10 Wildly Overpraised Movies

What The Critics Said: “Goes Hitchcock one better!” (San Francisco Chronicle)

What Lies Beneath is a movie of two halves: the first is a very poor man’s Rear Window with Michelle Pfeiffer’s rich, bored (and dull) housewife suspecting her neighbour might’ve murdered his wife. He hasn’t of course – it’s just a red-herring subplot intended to throw off the viewer, like Tippi Hedren’s pursuit of Rod Taylor in The Birds.

Exactly why Zemeckis keeps attempting to channel Hitchcock isn’t clear, because once the second half of the movie begins, the film becomes a pale facsimile of The Sixth Sense and Ringu as the ghost of a murdered girl uses Pfeiffer to find and take revenge on her killer. So enamoured were filmmakers of this plot in the 2000s that we saw it again in FearDotCom, Gothika, Dark Water, One Missed Call, Mirrors and Shutter.

For all its calculated Hollywood slickness, Beneath is still a dumb movie full of false scares, though bored viewers can at least amuse themselves by anticipating the moment when Harrison Ford uses his acting technique of wagging his finger at whoever he’s addressing.