It may sound strange to call a movie that was a big commercial hit "underrated." The trailers for "Ransom" sold it as a "Dirty Harry"-style action picture, and most reviewers were happy to pan it or praise it as such, evaluating the movie on how well it delivered the goods. This is one time, though, when audiences were sharper.

For weeks after "Ransom" opened, people asked if I'd seen it, with something like uncertainty in their voices. They'd liked the movie, but it wasn't what they had expected and they didn't quite know how to reconcile the conflicting feelings it stirred up in them. Watching it with a packed Saturday afternoon crowd, I was struck by how quiet the audience was. When the film got to the scene that had figured prominently in the trailers -- business tycoon Tom Mullen (Mel Gibson) going on television to announce to his son's kidnappers that he was using the ransom they demanded as a bounty on their heads -- nobody cheered. The audience seemed as dumbstruck as the television crew who watches Tom make his offer. How, they all seemed to be asking, could anybody take this risk?

To their credit, neither director Ron Howard nor screenwriters Richard Price and Alexander Ignon flinch from the answer: The business sense that has allowed Tom Mullen to parlay a couple of small airplanes into a multimillion-dollar empire is the same thing that allows him to comprehend the cunning of his boy's kidnappers. Ruthlessness is what links entrepreneurs to criminals in "Ransom." Everything is negotiable. Tom's wife, Kate (Rene Russo), says, "I stick with Tom and we always manage to land on high ground." But Tom's decision to turn the tables on the kidnappers isn't a deal he can keep hidden from Kate, and watching him gamble that the kidnappers can't take the risk of carrying out their threats to kill Sean (Brawley Nolte), she suddenly realizes how many people he's stepped on to lift them to their higher ground. One of those people, Jackie Brown (Dan Hedaya), a mobster whom Tom bribed to call off a union strike, wound up in jail while Tom, who denied making the bribe, got away with it. "I've got six kids and I'd die for every one of them," Jackie yells at Tom when accused of masterminding the kidnapping. As Tom's family is pulled apart, his and Kate's ordeal becomes a reflection of the families he pulled apart to come out on top.

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