Flashy visuals, an incessant techno soundtrack, and a plot full of twists that depend on everything going just a certain way…if this is your idea of a good time, Nobel Son will prove a useful diversion. For the rest of us, this comedy-thriller wears out its welcome fairly early on, despite the glorious promise of a deliciously wicked Alan Rickman performance. In the kind of role perfected by George Sanders once upon a time, Rickman plays a womanizing egotist whose self-regard is swelled to the breaking point when he wins the Nobel Prize in chemistry. But when he and his wife (Mary Steenburgen) jet to Sweden to claim the award, their son (Bryan Greenberg) is kidnapped by a brute (Shawn Hatosy) claiming to be the scientist's illegitimate offspring, with a hefty grudge against Dad. If Rickman weren't off screen for so much of this keep-'em-guessing storyline, the movie might be more bearable, and it would help if sexpot poet Eliza Dushku had more face time too. But the sound and fury whipped up by director Randall Miller (Bottle Shock) looks suspiciously like an attempt to approximate what the kids supposedly want to see these days, so the movie comes across as insincere as well as unpleasant. If you're going to spend this much screen time on a sequence detailing the sawing off of someone's thumb, you really ought to mean it. --Robert Horton