The Lake House Photo

Lake House

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, Christopher Plummer, Lynn Collins, Shohreh Aghdashloo

Directed by: Alejandro Agresti

RS: 1of 4 Stars

2006 Warner Bros. Pictures Drama

Talk about bad timing. Keanu Reeves plays an architect who loves a doctor played by Sandra Bullock. And they both love a house made of glass and set on stilts over a lake outside of Chicago. The snag? She lives in 2006 and he lives in 2004. But they write letters to each other and share the same dog (don't ask). What follows is a series of plot contrivances that are impossible to understand much less to swallow. Reeves looks less chisled and more human than he has of late, but his acting still has a long way to go to qualify as serviceable. Bullock, who showed surprising grit in Crash, can count this as a career step backward. Directed by Alejandro Agresti (Valentin) from a script by playwright David Auburn, taking a mighty fall from his days of winning a Pulitzer for Proof -- this bastard child of The Notebook and Somewhere in Time left me feeling that I'd drowned in a lake of romantic swill. I can't believe that even the most rabid chick-flick masochists wouldn't gag on it.