Tom sets Neil up with a phony cell-phone call directing him to a hotel where their daughter’s baby-sitter, who’s supposedly a confederate in Tom’s plot, is supposedly holding her - only the only other person in the room is, of course, Tom himself. Later, when it’s Neil’s turn to hand over the mysterious package (a box instead of an envelope this time) Neil opens the package and finds out it’s empty. He assigns both Abby and Neil to deliver mysterious packages for him, telling Neil it’s a cache of secret documents he stole from a competitor that will finish him in the advertising business if he’s discovered having had them - he lets Neil use his cell phone to tell Abby not to deliver the envelope, but she insists that they have to follow all Tom’s orders and delivers it anyway. Things get worse for Our Hero and Heroine when Tom announces that “for the next 24 hours, I’m God” and that he’s doing this to test the idea that people will do anything to rescue their kids from danger, no matter how humiliating. Neil at first tries to put him off with a lie - he says he has only $90,000 when in fact he has $142,000 and change, and Tom knows it - but eventually the Randalls extract their life savings, put it in a metal box and hand it to Tom, who abruptly sets fire to it (“I literally have money to burn,” he says, in one of the many weird jokes that adorn William Morrissey’s script) and throws the briefcase with the flaming cash stash out of the car and into the water while they’re on a bridge. They’re startled when, in their SUV, they’re suddenly accosted by a gun-waving psycho in the back seat he’s Tom Ryan (Pierce Brosnan, top-billed and also listed as “executive producer,” which could mean anything from he had a hand in developing the property, or he had nothing to do with the film besides acting in it but was a big enough star to demand the “executive producer” credit and the extra fee that came with it), who says he has their daughter captive.Īt first Tom comes off as a mercenary kidnapper who’s researched the Randalls in depth, knows exactly how much money they have in their bank account and demands it all as a ransom. The film was Shattered, billed as a tough, no-nonsense thriller built around the hoary old plot line of an ordinary (albeit pretty affluent) couple, Neil and Abby Randall (Gerard Butler and Maria Bello), who after about 20 minutes of almost unbearably saccharine exposition (it’s learned that he is an advertising executive who’s in a cutthroat race for a promotion against a colleague and is giving himself an unfair hands-up by stealing his colleague’s ideas, and she’s a former photographer who’s getting restive and beginning to regret her decision to quit her career to be a full-time housewife and mother) are depicted as going out separately, she to a girlfriend for some party time and he to a presentation for a potential agency client out in the middle of nowhere. Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan.The Hound of the Baskervilles (20th Century-Fox, 1.The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (20th Century-Fo.The Payoff (Warner Bros.-First National, 1935).Serious Moonlight (Night and Day Pictures, Magnoli.Snake People (Azteca-Columbia-Horror International.Mondo Balordo (Crown International, 1964).

Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Color Force/20th Century-Fox.Heart and Soul: The Life and Music of Frank Loesse.Race: The Power of an Illusion (California Newsree.

Shattered movie 2007