DON'T SAY A WORD (2001) I liked this...but don't tell anyone I saw this within a day or so of Along Came A Spider. They're both "rescue the kidnapped child" movies - and we've seen enough of those in recent years that one wonders why there's apparently sudden upswing in demand for them. They're enjoying some sort of glory days! People sure liked watching the horrors of kidnapping on the news for a while, but even that abated, attentions wandering to some other dastardliness. I wonder how Trapped is doing. The difference between the two movies is that while Along Came A Spider was kind of a so-so mainstream thriller, this one is a pretty good mainstream thriller. Not the kind of thing hard-core horror fans will much admit to enjoying, but I suspect that the mainstream thriller is a concept that is harder to pull off than one might think. Michael Douglas plays, well, Michael Douglas - rich guy, hot young wife, child who'll graduate from high school when he's 75 or so. Cringe-inducing "fatherly love" scene? You betcha. He's a psychiatrist with a new patient, played by Brittany Murphy (who I used to have a crush on but she's startin' to creep me out), who's like the psychological equivalent of Mr. Burns, suffering from every ailment known to man, a super-smorg of psychosis. One day his daughter (Skye McCole Bartusiak) is kidnapped by what appears to be an elite team of heist-pulling criminals (we previously saw them in action in the film's years-before prologue). What they want is a six-digit number known only that new patient...and if they don't get it, well, tick tock, tick tock... The movie's big hook is just what that six-digit number is, and what it represents. A code, a combination, a locker? So far as hooks go, this is not very compelling stuff, because it could literally be anything. A hell of a lot less tasteless than the one from The General's Daughter ("What's worse than rape by five men?" asked that ad campaign...you don't even want to know the answers I came up with), I'll give it that. Nevertheless, I was always curious about it, even asking friends who I thought had seen the movie. None of them have. I think I'm still the only one. Don't Say A Word might not be unpredictable, but it's made with both professionalism and a bit of a fierce spirit that a lot of mainstream thrillers lack. The opening heist scene is nothing new, but it's so well-done and intensely portrayed that it's hard to care. Okay, there are too man circling/sweeping cameras. The Along Came A Spider comparisons only get more numerous; Don't Say A Word was directed by Gary Fleder, who also directed the other movie's predecessor, Kiss The Girls. The casting and writing aren't half bad. Douglas is perfectly in his element, and Famke Janssen, stuck in bed almost the whole time with a huge cast on her leg, is way hotter than Jimmy Stewart. Murphy hits that right note where you want to like her but you're worried she might try to stab you with something. Whereas the girl in Along Came A Spider fought off her attacker by throwing exploding battery packs onto a stove, the girl here is a little less rash. She talks to her captors, asks the right questions, and is surprisingly well-behaved for a kid named Jessie. I didn't like the inclusion of Oliver Platt as a fellow psychiatrist. He wouldn't be here if he didn't factor into the plot, and once it's shown how, it feels artificial. It's easy to sympathize with Douglas's character - he could lose his daughter. Platt's is stuck with a girlfriend, not just a girlfriend, but a, uh, cupcake. Would his actions be more acceptable if it was his wife or child in jeopardy? Maybe, maybe not, but I wouldn't feel so manipulated into not sympathizing. And Jennifer Esposito is pretty much wasted as a cop who might help or hinder...or, maybe she'll just get sidelined for the whole movie, so many steps behind everybody else that she has no effect on anything. The plot plays out well, despite missteps near the ending, after zipping back and forth between four or five subplots. There are blessedly no surprise villains (well, not really) and no rewriting-the-reality-of-all-that-came-before ending. So far as mainstream thrillers go these days, this one's remarkably square and un-trendy. Which isn't to say it's a great movie or even a great popcorn movie. But it's definitely a good popcorn movie, which is what it wants to be and in a day where so many popcorn movies can't even pull that off, that's enough to make it stand out a little. BACK TO THE D's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE