Don't Say a Word

Plot synopsis:
In 1991, a gang of thieves steal a rare $10-million gem, but, in the process, two of the gang double-cross their leader, Patrick Koster (Sean Bean) and take off with the precious stone.
Ten years later, on the day before Thanksgiving, prominent private practice Manhattan child psychiatrist, Dr. Nathan R. Conrad (Michael Douglas), is invited by his friend and former colleague, Dr. Louis Sachs (Oliver Platt), to examine a disturbed young lady named Elisabeth Burrows (Brittany Murphy) at the state sanatorium.
Having been released from prison on November 4, Patrick and the remaining gang members break into an apartment which overlooks Nathan's apartment, where he lives with his wife Aggie (Famke Janssen) and daughter Jessie (Skye McCole Bartusiak). That evening, Patrick kidnaps the psychiatrist's daughter as a means of forcing him to acquire a six-digit number from Elisabeth's memory.
As Nathan visits Elisabeth, she is reluctant at first, but he gains her trust later—especially when he reveals that his daughter has been kidnapped and will be killed if he doesn't get the number they want. Dr. Sachs admits to Nathan that the gang who kidnapped Jessie also kidnapped his girlfriend to force him to acquire the number from Elisabeth. Sachs is then visited by Detective Sandra Cassidy (Jennifer Esposito) who reveals to him that his girlfriend has been found dead.
Meanwhile, Aggie hears Jessie's voice and realizes the kidnappers reside in the apartment nearby. The kidnappers send one of them to kill Aggie while the others escape with Jessie, but Aggie sets an ambush and kills him.
After Nathan takes Elisabeth out of the sanatorium, she remembers certain events regarding the gang. It is revealed that Elisabeth's dad was a member of the gang that committed the robbery ten years prior and that he double-crossed them and took the stolen gem. However, other members of the gang later found him and ordered him to reveal where he had hidden the gem, subsequently pushing him in front of a subway train. The gang members were arrested immediately, and Elisabeth escaped with her doll in which the gem was hidden. She also remembers that the required number, 815508, is the number of her father's grave at Hart Island and that her doll is placed beside him in the coffin. She explains that she had stowed away on a boat that was taking her father's coffin for burial in Potter's field on Hart Island, where the gravediggers put the doll, named Mischka, inside.
Nathan and Elisabeth steal a boat to reach Hart Island. The gang members track them down and demand that Nathan give them the number they want. Elisabeth reveals the number and Patrick orders his companion to exhume her father's coffin. He finds the doll and the gem hidden inside it. He then decides to kill Nathan and Elisabeth, but Detective Cassidy arrives before he can shoot them. Patrick's companion is shot by Cassidy, but Patrick manages to wound her. Taking advantage of the confusion, Nathan takes the gem from Patrick and throws it to a nearby excavation machine. Patrick goes to recover the gem, but Nathan triggers the mechanism which covers Patrick with earth, burying him alive. Nathan is then reunited with his wife and daughter, and it is implied that Elisabeth goes on to live with the Conrads.

Tags: comedy, suspenseful, neo noir, murder, mystery, violence, flashback, insanity, revenge

Review:
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.
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.
Sean Bean always plays a believable villain and Michael Douglas usually plays roles that keep the audience's attention....so the almost- two hours go by pretty quickly.
It had an interesting story line, sustained suspense and for the most part was well acted.I particularly liked Brittany Murphy as Elisabeth Burrows, the psychiatric inmate whose tortured mind holds the information that Dr. Conrad (Michael Douglas) needs to get in order to save his young daughter Jessie's (Skye McCole Bartusiak) life.
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.
Do you really think that in real life the man could...oh, wait, never mind.)As for everything else, Brittany Murphy scores some points for playing a schizophrenic disaster of a girl who you'd still like to nail.
Highly overdone thriller with a slew of sub-plots that confuse instead of enhance the story that in the end seems like a big wast of time, unless you see it for it's unintentional comedic values.A bank robbery ten years ago in Brooklyn NY to steal an expensive ruby from a safe deposit box goes astray when one of the crooks ends up stealing it from his fellow robbers.
The movie "Don't say a word" goes on with at least a dozen more sub-plots that would take a good size book to explain them all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It makes "Don't Say a Word" nothing more than a standard thriller, with some good actors in it.The cast is really the saving grace of the movie.
A sad, unfortunate fact about this movie is that the 2 young female stars Brittany Murphy and Skye McCole Bartusiak (who plays the daughter of Michael Douglas) both died in a young age.Anyway, this is a conventional thriller, nothing extraordinary.
Although the critics hated it, it manage to become a commercial success doubling its budget in box office.The plot is flimsy and fragile: The daughter of a psychiatrist is kidnapped, and her kidnappers want from his to "extract" a secret from a young woman who is imprisoned in a mental institution, that could lead them to a valuable object they tried to stole some years ago.It starts slow but soon some action picks-up but it becomes exaggerated and coincidental maybe even absurd.Michael Douglas does what he cans to save the movie but doesn't seem enough.Overall: If you can catch it on TV watch it, but never think of paying a single dollar/euro/whatever for it..
Under the cloak of "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy", Mr Douglas decided to take part in this not so good movie.
Anytime you think to yourself why doesn't the criminal kill or subdue their victims on a certain situation, then you know these dumb acts by them were written in so that the heroine could escape from their grasp.Situations like when the mom found out they got their daughter in same apt one floor away, why did the whole gang run off and send one guy to finish her unsupervised?
And what was her purpose in the movie, anyway?And who called the cops when the wife killed the guy with her knitting needle?And why was that poor young woman being kept in a filthy hospital room?And where did Oliver Platt's storyline disappear to?This was mindless entertainment for those nights when there is absolutely nothing else to do.
The all star cast delivers, Michael Douglas, Brittany Murphy, Sean Bean, etc.
all put in really solid performances.The story is fresh and is pretty well thought out, Douglas is a psychiatrist whose daughter has been kidnapped - but the perpetrators don't want money, they want him to get a six digit code from the troubled mind of a mental teenager (Brittany Murphy) or they kill his only child.There's plenty of tension and drama in the race to get the number and save his child, with some decent action thrown in.Don't say a word really should be a great film based on the positives listed above, but it seems the whole equals less than the sum of its parts and it just comes out as average.6/10.
Without Skye's brave, demanding and emotionally raw performance this movie would have been nothing.Even though Ms. McCole Bartusiak did by far the best acting job in this movie, Douglas, Janssen and Murphy were quite amazing too.
Even her performance as Daisy Randone in "Girl, Interrupted," was topped by her astounding performance as Elizabeth in "Don't Say A Word." Although I might be bias in saying all of this because my favorite films are horror and suspense ones (those and chick flicks...), honestly this movie has to be in my top 5, solely because of the chill I got from Brittany Murphy early in the movie.
Let's not talk about the female police officer, totally boring character!The direction isn't bad, but the real inspiration was lacking in the script.This one is for the Douglas fans, for the rest, there's nothing knew here!.
"Don't Say A Word" belongs to that group of films that, while they're not bad, do nothing to stand out from the crowd.The surprise twists in the story are so over-foreshadowed that they end up being no surprise at all.The casting of a Brit as the head villain was a cliche twenty years ago - now it is truly old hat and shows a lack of imagination on the part of the producers and casting agents.
Brittany Murphy is also shortchanged by the script, and what at first appears to be a promising performance is not allowed to blossom.This is symptomatic of the film as a whole - truly dramatic events are underplayed, and as a result the film feels like it has no climaxes."Don't Say A Word" is a film with an interesting premise that has been produced as a run-of-the-mill thriller..
This movie, starring Michael Douglas as Nathan Conrad, a prominent psychiatrist as a man who must retrieve a number from a patient in order to save his adorable kidnapped daughter, probably should win some sort of award for Dumbest Movie Title.
That gimmick is that the code that these evil bad guys (led by a superficially menacing Sean Bean) need is locked in the screwed-up mind of Elisabeth Burrows (newcomer Brittney Murphy), who isn't autistic but is so traumatized by the murder of her father years ago that she hardly speaks to anyone and reacts violently when approached.
A former colleague at a mental institution (which looks like it hasn't been cleaned for years) wants him to look over a difficult patient (Brittany Murphy as Elisabeth Burrows.) It's immediately obvious she's been scarred early on in her life, as a result she's done some nasty things that may keep her in the institution for some time.
The tough detective Sandra Cassidy is always a step behind the action, and the former colleague of Conrad's played by Oliver Platt has an ambiguous role, even by the end we aren't sure what his character is to bring to the film.
The film then casts this plot point aside, expecting the audience to forget all about this dead end.Famke Janssen's bedridden wife sees her right out of the action; her only shining moment is when she clashes with one of the baddies.
The daughter is unconvincing in the company of the bad guys (a weakness in the script and direction, no fault of the young actress.) At one stage, all too bored with hostage-holding, Jessie starts singing, almost charming a tattooed crim into joining in for the chorus.Now to Brittany Murphy's performance, and yes, she produces some convincing acting here.
I can't believe Douglas (psychiatrist turned action hero in the space of a few minutes) agreed to star in this and Sean Bean must be one of the luckiest actors around for the number of parts he receives.
"Don't Say a Word" is one of those thrillers that has absolutely nothing new to offer and steals some good ideas from other popular movies.
Conrad, a psychiatrist with a great wife, a lovely daughter and a successful career when he's asked to examine a disturbed young woman named Elisabeth (Brittany Murphy).
We see too much of Michael and not enough of Sean, but, this is entertainment, and Good triumphs over Bad. Don't say a wordabout the plot-holes, scenes that are unintentionally funny, and the cheezy old dig-up-the-wrong-grave gag.
Michael Douglas and Sean Bean make for good antagonists and both Brittany Murphy and Jennifer Esposito acquit themselves well in this company.
A few of the more preposterous ideas: Mortuary staff who allow an unaccompanied ten year old to tag along on a corpse-laden ferry A psychiatrist who is supposed to be so good he can do in 15 minutes what no one else has achieved with a patient in years A baddy who sets up a complex surveillance system overlooking his victim's flat instead of just kidnapping her like any proper criminal would A heavily-used cemetery where the main building is a ruin The ghastly prospect of being given a sponge bath by Michael Douglas...presented as a big treatI'd rather have a sponge bath from Sean Bean, any day, thanks!.
There's Nothing Much to Say. Well-trussed New York psychiatrist Michael Douglas (as Nathan Conrad) finds his world unraveling, after cute 8-year-old daughter Skye McCole Bartusiak (as Jessie) is kidnapped by psychotic Sean Bean (as Patrick Koster).
For ransom, the crooked Mr. Bean wants Mr. Douglas to pry a six-digit number from the disturbed mind of squirrelly patient Brittany Murphy (as Elisabeth Burrows).
Ms. Murphy is most memorable.***** Don't Say a Word (9/24/01) Gary Fleder ~ Michael Douglas, Brittany Murphy, Sean Bean, Famke Janssen.
I felt the story, pace, and plot was GREAT but the less than fluid character development moves it from a 8.5 down to a 7 (a 6 if you are not a Mike Douglas fan and a 5 if you also don't like suspense).If you have read the book you will probably be let down.
Michael Douglas is a good actor, but this movie is a disgrace.
And why can't people kill a villain properly without him coming back for a second attack?For all it's bad points, it does add in some interesting things like Murphy's psycho girl character (Although this gets a little one dimensional at times.
The movie is a good thriller, with many surprises until half way when you know that Douglas's character is eventually going to get stab in the back by the bad guys who are holding his daughter.Even more laughable is the fact that we are supposed to believe that Douglas takes on all these guys by themselves and comes out winning .
