A facile piece of hackery featuring Michael Douglas in full tizzy. He's a New York psychiatrist who does a favor for his colleague and pal (Oliver Platt) on Thanksgiving eve by seeing an apparently autistic eighteen year old girl (Brittany Murphy) who has suffered every mental malfunction in the book over the past ten years. She is fresh from having carved up an orderly, and Platt wants to save her from a lifetime of loneliness and medication, presumably so that she can kill and kill again. Anyway, she can be saved only if Douglas will spend an hour or so talking with heror trying toand I mean right now!
The next day, Douglas goes to wake up his own little girl to take her to the Thanksgiving Day parade, and--dang!--she's been kidnapped. No good deed goes unpunished. It seems that Douglas's new patient has, locked in her brain, a six-digit number that is the key to a gang of bank robbers' recovery of a ten-million-dollar ruby that got away from them when their heist went awry ten years ago. (They just got out of prison.) Since he is the presiding psychiatrist, they want him to get that number for them, or they will kill his little daughter. They give him until five o'clock that afternoon. Well, there goes Thanksgiving out the window. Why do they need it by five o'clock? No one ever says. Oh, I know--the time element lends suspense to the plot.
Actually, it is a fun plot. If it were a comedy, it would be "zany". Come to think of it, as an action-suspense-melodrama, it's...zany. Give this one a wide berth, unless you just happen to be in the mood to sit mind-benumbed in the dark, sucking on Jujyfruits and letting production values slide across your eye balls.
The next day, Douglas goes to wake up his own little girl to take her to the Thanksgiving Day parade, and--dang!--she's been kidnapped. No good deed goes unpunished. It seems that Douglas's new patient has, locked in her brain, a six-digit number that is the key to a gang of bank robbers' recovery of a ten-million-dollar ruby that got away from them when their heist went awry ten years ago. (They just got out of prison.) Since he is the presiding psychiatrist, they want him to get that number for them, or they will kill his little daughter. They give him until five o'clock that afternoon. Well, there goes Thanksgiving out the window. Why do they need it by five o'clock? No one ever says. Oh, I know--the time element lends suspense to the plot.
Actually, it is a fun plot. If it were a comedy, it would be "zany". Come to think of it, as an action-suspense-melodrama, it's...zany. Give this one a wide berth, unless you just happen to be in the mood to sit mind-benumbed in the dark, sucking on Jujyfruits and letting production values slide across your eye balls.