Don't Say a Word

A standard-issue kiddie-kidnapping adrenaline thriller, the only thing that makes Don't Say a Word unique is its particular gimmick: the snatched girl's father (Michael Douglas) is a shrink and the baddies want him to wrestle a secret out of a patient before they'll give his daughter back. While Brittany Murphy gives a complex performance as the traumatized patient who witnessed her father's murder but is intelligent enough to fool her doctors for a decade with counterfeit psychoses, the logistics of both the kidnapping and the head-shrinking are preposterously improbable. Director Gary Fleder attempts, as he did with Kiss the Girls, to puff this picture up with quasi-intellectual hot air, but the truth is, this is the kind of movie Hollywood makes on auto-pilot, counting on the audience to blindly accept the gimmicks, contrivances, coincidences and suspension-of-disbelief leaps of faith required in every other scene to keep it from collapsing under the weight of its own incongruity. Not a necessary purchase. (R. Blackwelder)