| 83 |
Portland Oregonian
As it unwinds, What Lies becomes both masterful and preposterous.
|
| 75 |
New York Post
If you're able to check your brain at the popcorn stand, you'll stand a much better chance of enjoying this crowd pleaser.
|
| 75 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Goes Hitchcock one better by imagining what it would be like if the master had the advantage of digital technology.
|
| 75 |
Entertainment Weekly
Bears the weight of too many genres jostling for screen time.
|
| 75 |
Miami Herald
An uncommonly playful fright machine -- a fun house factory of scares.
|
| 75 |
Christian Science Monitor
A few scenes indulge in overstated hokum or thriller clichés, but Pfeiffer is first-rate and several sequences are suspenseful enough to deserve that overused adjective, Hitchcockian.
|
| 75 |
Chicago Tribune
A classy supernatural lady-in-distress thriller.
|
| 75 |
TNT RoughCut
It's some scary fun to watch.
|
| 70 |
Chicago Reader
Other (Specify)
Assume that viewers are too hungry for mindless thrills to care whether dead characters spring back to life or live ones change their personalities according to the needs of the moment.
|
| 70 |
Salon.com
You feel you've been both a little creeped out and vigorously entertained. Its showmanship comes through in the clutch.
|
| 70 |
Slate
There's a great, Hitchcockian suspense sequence in a bathtub.
|
| 70 |
Variety
A thriller that tries aggressively, but not entirely successfully, to deliver the goods of three genres -- suspense, supernatural and horror.
|
| 67 |
Austin Chronicle
It's a kinder, gentler "Tales From the Crypt" that, in the end, is neither kind nor gentle.
|
| 63 |
Baltimore Sun
Until the last 15 minutes, What Lies Beneath is a well-paced maze that earns every gasp from its audience.
|
| 63 |
San Francisco Examiner
Regardless of how cheated out of a full-bodied motion picture you feel, you're still left with the year's sickest bathroom humor.
|
| 60 |
Film.com
An unexpectedly adult emotional rollercoaster with some very cold and unsettling things to say about men, women, marriage, and the lies we so often tell each other.
|
| 50 |
Mr. Showbiz
Startlingly shallow even for a summer movie.
|
| 50 |
USA Today
Never reaches much beyond the surface, and what lies there is all too predictable.
|
| 50 |
Rolling Stone
The scares are Hichcock hand-me-downs.
|
| 50 |
Boston Globe
Ford and Pfeiffer deliver craftsmanlike work, but the film steadily unravels as Zemeckis tries to ratchet up the suspense.
|
| 50 |
Chicago Sun-Times
Lacking a smarter screenplay, it milks the genuine skills of its actors and director for more than it deserves, and then runs off the rails in an ending more laughable than scary.
|
| 50 |
Newsweek
Jeff Giles
A slick but surprisingly empty genre movie that builds to a not particularly shocking shock.
|
| 50 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
Dumb, dumb, dumb - borrowing scare tactics from Hitchcock and other suspense masters, but forgetting basic story.telling essentials such as character development and logical exposition.
|
| 50 |
Village Voice
Suggest a Clintons-at-home scenario for 2001 -- haunted by the ghosts of dalliances past.
|
| 50 |
TV Guide
This slow, derivative chiller (which lifts liberally from "Ghost Story," "Rear Window" and "A Stir of Echoes") wastes far too much time on red herrings and telegraphs its plot points with painfully obvious dialogue.
|
| 50 |
New York Daily News
There is one good, legitimate scare in Robert Zemeckis' quasi-ghost thriller What Lies Beneath, and that's just not enough for a movie that lasts more than two hours.
|
| 50 |
Charlotte Observer
A picture sufficiently shallow that you'll discover everything that lies beneath it well before the end.
|
| 42 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Truly, this is a bad script.
|
| 40 |
The New York Times
Glazes over faster than a Krispy Kreme doughnut, and neither is very flavorful after sitting around for a while.
|
| 40 |
Film.com
This impeccable ghost story is utterly old-fashioned, a straightforward suspenser with no twists.
|
| 40 |
Washington Post
Sparse and implausible screenplay.
|
| 30 |
Film.com
Loses touch with its characters.
|
| 30 |
LA Weekly
At once illogical and insultingly stupid, filled with dead-end twists and the sort of dialogue that makes a mockery of actual adult relations.
|
| 20 |
Dallas Observer
What Lies Beneath is my head on the movie theater floor, snoozing through this film.
|
| 20 |
Los Angeles Times
Feels more planned than passionate, scary at points but unconvincing overall.
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