With names like Michelle Pfieffer, Harrison Ford, and director Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future and Forrest Gump) involved in a project, you'd think you'd have an instant winner on your hands. Unfortunately, that's not the case with this new suspense thriller.

Claire (Pfeiffer) spends most of her time hanging around her house with not much to do since her daughter has left for college. Her husband Norman (Ford) loves her but is quite consumed with work. To pass time, Claire becomes fixated on her neighbors' strange habits. After suspecting that her neighbor's wife has been murdered, she begins to notice peculiar goings on around the house. Doors creaking, strange whispering, footsteps--poor Claire. Before long, she realizes that she's become the target of a full scale haunting and, wouldn't you know it, everyone Claire confides this to, thinks sheÕs up in the night.

As you've probably heard, nearly every critic in the free world has blasted the marketing of this picture, alleging that Dreamworks has given away most of the film's surprises in the trailers and ads. Although these previews did give away part of the plot, my complaint with What Lies Beneath is that it pretty much sucked.

Robert Zemeckis is one of our very best directors. He's an inventive, technical wizard who can also excel with drama when he's at the top of his game. What Lies Beneath is slick but slick does not a good movie make. It's one thing to pay homage and another to blatantly rip off, and much of Zemeckis' imagery in this film seems to be directly lifted from the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. But Zemeckis doesn't stop there. Not only does this film seem to resemble classics, it also tips it's hat to highly mediocre fare such as Deceived and Sleeping With The Enemy.

The biggest problem with this problem-fest of a film was the painfully slow set-up that lasts over an hour. To top that off, most of the scares in the film don't stem from character or situations. Most are cheap-tactic scares such as sudden phone ring or a cats suddenly jumping on window ledges.

Pfeiffer is looking as beautiful as ever. She also possesses a gifted screaming voice. She adds more grace than this film deserves. Ford goes out on a limb with parts of this character but isn't all that effective. Some of the best moments in the film involve supporting players Diana Scarwid as Claire's friend and Joe Morton as a psychiatrist. But they were given precious little screen-time.

The bottom line is that What Lies Beneath is so calculated in it's execution, that it just isn't scary. When Claire is slowly walking backwards down her stairway and doesn't bother to look behind her, what do you think is going to happen? What Lies Beneath is full of moments like these. And aside from a horrifyingly intense scene that takes place in a bathtub, I never felt like any of these characters were in any jeopardy and I certainly didn't care. Even the twists in the plot (and there is a fair share of them) were at best uneventful.

What Lies Beneath is sort of The Sixth Sense meets Fatal Attraction. But The Sixth Sense had a strong emotional core and plot twists that the audience had no reason to expect. And certainly Fatal Attraction offered a much more chilling tale about the woes of marital infidelity. Sadly, with horribly written rip-off of a film, Zemeckis has created his biggest misfire. Up next for Mr. Zemeckis is Cast Away with Tom Hanks. If the trailer to the upcoming Christmas release is any indication, Zemeckis has fully recovered.