by Valarie Thorpe

What Lies Beneath has plenty of jumps and scares but nothing that I'll remember in a few days. Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer headline this foray into the spooky and are compelling in their roles. Unfortunately there just wasn't enough depth to keep us hooked for long and that's doubly unfortunate since the movie weighs in at a little more than 2 hours. That's about 20 minutes too long.

It's difficult to talk about this movie without giving away plot points, so if you're very spoiler sensitive you may want to steer clear of the rest of this review. Pfeiffer and Ford portray a married couple whose daughter has just gone off to college. Pfeiffer used to be a concert cellist and Ford is an award-winning genetics scientist. They also have a couple of neighbors next door to their new house that don't seem entirely on the up and up. Oh, and the new house they just moved into belonged to Ford's father who's now dead. And all of those things really don't have a lick to do with the actual plot. There's just too many unrelated events/moments/motivations for one movie and most of them are never explained.

The movie gives off the impression of a quick or lackluster editing job. I'm not sure whether this was director-driven or test audience redos but either way there are gaping holes. In one pivotal scene (that pretty much drives the entire plot forward) Pfeiffer's character goes to a town where she finds out a number of critical facts. Problem is she never had any real reason to go to this town and there are too many moments like this in the film.

Another annoying part of this movie is that a lot of the events that drive the story are in the past, so they are relayed to us in dialogue (not flashbacks). That's fine except that the chronology of the events talked about don't make sense when you go back and try to piece together the actual chain of events.

On to the good parts and there are a few. Pfeiffer is great in the vulnerable (although not too vulnerable) role of the female in danger. We're scared when she's scared, we jump when she jumps, etc. But the biggest problem is we see them all coming. There's no new ground broken here. I'd be pretty surprised to hear if anyone was surprised by any of the plot devices. What Lies Beneath? Not too helluva lot unfortunately and these two great characters are left without enough to work with.