BOO! Scared ya! Scared you more in fact than this lacklustre ghost story from consistently crap director Tom Shadyac will do anyway. Shadyac has been responsible in the past for such cinematic greats as Ace Ventura Pet Detective and Patch Adams, the latter alone ought to be enough to scare you aware from this movie, the former not exactly showing enormous potential for a ghost story such as this. Aside from Jim Carey's performance Ace Ventura was pretty high up there on the crappola stakes and Patch Adams scores a perfect 10 in the same rating system so I didn't hold out too much hope for this movie either. My heart sank a little lower when faced by the prospect of watching Kevin Costner trying to emulate the Bruce Willis role from M. Night Shyamalan's Oscar nominated The Sixth Sense which doesn't take voices from beyond the grave to tell you is going to be somewhat painful. Willis' role was very downbeat, but being dead he had an excuse, Kostner's idea of upbeat is an Armish knees-up so seeing him deliberatly play downbeat had 'painful' written all over it. The combination of these elements gives you...thats right, yet another contender for the Turkey of the Year award!

...the one we know about already because Shadyac has written it in ten foot high flashing neon lettering very early on, then underlined before it happens. My suggestion is to wait for a video release if you are really desperate to watch another Sixth Sense inspired ghost story, watch the first 20 minutes, 30 if you want to push it and then go catch up on some reading on Ciao for an hour before returning for the final 15. But then...I suppose my real advice would be to avoid this dreary insult to your intelligence like the plague or suffer the consequences. Still, if you are intent on seeing this, then you'll want to know a little of what you are in store for. The story opens intriguingly, hitting that downbeat note hard straight away. A woman is caught on a bus in South America, its raining hard and the river is swollen. Next thing you know there is a mud slide and she is swept off the road into a river's raging torrent. Her body is never found, her husband is a doctor and the camera will never leave him for the entirity of the movie from that point on. That Doctor is Kevin Kostner, a man who is about to become obsessed by his wife leading all those around him to think that he is losing his mind. His wife was also a doctor, her mission in South America was with the Red Cross and remnants of her time in the hospital remain to the point where Kostner is sure she is trying to contact him. Her old cancer patient children draw pictures of a wiggly 'cross', one claims to have seen her when he 'died' again(frequent thing for this kid) and even those who have never met her are having visions of her. The dragonfly was a passion of hers and dragonflies seem to be turning up everywhere, her parrot behaves as if she was home and he hears her voice emminating from dead patients...surely he is going nuts. Everyone seems to think so, but Kostner needs answers...

Given such an underplayed and frankly boring as hell lead character the movie would have had to have been something special in the plotting department to rise anywhere above the mediocre. Sadly though it isn't. One review I remember reading said something along the lines of it makes What lies Beneath look like a work of genius, which just about sums it up. If The Sixth Sense represents the pinnacle of modern ghost story cinema, then What Lies Beneath comes somewhere in the middle with movies like this looking up from the basement wishing it could aspire to such heights. If you can watch the kind of made for television movies which lurk around late night terrestrial television and accept the plots and storylines as being not all that bad and if they sometimes fool you, then you might find this movie enjoyable. Personally, I think that when a movie attempts to drag you in and weave a mystery around you then it ought to keep you guessing until the very end otherwise it fails and needs a damn good set of performances, scripting etc. to save it from a harsh review. Dragonfly gave up its mysteries to me before the first twenty minutes were over, confirmed them by thirty and left me cold until the inevitable twist at the end...what more is there to say? A non-spooky ghost story and a mystery with no mystery...2 stars because of course, it may just keep you guessing if you put your brain on hold before watching. But don't count on it!