The opening is reasonably suspenseful: in Los Angeles, middle-aged Thomas (Freddie Prinze Jr) is skipping off work on his birthday to spend quality time with his much younger girlfriend Hannah (Gabrielle Haugh), only to find her floating face-down in the pool. Panicked, Thomas shoves her body into a chest – then his wife comes home early. It’s not a bad setup, but it’s almost impossible to work out what The Girl in the Pool is meant to be. Is it a comedy about middle-aged male stupidity, or a naff throwback to 80s thrillers that gave beautiful, emotionally unstable homewreckers what was coming to them?
Providing the movie with its comic undertone is a funny (intentionally, I think) performance from Prinze Jr as dim-bulb Thomas. He’s constantly repeating: “I’m going to fix this.” The evidence suggests otherwise. Take the fact that when he throws Hannah’s body into the chest along with the floats and Lilos, he also tosses in her mobile phone. You don’t have to be a true-crime connoisseur to know the police will have the location tracked in five minutes flat using GPS.
