Don't say I didn't warn you (Don't Say A Word (DVD))

Member Name: george_lazenby

Product:	Don't Say A Word (DVD)
Date:	27/02/02 (101 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Not awful

Disadvantages: Very predictable, `

We turned up for 'Charlotte Gray', but it had already started, so in desperation we had to turn to 'Don't Say A Word', a clearly missable suspense thriller which did well in post-September 11th America, but isn't exactly the cinematic highlight of this spring. I usually like Michael Douglas, and there were a couple of interesting names down the cast (Famke Janssen, the ever-reliable Oliver Platt, who you will have seen in a dozen movies even if you don't know who he is), and it was either that or nothing, so off we went.

By 'eck, as Sean Bean seems close to saying, even in his most threatening moments, it's just like every other Hollywood thriller I've ever seen, only more so. Predictable, based on fundamentally ridiculous notions of how mental ill-health can be treated, it's overwhelmingly adequate. It's not too violent, not too complex, not too much of anything, and deserves to be your number three choice at Blockbuster when the two movies you genuinely wanted to see aren't available.

Douglas is a psychiatrist treating trust-fund hypochondriacs, with the movie-requisite gorgeous wife (Janssen, who I will not talk about in detail because I fancy her to bits and will lose my critical distance) and a cute moppet child. His friend (Platt) asks him to see a genuinely disturbed girl (Brittany Andrews) who has withdrawn into a psychological shell and will not emerge. Douglas quickly realises that she is faking her catatonia, but can do nothing more. It Just So Happens that the girl is also keeping hold of a six-figure number which is the key to a missing jewel, stolen in a robbery ten years previously by Sean Bean and his cohorts, and Bean then kidnaps Douglas' daughter, telling him that if he doesn't obtain the number by the end of the day, the girl is dead.

The entire enterprise is founded on a series on hard and fast rules which no-one in Hollywood seems capable of breaking. So if y
ou know that:

Hollywood Rule Number One: All mental illness is caused by a single traumatic event.
Hollywood Rule Number Two: All mental illness can be solved simply be reliving the event which caused the illness, and killing any bad guys associated with the event.
Hollywood Rule Number Three: Grown-ups can be massacred in large numbers, but the life of a single child is sacred and inviolate.

Then you know exactly how this nothing-in-particular thriller is going to turn out. There are some clever sequences which have allowed the film to be labelled as 'Hitchcockian': Douglas' attempts to spring Andrews from the nuthouse are suspensefully cross-cut with Janssen's attempts to find their daughter, a feat made more difficultby the fact that she has a leg in plaster. But all the most interesting elements are fumbled. The potential for a re-run of 'Rear Window' (with Janssen in the James Stewart role) is dropped almost as soon as it is raised. Moreover, the quite effective use of paranoia (Bean and his team have bugged the nuthouse and Douglas' apartment with web-cams and listening devices) is equally allowed to fall by the wayside, and the film never quite explains how they managed to bug so many secure locations in the first place.

Andrews actually gives quite a credible performance as the loony teenager, though it's a waste of time as the mental illness is just a MacGuffin to keep the film running. In reality, Bean knows the significance of the number (we don't) and you can't help thinking that if he just got his hands on her and put a gun in her mouth, she'd probably tell him everything he wanted to know.

But that's in the real world, not some silly, airport-novel world where things like this happen. Bean is useless in a thinking man's role (where's Alan Rickman or Jeremy Irons when you need them?), and the most embarrassing thing of all is Michael Douglas, looking like
a fat man wearing an ill-fitting Michael Douglas rubber mask. He looks tired and old, and can do nothing in a role that makes no demands on his talent for sleaze and moral equivocation.

'Don't Say A Word' wins one cheese point for having its title loudly included in the dialogue (I always like it when that happens), and it's not the worst film in the world. But so what? Given that cinemas are currently crowded with good quality stuff (even good quality nonsense), this really should be pushed back to the video shelf where it belongs.

Summary: