Ni una palabra

This movie provides in the thrills department. It stars Michael Douglas in the lead role (and he IS well cast) as a psychiatrist whose daughter is kidnapped by a bunch of men who want him to extract a six-digit number from a mentally disturbed young lady. Both parties then proceed to match wits en route to a great climax towards the end of the movie.

This was based on the book by the same name. The book was quite good, too. I rank this movie as your typical thriller with good twists.

*** out of ****

My 11 year old nephew said it was the scariest movie he's ever seen. I can't quite agree with that, but the level of intensity and the fast moving plot really impressed me, even if it all didn't quite add up in the end. I can't remember a movie that I've seen in awhile that just MOVED along so well and had so little downtime. Given the 'deadline', it felt like it was in real-time for the second half of the movie.

I was a little bothered by Michael Douglas having a wife the age of Famke. I love her and its not a knock against her but there was no need to keep up Douglas' legacy of attracting wives under 35 for him. Gwyneth Paltrow, Demi Moore and Daryl Hannah have all been love interests for him - why? Because its the male fantasy? Reeks of insecurity to me. Plus I don't see Dame Judi Dench romancing Leo, do I? Meryl Streep and James Franco? Anyway, this is not important, just slightly annoying.

There are questions I'd like to ask the screenwriter because there are inconsistencies along the way and about one or two things that are totally out of the question.

However, as I mentioned, the movie moves along so fast that you might not have time to dwell on anything for too long. I don't think it was speeded up to cover anything up either.

The best part is the acting, especially by Brittany Murphy. I didn't enjoy her in "Clueless" but really loved her in "Girl Interupted" and thought she was the best thing about that movie. Here she gives it all, in a part that could have been laughed off the screen if it weren't played exactly right. Jennifer Esposito is also very believable as a cop, Sean Bean as a kidnapper and, as mentioned, Famke as a trophy wife.

Worth watching, for sure. 7/10.

You may be used to seeing mean Sean Bean act ugly and beat people up, treating violence as a standard operating method. But you have got to see him as a cowardly thug in "Rowin", a shy schoolteacher in "My Kingdom for a Horse" and a bi-sexual in "Carnavaggio" to know how resourceful this he-man is. He is 43, but knows how to act and how to make violent scenes very realistic. Although he says that the superfluity of dirt in this film almost got him.

The suspense is well played up with Michael Douglas doing his concerned father/prof/drug czar with druggie daughter role as well as he usually does it. He has had enough practice to get that down pat by now. You get a real good feel for bank robbers who are almost without conscience, who love the thrill of the 'hit'.

Brittany Murphy does the crazed abused daughter so realistically that you wonder how she knew to play a mad person without hamming it up too much. I'll be looking for more from this young woman.

Yes, it's just an adventure yarn without little background given for why Bean is such a bastard, but it's a great escape yarn. See it, just don't expect 'MacBeth' (which Bean is supposed to be doing in London this summer).

They say there's nothing new under the sun, and that's especially apt in sunny Hollywood. So it's tempting to ask, merely as a theoretical exercise, "can you make a movie that is essentially a model kit assembled from other movies, and still make it effective?" "Don't Say a Word" proves that the answer is "Yes." WHY you would want to set out to do such a thing is another question; you'll have to ask the producers about it.

In the movie, Michael Douglas plays an affluent, happily married psychologist who has to contend (as Michael Douglas does in every movie), with a seriously disturbed woman. The femme-looney in this outing is Elizabeth Burrows (Brittany Murphy), a 10-year, 20-institution veteran with enough contradictory diagnoses to sink a DSM textbook. He is called in to consult by a colleague (Oliver Platt) and then is bewildered as a shadowy band of Bad Guys snatch his daughter and demand that he work his famed empathy thing with poor Britt and get her to give him a ten-digit number that they need. Her dad, it seems, ripped them off during the heist of a precious red jewel, and they need the number to find it. Douglas figures out that while she has problems of her own, Elizabeth has been confounding her doctors by imitating various symptoms, in effect, staying institutionalized to hide from the evildoers. Me, I would have gone to Tahiti; to each his own.

The kidnap-flick tropes then come in fast and heavy: the Panicked Discovery, the Initial Phone Call, The List of Rules (no cops, yada yada), "No Deal Til I Talk to My Daughter", the Desperate Clock-Race Across Town, the Tough Female Detective trying to Figure It All Out, and more. We get a host of other familiar faces, too: the Bad Guys are a band of high-tech thieves (which are so common in movies, they must have a hell of a union), with black leather jackets, sleek laptops, and a guy whose job during the robbery is to stand in the middle of the bank with a stopwatch calling off the time, as though they were at the Olympic trials for the 100-meter Felony.

