On D List of Movie Reviews
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Dead Silence (1997)
Rate:
8
Viewed:
4/26
4/26:
"A veteran FBI agent negotiates the release of a busload of deaf schoolchildren taken hostage by three
desperate escaped convicts."
Count me in! Jeffery Deaver wrote a lot of books and came up with the character of Lincoln Rhyme who would
be played by Denzel Washington in The Bone Collector.
Prior to that, his first film ever was Dead Silence. These two remain the only ones of the 90's. To be
truthful, I didn't know the latter existed until reading Marlee Matlin's autobiography:
I'll Scream Later. The effort has been worth it although the editing of the opening scene is
awful.
James Garner gives a terrific commanding performance. I always thought he was first a movie star for decades
and then became an actor when he started doing made-for-TV films. As a FBI man, what his character said about
tactics in regard to the hostage situation is extremely interesting. Eventually, they make sense because it's
all about game theory.
Quite often, villains start out intimidating and then weaken toward the end with a predictable
death to the relief of everybody. Not so for Ted Handy. I found him very formidable from start to finish by
meaning business. Therefore, Kim Coates may have topped his work in
The Client.
As for the deaf hostages, they stay in the background most of the time and thankfully not be a distraction. The
audience doesn't have to worry about the lack of translation of their signs; they are pretty much basic with a
few being easily figured out not long after. However, the most ridiculous scene is when Ted Handy decided to
go inside the house to get Marlee Matlin's character and she set the fire for upstairs as a trap. By the way,
when I heard "Beaumont," I thought the setting was near Houston, Texas, but it turned out to be upstate New York,
just right next to the Niagara Falls. In reality, the town doesn't exist.
Initially, Detective Sharon Foster's negotiation skill seemed brazen but effective. When the two men gave
themselves up, I was like, "That was too easy, and yet there are thirty minutes left in the film." Then, it
dawned on me by thinking back to the powwow when pictures of the convicts were shown and there's a mention of a
mystery woman. I immediately connected the dots before the twist was about to be revealed. Either way, it's
clever but absurd because there's no way the real Sharon Foster would've been killed like that. Plus her dead
body wasn't discovered in the bathroom for many hours...at an airport!
All in all, if you liked The Negotiator, Dead Silence
should be right up your alley.