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Lake Placid
(*1/2)
It's this and movies like it that I watch when I have absolutely nothing else to do. I sit down, dim the lights, and I prepare for cheap thrills and no thinking. In that respect, Lake Placid delivers. Unfortunately, if you're feeling at all ambitious, you'll notice just how bad it really is. The screenplay (from Ally McBeal writer David E. Kelley and Michael Pressman) is probably the most idiotic thing I've ever heard in my life. Lake Placid wants to be everything all at once. Sometimes it succeeds, but it always feels false because of what's surrounding it. It attempts to be a campy tongue-in-cheek comedy, and sometimes that works. Then two sentences later it turns itself into a thriller monster movie; something that last summer's Deep Blue Sea accomplished.
If it really matters, the story is around a creature in Black Lake (there is no real Lake Placid in the movie, but it's explained that the lake is really, really calm) who takes a bite out of a fish and game official tagging beavers while the local sheriff Hank Keough (Gleeson) sits in a boat. Soon, Fish and Game Warden Jack Wells (Bill Pullman) is on the scene, and at the same time a New York museum sends Kelly Scott (Bridget Fonda) out to look at a reptile tooth pulled from the leftovers of the body. Soon a rich and crazy mythology professor named Hector Cyr (Oliver Platt) shows up to swim with the beast, claiming crocodiles are "divine conduits".
Platt provides most of the real humor of the movie; and we know he's capable of it from his role in the Stanley Tucci directed film, The Imposters. When asked how an Asian Crocodile could have migrated to Maine, he replies "well, they conceal information like that in books". Funny stuff, but that's just one of the movies problems. I'm willing to suspend disbelief when I watch a movie. After all, it's not truth we seek when we watch a movie, it's mimicry of truth at best. But I want the movie to at least give itself some credibility.
The rest of the movie belongs to the crocodile. I wouldn't have bothered to watch this without the beast running around taking people's heads off. We see a lot of cheesy "croc-cam" shots, and every once in a while a six foot head bursts out of the water. When it hits land, it looks less realistic, but does it really matter?
As for the actors; I know they're a talented group of people. Despite many recent roles, I remember Pullman's roles in such movies as The Zero Effect, and The Last Seduction, and I know that he has some real talent. But in a movie like this, there's not a whole lot of opportunities for him to show it. Bridget Fonda held her own in Jackie Brown, and was great in A Simple Plan, but here she just comes off as a whiny arrogant bitch. I think she was supposed to be funny. But here I made judicious use of the fast forward. Thank God for home video. I was entertained by Brendan Gleeson in his role as William Wallace's sidekick Hamish in Braveheart, and he was great as Martin Cahill in 1998's The General.
I assume you want my opinion. Otherwise, why would you be reading this? So here it is. Watch this movie only when you're really bored, don't feel like exerting yourself, and don't feel like spending a lot of time on anything. However, if you feel like seeing a similar kind of movie that actually entertains you, I suggest the film Deep Blue Sea, Director Renny Harlin's movie about a group of smart sharks.