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Q: What do an IRS auditor, a dog, a divorce lawyer, and a movie audience have in common? A: They can all smell fear on a big-name Hollywood director. So it's not a good sign when Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump) is so insecure about the plot of his latest project that he plays all his cards in the opening frame: a bloated, moldy, female drowning victim goes "Boo!" in Claire Spencer's (Michelle Pfeiffer) brain. No tease, no tension-building, no exposition, nothing. When you add what the trailers have been giving away for months -- Claire's husband Norman (Harrison Ford) had an affair with a younger woman whose questionable death occurred in their home, and now the ghost is taking over the premises and Claire as well -- it forms a pretty clear picture of what to expect before the house lights have even gone dim.
Whatever happened to the idea of carefully, painstakingly setting up the big payoff? Before Psycho was released in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock not only made a personal plea in the trailers that folks who came to see his groundbreaking shocker refrain from sharing the secret of its ending, but he bought up and destroyed as many copies of Robert Bloch's source paperback novel as he could find (which was relatively few in those days before runaway tie-in mass-marketing). As recently as 1984 James Cameron turned a pulp sci-fi cliché into a box-office blockbuster at least in part by keeping audiences wondering for a while who was the villain in The Terminator -- Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn, or maybe both. But by the time its sequel came out, that film's crucial twist had been ruined in advance by all the hype about the cyborg's being the good guy. Somewhere between '84 and '91, the mainstream film industry lost the last of whatever nerve it may once have had.
Is What Lies Beneath going to be so tepid in the telling that Zemeckis aims only to satisfy the kind of people who first thing skip to the final chapter of a novel to see if it's worth an allotment of their precious limited tolerance for reading? In a word, yeah. And it's silly enough at times to set off my favorite barometer of movie misfire, the widespread unsolicited giggle. Seeing Pfeiffer play two wildly different characters in the same body -- a mousy housewife and a horny coed -- is marginal fun. But the transitions between the two are so unsubtle, and Claire is so dense -- she tries candles and a ouija board to flush out the spook, goes off on a tedious red-herring subplot that fools nobody but her and makes absolutely no sense in light of the giveaway opening scene, and accepts a book on witchcraft from her best friend who should be a major warning sign because not only is she played by Diana Scarwid, who was in Psycho III, but is named Jody, like the giant demonic pig in The Amityville Horror -- that any potential enjoyment is squandered. By the time Ford, who hasn't had a good movie in at least three years now, finally gets to contribute something in the way of a minor surprise at the end, it's too late to save the proceedings from a needlessly drawn-out finale featuring several episodes of water-related peril.
And by the way, "Rosebud" was the sled. D+
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