Illogical 'Lake House' sinks into absurdity

Actors Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves are pictured in a scene from their new film 'The Lake House' in this undated publicity photograph. The film opens in the U.S. June 16, 2006. NO SALES NO ARCHIVES REUTERS/Peter Sorel/Warner Bros/Handout

Rumor has it that John Cusack was offered the Keanu Reeves part in The Lake House and turned it down. Wise man, that Cusack.

The Lake House is one of the more befuddling movies of recent years. The premise makes no sense, no matter how you turn it around in your head.

It attempts to be a romance, a time-traveling mystery and a meditation on loneliness. It doesn't succeed at any of the three.

The movie re-teams Speed's Reeves and Sandra Bullock, and they do have chemistry, in the rare moments they are together.

Bullock plays a doctor with no time for a love life (a prototype we see often on TV shows, as well as in last year's Just Like Heaven). Reeves plays a gifted architect. The two fall in love, but nothing is ever easy. It turns out Reeves is living in 2004, while Bullock's existence is set squarely in 2006. Don't you hate when that happens? And more important, how can this happen?

The truly strange thing about the movie, a remake of a Korean film, is that no one really questions the logic of this occurrence.

The two meet because they have both lived in the same glass-enclosed house overlooking a lake. They correspond through handwritten missives, which they leave in a magic mailbox that signals when they've got mail by mysteriously raising its flag.

It makes no sense why these two well-educated professionals, their friends and family would simply accept that they have managed to defy time and logic.

This melodramatic romance moves at a glacial pace. It also takes itself too seriously. Films such as Somewhere in Time have pulled off the time-traveling love story with more aplomb. Even if we suspend disbelief completely, The Lake House is unconvincing, unsatisfying and unmoving.