How sad is this?

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Gary Fleder's Don't Say A Word is a slightly topical and generic thriller that slickly goes through the motions to give us a result that is entertaining, if nothing special. The late Brittany Murphy plays Elizabeth, a disturbed young girl who resides in a psychiatric facility, haunted by a violent past trauma, unable to cope or communicate. A decade earlier, she witnessed her father brutally murdered by a group of jewel thieves, bent on finding out the location of a priceless gem he hid somewhere. Michael Douglas plays Nathan Conrad, the psychiatrist tasked with unlocking the secrets of Elizabeth's mind. The trouble arises when Patrick Koster (Sean Bean), leader of the thieves, catches on and promptly kidnaps Conrad's daughter (Sky McCole, RIP) as leverage to find the whereabouts of the jewel. A tense game of cat, mouse and killer ensues as Bean's crew basically terrorizes Douglas's family. Murphy gives the best performance as the damaged teenager fighting tooth and nail to suppress the horror of times past. Douglas makes a solid protagonist and desperate father, struggling to protect his daughter and wife (Famke Janssen) whilst in the midst of crisis. Bean carries the villain role nicely, never moustache twirling yet maintaining the menace terrifically and holding his end up. There's supporting work from Oliver Platt, David Warshofsky, Victor Argo, Jennifer Esposito, Shawn Doyle and Aiden Devine as well. It's standard thriller territory, helped nicely by its cast and given an extra shot of quality by Brittany Murphy's superb work.

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.

'Don't Say a Word' covers familiar territory, to say the least. The first few minutes shows us what Dr. Nathan Conrad is in for: A jewel he must find to get his kidnapped daughter back. For the most part, the movie does work, and Sean Bean makes an effective villain. What didn't work for me, however, were the scenes where this poor doctor has to visit a mental patient (played by Murphy). I didn't buy her as this character. Or maybe it was they way she was acting, I don't know. She should have been either less shy, or more crazy. Take her scenes away, and this movie could have better than it is. I do give the movie credit for trying to be original, but the half of the movie featuring Murphy is a misfire.**1/2 out of ****

It is sometimes claimed that male Hollywood stars have a longer shelf-life than their female counterparts, and there seems to be some truth in this statement. There certainly seem to be more leading roles for men in their fifties and sixties than there are for women of the same age. There is, however, a price to be paid for this greater longevity. Modern leading men who prolong their careers into these decades tend to end up being cast in less interesting roles than younger men. Although there are exceptions, notably Clint Eastwood, it is rare to find a male star who can live up, in the second half of his career, to his achievements in the first.Michael Douglas is a case in point. In the late eighties and early nineties he was one of the most talked-about actors in Hollywood. Although there were occasional exceptions (I doubt if many people stood round the water-cooler discussing the merits of "Shining Through"), most of his films from "Romancing the Stone" in 1984 until around the time of "The American President" in 1995 were widely discussed topics of conversation. Many of them were discussed not merely because of their intrinsic merits but also (as in the case of "Fatal Attraction", "Wall Street", "Basic Instinct" or "Falling Down") because of their controversial content. In recent years, although he has continued taking leading roles in films, he has not aroused anything like the same amount of attention; conversations about him around the water-cooler probably concentrate more on his marriage to Catherine Zeta Jones than on his films."Don't Say a Word" is one of Douglas's more recent films. It is thriller of a type which dates back at least as far as Hitchcock's original "The Man who Knew Too Much" from the thirties but which has become very fashionable in recent years. Other recent examples include "Trapped", "Red Eye" and "Firewall". The basic premise is that the villains kidnap or make threats against a member of the hero's family in order to force the hero to assist them in some nefarious scheme. The villains usually want the hero to play some active part in their criminal enterprise rather than simply to pay a ransom (although "Trapped" is an exception in this respect).Douglas plays Dr Nathan Conrad, an eminent New York psychiatrist, whose young daughter Jessie is kidnapped by the villains. Their demand is an unusual one. One of Conrad's patients is a mentally disturbed young woman named Elisabeth Burrows. Locked in Elisabeth's memory is a six-digit number which, it turns out, is the key to the location of a priceless jewel. (Its precise significance does not become clear until near the end of the film). Conrad's task is to try and persuade Elisabeth to divulge this number. He has eight hours in which to accomplish this task, failing which Jessie will be killed. That is the bones of the plot, although there are a number of sub-plots; Conrad's wife Aggie, at home in bed with a broken leg, is menaced by one of the gang, Jessie struggles to free herself from her kidnappers, and a female police detective is on the trail of the villains."Don't Say a Word" is not a bad film, and although there are some plot holes- it is never, for example, made clear how Elisabeth knew the location of the missing jewel, or how the villains knew that she knew- it avoids many of the other flaws which have disfigured a number of recent thrillers. It does not, for example, descend into sadistic vindictiveness in the way that "Trapped" does. Nor does it rely upon a succession of implausible plot twists, inserted for no good reason other than to show off the scriptwriter's cleverness. Some have complained that Famke Janssen is too young and attractive to be married to an older man like Conrad, but in fact she is four years older than Douglas's real-life wife. Douglas, in fact, plays his part well, as do most of the other actors, especially Brittany Murphy as the disturbed Elisabeth. Director Gary Fleder handles the action sequences well and develops a real sense of tension. As another reviewer has pointed out, the atmosphere of the film is close, oppressive and claustrophobic, especially in the final scenes in the Potter's Field graveyard.The problem with the film is that its central premise has been overworked. Familiarity with this sort of plot line has bred contempt, so that even when a relatively good example of this particular sub-genre comes along it can seem hackneyed. Few of Douglas's earlier films were masterpieces, but most of them were at least original enough to arouse the viewer's interest and to remain in his or her memory. "Don't Say a Word", by contrast, is an OK thriller, but not really a memorable one. 6/10