Douglas's daughter is held by Sean Bean's gang of very bad men, on threat of instant death if head-doctor daddy can't prise a number from the head of basket-case prisoner Brittany Murphy by teatime.In any Hollywood big-star family man suspense thriller, the suspense is always dissipated by knowing exactly how it's going to end up.
Although there is nothing surprising or unusual, it is a good evening's entertainment.My only complaint is that the main characters played by Michael Douglas, Sean Bean, and Brittany Murphy are so well acted and well written, that the othercharacters - the wife, the policewoman, the daughter - are to some extentsqueezed out.
The one redeeming plot aspect of "Don't Say a Word" which sets it somewhat apart from the others mentioned is the fact that Dr. Conrad's (Michael Douglas) expertise as a psychiatrist is made essential to getting his daughter back (as opposed to leaving it up to the police, or just running after the kidnappers with guns blazing).
Interesting note, Brittany Murphy (psycho girl) and Skye McCole Bartusiak (Douglas' daughter) are appearing in this year's "Riding in Cars with Boys".
All of the pieces were in place, a strong premise and good actors (Michael Douglas, Famke Janssen, Oliver Platt and Brittany Murphy who I had never heard of until now).
Wow, I thought that I didn't like michael douglas before I seen this movie.
If you think you know where it's heading, you're probably right.That said, visually it gets the job done, and Michael Douglas plays his standard role as only he can.
The movie casts Michael Douglas as psychiatrist Nathan Conrad, trying to communicate with a girl so that he can find his kidnapped daughter.
There 's not one scene that the average viewer has not seen a hundred times.this is the prefect run-of the mill thriller:the brilliant but quiet shrink who turns of course into the toughest of guys,able to wield the gun and to drive a motor boat:if it were a plane he would do the same single-handedly.Anyway,as soon a family is involved ,suspense disappears:how could the "nice" "lovely " little girl be mistreated?And courageous at that,not a tear!There are the de rigueur Hitchcockian references :the wife with a broken leg ("rear window" ) the long run and the shrink paraphernalia which the Master used in the forties ("spellbound").Nothing to get hung about ..
Thieves kidnap the daughter of a psychiatrist(Michael Douglas)to make him jog the memory of a mentally disturbed teen(Brittany Murphy)who holds the key to finding a multi-million dollar stolen jewel.
It is safe to say that a movie starring Michael Douglas is always worth watching..
"Don't Say a Word" is a mystery thriller movie in which we watch a psychiatrist trying to find his daughter after she was kidnapped from a group of people who don't want money but only an information.
It has a well-written script with some good scenes and an interesting plot that I believe it's the most important advantage of this movie.
Two thumbs up for this movie!Renowned psychiatrist Nathan Conrad (Douglas) is a happy family man up until his daughter (Bartusiak) is kidnapped by a bitter thief (Bean) and his crew.
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.
But in this movie , it is just a dialog without any director's try to show us that Dr.Conrad REALLY needs 6 digit number.In the two thirds , film keeps his tension , but in last twenty minutes everything turns out to be some peaceful-guy-who-turns-into-a-maniac-thriller.Actors are doing very good and they are the ones who save the film from totally popcorn style.
Psychiatrist Nathan Conrad (Michael Douglas) wakes to a parents worst nightmare, his daughter, Jessie (Skye McCole Bartusiak) has been kidnapped.
Oh well I'll just finish with what I've got, no one will notice.'  To wrap things up, this isn't a bad little movie just very formulaic and in the end not very interesting.
Overall, I'd give it a C+ (the + being for Michael Douglas who can make any bad movie good)..
I guess the movie could of had some more character development & the plot could have been made a little better towards the end, but they seem like time restraint problems, and the knowledge that not everyone has an attention span that can last for 3 hours, even if the story is really fantastic.
Everyone, and I mean everyone, Michael Douglas, Sean Bean, the little girl, Famke ...
When Michael Douglas's daughter is kidnapped on thanksgiving weekend, he's got five hours to get a number from an autistic woman (Brittany Murphy) in a mental institution.