She’s
a lonely doctor. He’s a lonely architect. They’ve both bought a nice
riverside abode – only at different times. Via some letters (she leaves
him, believed to be the new tenant, a ‘welcome letter’), they discover
that they’re actually two years apart. She’s in 2006, he’s in 2004. Hmm. The
twosome make the most of their ‘long distance’ relationship – by way of
their magic letterbox –ultimately deciding they’d like to meet, of
course. How’s that going to turn out, though? Like many a reunion before them – be it Livvy and John’s Two of a Kind, Matthau and Lemmon’s Out to Sea, Wilder and Pryor’s Another You, Snipes and Harrelson’s Money Train
– we’ve a film built solely around the names in it, without much
deliberation or attention paid to the film itself. If you build it,
they will come…. that was evidently the studio’s motto. In short, a nice heavy inoculation of Speed
into it’s veins, might’ve been given it some spark or fire. Seems
nobody much cared about what Keanu and Sandy were doing in this, just
that they were doing it, and the result is a rather comatose, just
tolerable, affair. If Speed was "Die Hard on a Bus”, then The Lake House is “Frequency with Prozac” - a film with a great idea (based on a Korean film called Il Mare), which, like a bus without a battery, goes nowhere fast. Interesting enough, and entertaining in spots, sure, but for the most part, The Lake House
is fairly middle-of-the-road stuff. The script is barely there, the
ending is an unsatisfying cop-out, and the performances – though Sandra
Bullock fares the best – are as wooden as a deck chair. Reeves,
in particular, near single-handedly destroys the film, by merely
‘reading’ his lines – were they stuck up around the set, so he didn’t
have to recall them? – Thus forgoing the believability and poignancy of
not only the film’s plot, but also the supposed chemistry that’s
supposed to be present between him and Bullock. I personally, couldn’t
sense anything there. The Lake House is a pleasant-enough time passer, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it’s – time for another Speed reference – a bomb. EXTRAS Minute extras package containing the trailer and 5 deleted scenes. Conclusion:
Movie 60% Extras: 50%
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