The movie has a nice pace, is thrilling enough, the acting is not all bad, but in the new millennium I can’t stand certain things anymore.
The problem is that the story is full of holes and absurdities. There are the usual things, like the fact that brutal criminals hurt and kill without a second thought and yet the heroes are never really touched. We all see these things in basically every action movie, and maybe it’s supposed to create suspense, to make you feel scared for your hero, and it was all very well in 70s movies, but now it’s just annoying. When Sean Connery played James Bond it was normal that the villain would never kill him right away, they always ‘left him to die’ giving him time to find a way to escape. It was a long time ago, we’ve seen lots and lots of movies like that, the world is changed and yet screenwriters never move on. Why should they try new ways when it’s easier to simply repeat the same thing over and over? :-/
Our heroes never get out of trouble because they’re smart or because the police save them in time, oh no that wouldn’t do because the heroes must save themselves! So they simply get lucky in the most stupid ways.
Patrick is about to shoot Conrad, but instead he shoots his man first, for no real reason, and talks to Conrad giving the cop time to arrive. That was absurd, and his other man doesn’t even flinch in seeing him shoot their ally like that, doesn’t he think that he might be next? Well, that was absurd but not as it was absurd that, after having decided to kill Conrad, two of them watch without making a move while Conrad and the long-haired guy fight. Again, not as absurd as the fact that the big criminal who spent his days either killing and stealing or in prison is not able to kill the doctor who spent his days talking to people, sit on a comfortable chair..
What about the other criminal who gets killed by the doctor’s wife who has even a broken leg?
Let’s not talk about the cop who is so determined to solve her cases that she works on Thanksgiving without pause: movie characters are always like that and that’s why people like movie characters more than real people. In movies people always care so much..
Let’s not even think too much about the fact that Conrad never tries unorthodox methods to get Elisabeth to tell him the numbers. He’s desperate, but he’s a good man and a doctor, so he tries to solve Elisabeth’s problem in order to get her to tell him what he needs to know.
Movie characters are like that: cops and doctors who care so much about their jobs, and now even a psychiatrist who can diagnose a girl he met only once simply by reading her file, although she’s been in and out of mental hospitals for ten years and nobody got it. He’s the best psychiatrist and that’s it.
Also, the story is that in 1991 these criminals entered a bank interested only in a gem that was kept in a specific box. They knew which one and were interested in nothing else, after all the gem is worth several millions so the money in the bank is merely petty cash in comparison. It’s not our business to know how he could know where the gem was kept.
One of the thieves double crossed the others and kept the gem for himself, hiding it in his daughter’s doll. They went after him right away, found him and killed him in front of his little daughter. It was a crowded subway, and although nobody tried to help the man (come on, anyone attempting anything would have been killed, who’d do that? they were clearly not joking), after he died hit by a train the three criminals were immediately arrested by cops. They spent ten years in prison and just got out.
Very quickly they manage to find the dead man’s daughter, and they also kidnap Sachs’ girlfriend and Conrad’s daughter to ensure their help. For some reason they kill the girlfriend right away, she was clearly not one of the protagonists. They know everything about the Conrads and they kill the old woman who lives next to the Conrads in order to set there their headquarters.
They work fast, don’t they? Wow, you’d think such a plan would require some time...
Conrad suspects nothing when he gets home after seeing Elisabeth for the first time: he puts his daughter Jessie to bed and plays sponge-bath with his wife to show us that the perfect American couple is still at it like teenagers even having an eight-year-old daughter.
They sleep and the next morning the child is gone. The chain at the door has been cut. They didn’t hear a thing.
The criminals set rather sophisticated surveillance equipment everywhere in the house so they can control everything from their screens: when did they do that? Not during the night since they overheard them and even saw them the night before (Patrick mentions the sponge-bath, so we can imagine that he saw the doctor using a sponge on her leg). When did they set their equipment? They were released only recently, and she’s stuck in bed because she broke her leg skiing..
