Mini Review - What Lies Beneath

When this movie came on TV Saturday night & T asked if I wanted to watch it, my initial response was "Wha?". I could not for the life of me remember this move ever coming out. And while I missed a fair chunk of the middle of it (I'm a bad reviewer, I know), I can say with perfect confidence that, if the middle of the movie was anything like the end of it, I didn't miss a thing.

The gist of the movie is that Michelle Pfeiffer's character becomes sort of possessed by the spirit of a local college girl that was murdered a few years before & whose body was never found. She finds out that her husband, Harrison Ford, was having an affair with the girl at the time she disappeared. He tells her that the girl committed suicide in their house to set him up & that he took her body & dumped it (& her car) in a lake. Pfeiffer is drawn to the area near the girl's final resting place & finds a box with her necklace in it. Ford 'fesses up to the fact that he killed her to keep her from going to the dean at the college he's a professor at. Now, because Pfeiffer wouldn't just let things go, he has to off her. Several *yawn* tense scenes of him drugging her & trying to drown her in the bathtub (he was going to make it look like she did herself in by electrocuting herself in the tub) result in one of the most paint-by-numbers final confrontations seen since the equally mind numbing Sandra Bullock, er, 'thriller', "Murder By Numbers" (He's dead! No he's not! Now he is! Nope, he's alive again! Sheesh! The guy popped up more times than the lovechild of Freddy Krueger & Jason Vorhees!).

The only real draw for me was seeing Ford play a bad guy. Unfortunately, it was like watching "Temple of Doom," when Indy is temporarily possessed by Mola Ram. I kept waiting for Short Round to try to snap him out of his trance ("Docta Jones! I luf yeeew!"). I mean, I always equate him with being a hero. I guess, in a way, he's been type-cast. There are worse things to be type-cast as, but still, I can imagine that even Ford wants to expand his repetoire now & then. It just didn't work here.

The acting wasn't bad, but the lazy scripting killed off any chance of an enjoyable suspense movie.

2 out of 5 meh's