What Lies Beneath is a compelling thriller that really needs some trimming to fix its biggest issue, the terrible pacing. I'm all about "slow burn" movies, but What Lies Beneath is a slow burn followed by a big spike, followed by more slow burn followed by a big spike, ending with more slow burn ending in thirty minutes of madness. That first spike in the drama feels great; you've waited half an hour for the thriller elements to kick in and you get a reward. But... then we mill about and the movie lulls for half an hour, and rinse and repeat. Everything I want to talk about falls into mild spoiler territory and the entirety of the enjoyment I got out of the film was watching it unfold, so I won't ruin the story, but it went in some unexpected directions, some great and some that really only took up extra time. What Lies Beneath is over two hours and I can't help but feel that the biggest fault here is that it was written by Clark Gregg (Agent Phil Coulson in the Marvel Extended Universe), who doesn't quite seem to understand how movies should work. He also wrote an adaptation of the book Choke, which had none of the charm of the novel and totally misunderstood the message an then most recently wrote Trust Me in 2013, which he also directed and stared in as the lea and no one has ever heard of. Robert Zemeckis gets some really fun shots and he does a good job with the screenplay he's given, but you can only elevate it so far. Pfeiffer is fine and Ford is three Ambien deep as he trudges along giving it his best C+ effort. If the screenplay was given to a team of real writers for retooling, What Lies Beneath has some serious potential, but what we got is a decent thriller.