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The Movie: "This is not viewing. This is suffering." I said that to myself about halfway through "What Lies Beneath". The opening hour is so slow, it almost comes to a complete halt. 30 minutes into this picture, I grew impatient. About an hour in, I nearly walked out. Last year on almost the same weekend, Dreamworks unleashed "The Haunting", a truly silly remake that at least had some unintentional laughs. There's nothing even unintentionally entertaining here . What little story there is goes like this. Claire(Michelle Pfieffer), a former musician, is married to Norman(Harrison Ford), a scientist. Their daughter goes away to college, and the following scenes of them newly alone in the house like something deleted out of Pfeiffer's similarly terrible "Story of Us". We see their relationship, and suprise, it's pretty dull. After that, something finally begins to happen. Doors creak open, pictures fall, Claire sees something in the bathtub(I almost could tell all the secrets of this film, but the horrid trailer has given away just about everything). There's a ghost in the house and who she is or why she's there sets the story in (slow) motion. The film has been marketed as a horror film, but it's not even scary. Usually at the helm of good films, director Robert Zemeckis uses the same scare device over...and over...and over. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you. Try and fool me the 20th time, I'm begining to get pissed off. These are empty scares - surface chills that are dulling and just plain boring after a while. It certainly doesn't help things that the audience is a mile ahead of the film, which makes every scare utterly predictable - it even makes a major hint or two early on as to what's going to happen later. The film did make me laugh once, when it used an ouija board in the plot, and actually took it seriously. Harrison Ford turns in another non-existent performance similar to "Random Hearts" - I will say though that his character is so thinly written that I doubt many (if any) actors could have really done anything with it. Michelle Pfeiffer is actually enjoyable here. I'm not a fan of her past performances, but she seems down-to-earth and sympathetic here - the only problem is the rest of the movie drags her performance down with it. Supporting players are shown then quickly forgotten. Everything is practically forgotten as the film takes a quick turn for the even worse as it comes towards the conclusion, practically dumping most of what came before in favor of an embarassing final set of sequences, which lead up to a dopey payoff. The film takes from Hitchcock, and seems like a pasted-together retread of elements of "The Burbs" and director Neil Jordan's "In Dreams" as well as, of course, "The Sixth Sense"; what the film brings to the table on its own isn't anything interesting, either. I didn't find anything the least bit entertaining about this film, and nothing that comes close to being the least bit scary. The only thing that brought some enjoyment from "What Lies Beneath" was the cinematography by Don Burgess, who captures the scenery well, and whose work and camera movement in the interior scenes keeps the film from coming to a complete halt. Everyone here can do much better than this. The screenplay is certainly the worst part of the equation, but it's not the only one at fault here. There are few movies that I dislike enough to make me angry for wasting my time - this is one of them. |