While Sean Bean is a good character actor, what his character is doing doesn’t make sense with what we know about the ‘world’. Oliver Platt is a fantastic character actor, but he’s mostly wasted in this movie. And I didn’t buy Murphy’s portrayal of Elizabeth.
Don’t Say A Word isn’t without its good points, however. Skye McCole Bartusiak could go far, provided she doesn’t take ‘kiddie’ roles. There’s something in her eyes that hints at big things to come. Haley Joel Osment things. Kirsten Dunst things.
For the most part, however, Don’t Say A Word makes a good effort, but falls short of the mark
