Michael Douglas, 57 years young, plays a fabulously successful psychiatrist in New York. He has a gorgeous wife played by the 38-year-old Famke Janssen, and a cute eight-year-old daughter. Second wife, second family, you ask? Nope: we are invited to believe this is the first time the old boy has settled down. Anyway, Janssen has some mature half-moon specs to minimise the age difference. She is laid up at home with a broken leg, occasioning some sweet conjugal fumbling and incidentally leading us to expect a nail-biting scene of Hitchcockian tension hinging on her incapacity - a scene that, like so much else in this terrible film, fails to materialise.
Our story begins when Douglas is persuaded to see Elizabeth, a catatonic teenage patient in a secure cell, played by Brittany Murphy, reprising her basket case act from the 1999 mental ward movie Girl, Interrupted. Why has Douglas been called in for a consultation? Because of what a colleague calls his "famous touch with the teens": an unfortunate tribute if ever there was one.
It turns out that she is morbidly obsessed with keeping secret a certain number, which turns out to be the key to the whereabouts of loot from a bank job she witnessed 10 years ago. So a crew of villains, led by unspeakable Brit Sean Bean, kidnap Douglas's young daughter and force him to use his head-doctor skills to coax the number out of Murphy.
This could have been enjoyable hokum were it not for the hilariously lame script. At first, while Murphy is banged up, she is supposed to have creepy Hannibal Lecter qualities and superhuman strength, trashing five burly male orderlies before she is subdued. But when it later suits the film for her to be a victim child-woman, this Lecter-ish mystique vanishes, and the prerogatives of action and physical derring-do are entirely ceded to Douglas.
Which brings us to Detective Sandra Cassidy, played by the talented Jennifer Esposito, the NYPD officer who is on the villains' trail and catches up with them just as they are about to pull the plug on Mr Douglas and his hollow-eyed protegee. But does she get the honour and satisfaction of kicking their ass and taking them down? By no means. Poor Detective Cassidy is felled by a bullet, and it is the feisty Douglas who dispenses with the villain. Humiliatingly, she is ferried into an ambulance at the end, with Douglas asking condescendingly if she's OK. The frenetic camerawork fails to distract you from any of this and Gary Fleder's movie never loses its atmosphere of over-heated absurdity.
