The Lake House

Review by Clint Morris

Speed duo Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock reunite on the big screen in something that features no buses, bombs or bald guys pop-quizzing. What The Lake House does have in common with the latter film though, is that it’s still chugging along when it hits 55 (minutes, that is, not km/h).

Not to say it’s as comfortable a ride as their first journey, though.

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. 

2.5 out of 5

The Lake House
Australian release: 27th July, 2006
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, Christopher Plummer, Lynn Collins, Shohreh Aghdashloo
Director: Alejandro Agresti
Website: Click here.