Michelle Pfeiffer was, for a while, one of the most intelligent and watchable actresses in circulation - but her taste in scripts has gone completely down the tubes over the course of the last decade, and this shockingly dreary melodrama hardly heralds a return to form.

Based on the 1996 bestseller of the same name, Deep End of the Ocean is a dull-as-ditchwater tearjerker about a mother's failed attempts to come to terms with the kidnapping of her three-year-old son, which starts off as boringly pedestrian and rapidly proceeds to get a whole lot worse.

Pfeiffer plays a doting mother whose three-year-old bundle of joy is snatched from her grasp when she's stupid enough to leave him completely unattended in a packed hotel lobby. The rest of the movie details her grief and guilt in tortuous detail, as well as the tragedy's effect on the rest of the family. Pfeiffer essays a reasonably believable portrayal of a post-traumatic depressive, and invests the role with infinitely more effort than it deserves, while Treat Williams is content to go through the motions as her suffering hubby. But why on earth either of them saw fit to appear in the movie is another matter entirely.

The film hinges on a plot twist which is so ridiculously implausible and convenient it briefly plunged me into a bout of mirthless laughter, but that's only the least of its sins. Deep End Of The Ocean's unique awfulness stems primarily from its unholy combination of maudlin sentimentality and saccharine sweetness, excessive even by Hollywood standards.

When I warn you that Deep End not only stars Whoopi Goldberg but got the thumbs-up from Oprah fucking Winfrey, you can maybe just about begin to appreciate the extent of its dreadfulness.