When I first heard the plot for Don’t Say a Word, I was skeptical: The young daughter of Manhattan psychiatrist Nathan Conrad (Michael Douglas) is kidnapped, and the only ransom is a six-digit number that resides in the brain of Elisabeth, a disturbed patient of his. He has until the end of the workday to get the number out of her, tell it to the kidnappers, and save his little girl. The whole thing sounded awfully contrived to me. But, being the dutiful reviewer, I put aside such notions and headed into the theater. For the first half hour I thought I had misjudged the film, but soon it unwound into an implausible mess.

Director Fleder has an eye for interesting camera angles, including sweeping helicopter shots, but his visual expertise is largely wasted on a plot that unravels in both tension and plausibility. Don’t Say a Word is typical of the slick but generic grind thrillers that have popped up with regularity over the past decade. Many are based on successful books, and in the play-it-safe world of filmmaking, such projects are usually rubber-stamped as long as a name star or two is attached. Not all are bad. But there is almost always an underlying, formulaic tone which keeps the films from rising above mediocrity. Other signs are contrived climaxes and plot turns that serve only to add minutes to the running time and not to better explain the characters or situation. Even the title suggests a bland”thriller.”

Why the deadline of 5 pm to come up with the requisite digits? Just to create an artificial race-the-clock deadline to add tension. Why does this take place at Thanksgiving? Just to highlight the “threat to family” motif. It’s a little disappointing to be able to see right through to the screenwriters’ shallow bag of manipulation tricks so easily; it’s a sign of lazy writing.

Plot holes are another sign of lazy writing, and Don’t Say a Word has plenty of them. How did the kidnappers know that Elisabeth had the number, or that a number even existed? If they knew what the number related to, why didn’t they go there in the first place?

Much of Douglas’s career has been spent in thrillers of one sort or other, from The China Syndrome to The Game. Perhaps he’s done so many that he can’t tell the good from the bad. Jennifer Esposito appears as a police detective who, for reasons unexplained, doggedly pursues the case and demands priority for her lab work and autopsies. She apparently has no other cases to work on, and devotes all her non-beauty-sleep time to the case. This is perhaps to help the audience accept the speed with which she solves the case. Esposito is utterly unbelievable in the role, the most unlikely New York City cop since Angelina Jolie donned the uniform in The Bone Collector (1999). I have read that the original novel upon which this film was based didn’t even have Esposito’s character in it; her inclusion here was an afterthought. Her vestigial role seems to confirm that.

You know the old saw: If you can’t say something nice… don’t say a word.



Recommended:
No

Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older