I finally saw: Don't Say a Word

You'd be right to question the wisdom of going back to catch up with those disposable, interchangeable detective thrillers from the 1990s and early 2000s that you didn't see at the time. For the most part, they existed for that exact moment in time, and had no artistic merit that would prompt a critical viewer to go back and grapple with them 20 years later.

But Don't Say a Word did have that little sing-songy part of the trailer that my friends and I must have seen 50 times back in 2001: Brittany Murphy singing "I'll never tell ..."

Just to write out the words doesn't do it justice. "Tell" really has two syllables, like "teee-elll."

But if you were watching network TV in 2001, as I was in my first months after moving to Los Angeles, they played this ad constantly, so you'd remember it. And if you were like me and my friends, you mocked it out of sheer exhaustion from seeing it so many times.

So after an abortive attempt to watch Sharknado on Amazon due to technical issues -- another "I finally saw" candidate when I do get to it -- I switched over to Netflix and found this.

And two of the reasons I selected it were obvious:

1) An increased appreciation of the aging Michael Douglas, who I watched and enjoyed in The Kominsky Method, and who will not be with us forever;

2) An appreciation I always had for Murphy, who is already not with us.

I hoped the movie would be a real tete-a-tete between these two. The singy-songy "I'll never tell" certainly suggested that Murphy's psychiatric patient was toying with Douglas' child psychologist, and that the thing she wouldn't tell was something she was holding back for spite, in order to make Douglas squirm.

In reality, she isn't the antagonist, and the actual antagonist is far more banal. It's Sean Bean, who is both a jewel thief and a kidnapper, and that jewel thief also committed a bank robbery. So really, it's every cliche you can think of thrown into a blender and reduced to something colorless and bland. 

There's also a different protagonist than you might expect, or at least a third protagonist in addition to Douglas and Murphy, which is Jennifer Esposito playing a detective tracking a killer. Right, so Bean has also killed some people on his path to finding the lost jewel. A number in Murphy's head is the thing she won't tell, and that will lead to the jewel, or else Douglas' kidnapped daughter will be killed.

So yeah, it certainly would have been fine if I'd never seen it.