But all this is skillfully handled, with just enough tweaks to the familiar formulas to make it feel fresh. At one point, Douglas makes the kidnappers relocate to meet him, a nice twist on the usual "kidnappers run the bagman all over town" scene. And the bit with the mental patient, well, it beats can-we-raise-the-money-in-time? For his part, Michael Douglas does well, though he is a little too slick to portray besieged decent men. My hunch is that Harrison Ford was first choice to play this role. Famke Janssen is good as his wife. Though the script gives her little to do, she is really the one who makes us feel the panic and despair that attend the abduction of a child, and though it's a familiar movie scenario, it is still able to play on the nerves quite effectively. The little girl playing Douglas' daughter does well, too, cute but not cloying, smart but credible; there is an amusing scene where she attempts to make conversation with the hulking, tattooed murderer who is guarding her, eventually cajoling him into making peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches. And, carrying on the proud tradition started by Alyssa Milano in "Commando", does her level best to foil her captors.

The Bad Guys are a little disappointing. They are assigned quirks rather than characters (one never appears to have a name). As the head villain, Sean Bean makes what he can of his feral charisma, but he literally phones this performance in. I think the poor guy is doomed to spend the rest of his career playing Hibernian heavies in leather jackets. Their operation seems a little too well-orchestrated, especially since the movie supposedly take place less than three weeks after they've been sprung after doing a dime in Attica (where one guesses they studied electronic eavesdropping in between lifting weights). And while the movie doesn't say how much the priceless rock is worth, by my estimation, after splitting the proceeds and covering their overhead, surveillance equipment, and tattoos, the gang should have just enough left for a celebratory lunch at the IHOP.

The best performance is by Brittany Murphy as the twitchy, wary Elizabeth. With her weird hand gestures and tuneless singing, this character could have been really annoying. But Murphy makes her guileless and affecting. Watching her stare out her barred window at the tugboats in the river, your heart breaks just a little.

The story is not always credible, especially the parts involving Jennifer Esposito as the detective, who is really a sideshow anyway. We also see several New Yorkers who are surprisingly pliant when deprived of everything from cell phones to speedboats. And the parents adhere blindly to the "don't tell the cops" rule, even after it is laughably impractical to do so.

The thing that really makes the movie work is the setting and the way it is shot by director Gary Fleder, who made the underrated "Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead". Fleder puts us in claustophobic, oppressive places, from underground morgues to puke-green institution hallways with prison doors and disturbing graffiti, to the fog-shrouded darkness of Potter's Field, graveyard of the anonymous dead of New York City. Even Douglas' luxury apartment seems at tight quarters, and these places are filmed in such a way to make this close to a horror movie. The dark climax is formulaic, but give a neat twist in location. The number, incidentally, doesn't refer to an uplink code or satellite designation or encryption key or any of the usual millenial McGuffins of late. What it represents is something surprising, sad, and refreshingly old-fashioned. Which kind of goes for the rest of the movie as well.

Renowned psychiatrist Nathan Conrad visits an 18 year old woman who is mentally disturbed with his colleague Dr Sachs. The next morning he awakes to find his daughter kidnapped and him and his wife under surveillance by a shadowy group of men. He is given until 5pm that day to get the patient to reveal a 6 digit number to him that is locked up in her head. Meanwhile his wife is trapped in their flat and police woman Cassidy is piecing together a puzzle that begins with the discovery of two related murders.

It doesn't matter how daft a story is if it manages to convince you for as long as it's on screen. For example Face/Off has the most absurd plot in the world, but for 2 hours it doesn't matter and it carries you along. This doesn't quite manage the same trick. The plot is daft - every single part of it is silly from the idea of a girl being unreachable is daft, the idea of the gang doing this is daft and the way that with very little notice the gang manage to set up cameras everywhere.

That said it has it's moments - the opening robbery is good and some of the drama works well. However for too much of the film you feel like the director is really trying to make it feel more tense than it is - witness the scene where Conrad first finds talks to Patrick Koster on the phone, the camera spins wildly all round him. Similarly he uses a lot of handheld stuff to give the impression of more action than is really happening, he also uses other lazy tricks like having everyone shouting their lines at times and making everyone squeal their tyres etc when they drive! These combined with the silly plot make it hard to get into.

Douglas is OK but he doesn't convince as the strong father figure that saves the day - he looks too old to take on Bean in a fight. He also looks far to old to have a beauty like Famke Janssen. She does well despite being stuck indoors all the time - the only problem with her is that she is far to warm and perfect a character. Murphy is good although she has moments where she's too hammy. Bean and his gang are good but they are distant from the action and never feel like a real threat - in fact you could almost sympathise with Bean, having been double-crossed at the start and wasting 10 years of his life. Esposito is OK but she doesn't really have a character - she tries to be tough and slightly sassy (a role she did so well everyday in Spin City) but she comes across as nondescript as her black leather coat. Victor Argo is a pleasure to see, but he's wasted here with nothing to do in a really small role. Fans of Abel Ferrera will know him while he's been in other things (notably the two Smoke films) and know how good a character actor he can be.

Overall this never manages to rise above it's silly plot. It has it's moments but with lesser stars this would have been just another silly straight-to-video thriller.