Don’t Say a Word,
starring Michael Douglas, is also opening to mixed reviews. The Washington Post‘s Stephen Hunter, who remarks that the first hour of the film is “pretty scary,” says that it eventually “transmogrifies … totally into Hollywood hooey.”
But Carrie Rickey in the Philadelphia Inquirer pronounces it “one of those well-wrought, emotionally overwrought affairs that could easily overwhelm a fragile nervous system.” Here, too, critics are suggesting that the movie ought not to be taken too seriously.
Eleanor Ringel Gillespie writes in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “[It] is a classic race-against-time movie that, once set in motion, ticks along like clockwork. What keeps you hooked are good performances and just enough plot twists. That’s not to say the picture is bursting with originality; it’s not, right down to the arbitrary timeline. But as it dutifully goes through the expected tropes and inevitable implausibilities of the genre, the movie stays steady on its feet and steadily involving.”
But several critics question whether audiences are really ready for thrillers of any kind following the Sept. 11 events. A. O. Scott in the New York Times notes that in Don’t Say a Word, “a climactic scene in which a bad guy is buried alive in an avalanche of dirt, dust and falling beams inadvertently conjures up some horrific associations.”
