Gibson plays Tom Mullen, a self-made millionaire and man of the people who has turned a tiny, one-man air freight company into the fourth largest airline in the world. He's got a cover model wife (Rene Russo), a puckish young son (Brawley Nolte, son of Nick) and a dazzling penthouse apartment on Central Park. But when sonny boy gets kidnapped by a quartet of low-brow criminals (Lili Taylor, Liev Schreiber, Evan Handler and former New Kid on the Block Donnie Wahlberg), Mullen's storybook life falls apart. Naturally, our anguished father is quick to pay off the ransom. Naturally, the FBI gets involved. Naturally, everything goes wrong.

The original script comes from an obscure 1956 film starring Glenn Ford. It's been given a modern-day polish and a major action injection by novelist/screenwriter Richard Price (Clockers). What could have been an overwhelmingly dour and claustrophobic tale instead becomes a zippy, carefully plotted psychological thriller. The film's advertising hasn't been shy about giving away the film's major plot twist. About halfway through, feeling his son is doomed, our hero decides not to pay off. Instead, Mullen goes on television and offers the $2 million ransom as a bounty on the head of the kidnapper. Here's where Howard's film really kicks into gear. Not only does it give the audience a chance to cheer for a hero who's just gone from defense to offense, it also adds an interesting moral level to the proceedings. Gibson's character has been colored with few shades of moral ambiguity by Price's script polish. According to the backstory, Mullen has just skated through an exhausting FBI investigation to determine if the airline exec made under-the-table payments to a seedy crime boss in order to call off a pending union strike. Questions soon arise. Did Mullen pony up to save his company? Why won't he do the same to save his son? Has he taken the ultimate gamble, or has he just gone nuts? The atmosphere quickly goes from tense to wrenching.

This is not the kind of movie that you should wait to see on video. It's meant to be seen in the theater where the audience can gasp en masse when the hero is in peril and cheer loudly when the bad guy gets his just deserts. That Ron Howard. He never met a crowd he couldn't please.