DON’T SAY A WORD

Don’t say a word to Michael Douglas, but Mel Gibson already made this movie a few years ago as Ransom The details are a little different, of course — there’s an element of smarmy cheesecake tossed in with an unstable Lolita holding a crucial secret — but in general this is an endangered-child/revenge flick appealing to the lowest common denominator in the crudest possible way.

Douglas is Dr. Nathan Conrad, a brilliant therapist for troubled teens (“I don’t hold much with Freud,” he confesses to a panty-stealing masturbator). His plans to celebrate Thanksgiving with his wife, Aggie (Famke Janssen with her leg in a cast, which is as Hitchcockian as this movie gets), and chirpy eight-year-old, Jessie (Skye McCole Bartusiak), go awry when he agrees to check out 18-year-old Elisabeth (Brittany Murphy), who has spent the past 10 years in mental hospitals after seeing her father get killed. Turns out she has information about a stolen gem that generic thug Sean Bean requires, and he snatches Jessie to ensure that Nathan will extract it. Given an arbitrary deadline, Nathan rushes to solve Elisabeth’s case like someone defusing a bomb in a better movie, but we know all along that he’ll get payback from the cowardly kidnappers.

Gary Fleder employs some of the bogus Seven-ish atmospherics of his Kiss the Girls, and he plays distastefully with themes of voyeurism and childhood trauma, but the murk, crabbed cutting, and pseudo-psychology only blur whatever suspense or clarity the original Andrew Klavan novel possessed. The word on this one is “bad.”

— Peter Keough