This is the kind of movie that I hate watching. It has enough good things, like the cast and the acting, that you want to like it, but the story is full of so many holes and implausible plot twists that it only depresses you.

Michael Douglas, Famke Janssen, Sean Bean, Brittany Murphy, and especially Oliver Platt are all favorites of mine. Gary Fleder, the director, did one of my favorite episodes of the television show “Homicide” titled “The Subway”. Usually thrillers involving psychiatrists are intelligent. You would think they would have to be.

Still, this movie just kind of laid there. It never got me involved or excited enough to care about what happens next, or to the characters.

Douglas plays an expert child psychiatrist who is called in by a colleague, Oliver Platt, to help with a patient. Platt is quite insistent, and acts like it is an emergency. The patient, skillfully played by Brittany Murphy, appears to be suffering from multiple mental traumas. After a brief inspection of the patient he goes home to see his family. Douglas has a wife played by Famke Janssen who is bedridden with a broken leg, and a young daughter. We know going in thanks to the advertisements, and general tone of the film, that all the happy scenes with the family are there just to make us feel more tension with the soon to follow scenes of the family in peril.

Kidnappers grab their child, and tell Douglas that he has a short time limit to get a six digit number out of his newest patient, or else his daughter will die. There are cameras watching his bedridden wife, so she can’t help. Douglas doesn’t know what the number is, what it represents, why someone needs it, or even if he can get the girl to give it up within a day. What he does know is that the patient is faking the majority of her trauma, and that he has to do whatever the kidnappers want for the time being.

We are told that the six digit code number is stuck inside her head, as if it has to be found through psychiatric means. This could have been very easy, and I could imagine some fascinating talking back and forth like in “Silence of the Lambs”. Initially we don’t know what the number is, or what it even represents. The film could have played with this more as they tried to figure out combinations and possibilities. In the end, it could have been anything else like a key, a name, or a tree in a cemetery. A better film would have made the key a ‘McGuffin’, which was Hitchcock’s word to describe something that doesn’t matter what it is, just that everyone is after it. In this film, they try to play off the key’s actual meaning as something far more interesting than it is.

The film has lots of good actors, but none performed especially well. Brittany Murphy probably did the best job. Her wail “I’ll never tell” played in all the commercials, and was probably the single most haunting thing about the whole movie. She is really asked to perform quite a range from psychotic, to terrified, to comatose, to drugged, to intelligent and eventually to happy. She does all this well, but it is a shame that the script didn’t allow her to make the transitions more believably.

I could mention the character’s name that Douglas played, but why bother. Anyone talking about the film would only say ‘Michael Douglas’ since that is clearly who we are looking at. He is playing a standard Douglas role, and never fills the shoes of anyone we haven’t seen him play before. I’m not saying he was bad in this, but great actors become characters. Even with such a two-dimensional script as this.

Sean Bean, is forever doomed to play slightly mad and emotionally disturbed villains because he does a great job at it. Here he is a crook who was cheated, and sentenced to jail for ten years. He is truly angry, but cannot take his revenge on the man who stole from him, because he had just killed him before being incarcerated. I was surprised that for someone who has been in jail for ten years, he put such a short deadline on trying to find his lost prize. One would assume that the treasure was going to be shortly lost forever or something, but no, I think he could have waited another day or two without any loss.

Famke Janssen has to spend most of the movie in bed with a broken leg and not react very much. I wasn’t very impressed with what she did, and I’m sure many actresses could have done a better job even with the limited range allowed her.

I've loved Oliver Platt in every supporting role he has ever done, until now. His character didn't make sense, and then he disappeared without a mention. Why would he call in this other doctor, and then let him leave the first time without getting the number. Platt acted illogically, and not like someone who truly had a loved one recently murdered.

The direction by Gary Fleder was okay. Looking up this film on IMDB reminded me that the director previously did the well made “Kiss the Girls” and a classic, and excellent, episode of the television show Homicide called "The Subway" which had a few similar scenes. One very neat scene in this film deserves complimenting where a man who killed someone by throwing him in front of a subway car is being buried alive by dirt, and they cut back and forth between the dirt and the subway as if to say he is getting what he deserves.

I could easily imagine this being a really good film. However, the movie just doesn't earn a lot of the scenes it tries to pull off. There is a lady cop who is trying to solve the case along a parallel course to Douglas’. She just seemed to find the next step in her investigation through contrived and illogical means. I never believed Douglas cured Murphy of anything. He didn't really earn her trust that fast either. The enemies couldn't have planted as many cameras as quickly as they did. Why did Douglas let him listen through a two way mirror during his second interrogation? There is a scene where Douglas tells one of the kidnapper’s flunkies that he knows he couldn’t kill his daughter because he can tell that he likes her. This was true to us, but there is no way Douglas could have determined this as fast as he does. Why didn’t he continue to get help from Platt? It probably would’ve been easier to sneak the patient out of his hospital that way. And why do all of these movies end with all the surviving characters so happy, when in truth they should be as traumatized as Brad Pitt at the end of “Seven”?

I think one of the biggest problems with the story is that it has too complex of a plot. Instead of focusing on an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation, so many groups of people are acting all at once under a strict deadline that we forgive the improbabilities as we merely struggle to keep up. Compare this method to a better film this year, “The Deep End” where we get the opposite. With that film we see a very simple plot dragged out to it’s intelligent conclusion with detail and depth.

All the elements are here for a better film, tantalizing us with its potential. Unfortunately it chooses to give us brief scenes of action that we’ve seen in much better films, instead of working on the potential mental struggles that could’ve made this into an intelligent thriller.

Note: On my own web site, I gave the film 2½ stars.




Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older