Trimmed by about an hour and a half, this could have been a great episode of Tales From the Crypt — but who hires Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer for these underdeveloped roles, anyway? Pfeiffer is allowed to play it sexy for about five minutes, during which she wears a hot red number, spreads her legs salaciously, and growls a few lines of dialogue-that's a hot-blooded incongruity compared with her character's otherwise meek demeanor. Otherwise, she remains lovely but muted, with Zemeckis dressing her, predictably, in white nightgowns, often dripping wet. Ford, meanwhile, exudes the kind of general inquietude that made me think about his ranch in Wyoming rather than his performance. Mainly, he grunts, scowls and grins, and such is the goodwill that he's accumulated from years of playing the dashing hero that he mostly gets away with it.

Still, this sort of storytelling might be entertaining if it weren't so slowly paced, and it could be suspenseful if Zemeckis didn't go for the tawdry ooga-booga every single time. Zemeckis's camera is always spinning through the air around his characters so you can sense the cheap scare lurking just off-screen even before it drifts into frame, invariably accompanied by that big gotcha! sting on the soundtrack. Such predictability is inherent in the plotting, as well, with clumsy foreshadowing betraying a climactic plot twist about a half-hour in. However, the film includes some unspeakably lovely underwater cinematography, no doubt assisted by some degree of seamless CGI work, and I give Zemeckis all kinds of credit for the bizarro lyricism of the final scenes. If only he weren't working so hard to simultaneously embrace and explain away the paranormal, What Lies Beneath might have found a reason to be.