The child is a very smart eight-year-old who looks out the window and understands she’s right next her parents apartment, and who sees what I think is the ventilation grid and leaves it uncovered, all while her capturer is out of the room to make a couple of sandwiches. She then starts to sing to let her parents know where she is without raising suspicions... wow what a kid!
Patrick still understands, but only because he can hear what happens in Mrs Conrad’s room and he hears the child’s voice. What does he do next? The immobilized and surveilled woman found out where they are! So he takes the child and two men and goes away! Why?? What could the woman do? Not call the police or anyone else because they were controlling her. Not even calling her husband to tell him, for the same reason. Surely not sneak out to get her, because of her bad leg and because of the same reason why she couldn’t call. They were controlling her, so why the rush to run away?? That’s stupid.
They leave the fourth man behind, who has no trouble with the plan apparently. He seems to be quite at ease with the idea that the other three run away while he’s left behind to kill the woman!
During the time it takes him to reach her room (how slowly does he walk?) she has managed to free herself from the thing that blocks her leg and also to hide somewhere so he can’t find her, until she hears him enter the room where she is (is he very noisy or is her hearing so good?) and she hits him with her crutch. She hits him once more and then reaches the room where they kept the monitors.
She notices that he’s no more on the floor where she left him right when he has reached her: they fight and the rich woman with the broken leg is able not only to stop the ruthless criminal from strangling her, but is also able to stab him with the thing she kept in the plaster cast to scratch her leg.
Conrad takes the girl to Potter’s field, because Elisabeth’s father was buried a John Doe even if his daughter was found and she seems to have a name and a surname..
The fact that Elisabeth remembered the six numbers on her father’s grave doesn’t trouble me because after all the mind works in mysterious ways. She never had any of the mental illnesses that were attributed to her. Conrad says that she suffers from post-traumatic stress after seeing her father die in front of her, and in the last ten years she’s been afraid that they’d go after her next (maybe not remembering or not realizing that they had been arrested), and has faked it to be safely imprisoned in mental institutions.
Basically as a little girl she followed her father when he escaped, looking at the men chasing them. She stayed where dad had told her, but moved to see what was happening. She saw some men demanding something from him, and pushing him on the railway track, keeping him there to get him to talk until he was hit by a train. She saw the men getting arrested, and then disappeared, she was not found there. She reappeared later, hidden in the boat that was carrying her father’s coffin to Potter’s Field (how she found it is again supposed to be none of our business I suppose), and the men charged with burying the coffin probably took pity on her and granted her her wish, and buried her doll with her dad.. she had touched the coffin with her fingers where the numbers were engraved and that’s how she knows the numbers.. although how could Patrick know this is another mystery.
Patrick finds his precious gem, shoots his partner as I said before, the cop arrives to shoot the other partner (alone against two of them, did she really think they were going to surrender?) but he manages to wound her before dying. Conrad fights Patrick but doesn’t kill him because he’s not a murderer, still luck helps him once more and Patrick is buried alive.
The cop had of course asked for reinforcements before setting foot on the island, but it doesn’t seem like anyone tried to find Patrick. Who cares, I guess.
At the end, someone drove Mrs Conrad there so we can see the family reunited. Conrad thanks the cop and then takes Elisabeth to his family, I guess to live with them. That was the right thing to do of course, had he forgotten about her this movie would have been worth zero stars, but when the wife saw her she merely smiled at her, without a single question. How could she know about her part in the whole thing? Who told her?
It ends with Elisabeth and Jessie holding hands, which was nice, and yet not enough. I would have liked something more.
Dr Conrad-Michael Douglas
Mrs Conrad-Famke Janssen
Thief leader Patrick-Sean Bean
Unstable girl=Elisabeth Burrows- Brittany Murphy
Cop-Jennifer Esposito
Dr Luis Sachs-Oliver Platt
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