Plot
In 1991, a gang of thieves steal a rare $10 million gem, but in the process, two of the gang double cross their leader, Patrick Koster (Sean Bean) and take off with the precious stone.
Ten years later, on the day before Thanksgiving, prominent private practice Manhattan child psychiatrist, Dr. Nathan R. Conrad (Michael Douglas), is invited by his friend and former colleague, Dr. Louis Sachs (Oliver Platt), to examine a disturbed young lady named Elisabeth Burrows (Brittany Murphy) at the state sanatorium.
Having been released from prison on 4 November, Patrick and the remaining gang members break into an apartment, which overviews Nathan's apartment, including his wife Aggie (Famke Janssen) and daughter Jessie (Skye McCole Bartusiak). That evening, Patrick kidnaps the psychiatrist's daughter as a means of forcing him to acquire a 6 digit number from Elisabeth's memory.
As Nathan visits Elisabeth, she is reluctant at first but he gains her trust later - especially when he reveals his daughter was kidnapped and will be killed if he doesn't get the number they want. Dr. Sachs admits to Nathan that the gang who kidnapped Jessie also kidnapped his girlfriend to force him to acquire the number from Elisabeth. Louis Sachs is then visited by Detective Sandra Cassidy who reveals to him that his girlfriend has been found dead.
Meanwhile, Aggie hears Jessie's voice and realizes the kidnappers reside in the apartment nearby. The kidnappers send one of them to kill Aggie while the others escape with Jessie, but Aggie sets an ambush and kills him.
After Nathan takes Elisabeth out of the sanatorium, she begins to remember past events. It is revealed that Elisabeth's dad was a member of the gang that committed the robbery ten years ago and he double crossed them and took the stolen gem. However, other members of the gang later found him and ordered him to reveal where he had hidden the gem, pushing him in front of the train in the subway. The gang members were arrested immediately after that and Elisabeth escapes with her doll, where the gem was hidden. She also remembers that the required number, 815508, is the number of her father's grave at the Hart Island and her doll has been placed beside him in the coffin. She stowed away on a boat that was taking her father's coffin for burial in Potter's field on Hart Island, where the grave digger's helped her put the doll, Mischka, inside.
Nathan and Elisabeth steal a boat to reach Hart Island. The gang members track them down and demand that Nathan gives them the number they want. Elisabeth reveals the number and Patrick orders his companion to exhume her father's coffin. He finds the doll and the gem hidden inside it. He then decides to kill Nathan and Elisabeth but Detective Cassidy arrives before he can shoot them. Patrick's companion is shot by Cassidy but Patrick manages to wound her. Taking advantage of the confusion, Nathan takes the gem from Patrick and throws it to a nearby excavation machine. Patrick goes to recover the gem but Nathan triggers the mechanism which covers Patrick with earth, burying him alive. Nathan is then reunited with his wife and daughter, and it is implied that Elisabeth goes on to live with the Conrads.
Read more about this topic: Don't Say A Word
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“But, when to Sin our byast Nature leans,
The careful Devil is still at hand with means;
And providently Pimps for ill desires:
The Good Old Cause, reviv’d, a Plot requires,
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up Common-wealths and ruine Kings.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)