Amidst the moody photography of a lakeside area of Vermont, Robert Zemeckis's What Lies Beneath early on portends great possibilities for evoking a striking sense of eeriness and tension. Alas, that promise remains unfulfilled, as the film sabotages itself through unequal character development, overused fright gags (limiting the audiences' field of view to thrust something in it, or backing characters up just to have them meet up with something at the edge of the screen, for example) and a plot that audiences will likely recall from most any Movie of the Week. The talented Joe Morton's presence in the film is forgotten too soon after he is introduced, and Harrison Ford's Norman (don't ask about the Silvestri score, it's just too derivative) seems to have been written by multiple screen scribes kept in isolation, for he ends up contradicting himself throughout. By the end of this overlong film, the payoff, far more gentle than most summer fare requires) does more to save mood than generate excitement. Performances are all reasonable (Ford notwithstanding) but the load of cliches makes this a trite and lackluster blockbuster.
Review of What Lies Beneath
