1/2

You know those singular movies that inspire critics and screenwriters to make sycophantic fools of themselves, gushing about lean, perfectly streamlined scripts that have absolutely no unnecessary or redundant scenes and contain only lines of dialogue that move the script forward at an impeccable clip? Yeah, well, Whiteout is not one of those movies.

Antarctica, all six million square miles of it, is pure ice and rock, utterly devoid of vegetation. It is easily the most isolated, inaccessible and inhospitable piece of real estate on the planet. Winds regularly gust at more than 100 miles per hour and temperatures, which rarely climb above freezing, can plummet to minus 120 degrees. And six months out of the year, the continent is plunged into near total darkness. As one character says early in Whiteout, “Nature never intended you to survive here.”

But it is here that U.S. Marshal Carrie Stetko (Kate Beckinsale) finds herself, playing sheriff to a handful of frontiersman scientists scattered across the continent at various research stations. When Stetko, poised to retire and return to the warmth of the United States, discovers a dead and mangled body deep in the frozen desert, she is faced with an impenetrable mystery—who committed Antarctica’s first homicide and why? Her investigation will uncover a secret buried beneath the ice for decades, and as a devastating winter storm bears down on the tiny outpost the researchers call home, Stetko will be forced to question herself, her past and the friends she only thought she could trust.

I’m sure Whiteout looked decent on the page. And I can understand Beckinsale’s desire to continue to pull away from the supernatural thrillers that made her a household name and zero in on more serious fare. But sadly, the script she thought she read is not the movie now showing at a theater near you. Based on a graphic novel by Greg Rucka, Whiteout (which shares some dramatic elements with Michael Chabon’s fine novel “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union”) is an appallingly lazily written movie, no small feat given the fact that it had no less than four credited screenwriters. There’s a lot of needless dialogue, much of it clumsy, amateurish and a complete restatement of the obvious. Much of the problem has to do with the film’s structure, weighed down by repetitious and overly stylized flashbacks that are supposed to add depth and complexity both to Beckinsale’s cop and the story over all but succeed only in slowing the already tedious action to a crawl.

Director Dominic Sena’s direction is no more inspired. Whiteout makes you yearn for far better icebound movies like John Carpenter’s The Thing, in which you leave the theater shivering, convinced you’ve just spent two horrific hours on the ice. Instead, Whiteout appears to have been mostly filmed against a bluescreen, the backdrop a consistent splash of pink sunset pastels. The empty desolation the filmmakers try so hard to evoke has never looked more inviting.

Whiteout is a whodunit in which every character is a potential suspect (except perhaps the one person the film tries to cast suspicion on more than any other; the obvious choice is never the right choice). Regrettably, nothing makes the slightest sense in this movie, from Beckinsale’s lengthy and gratuitously disrobing before a hot shower to the fact that Whiteout never quite decides what it wants to be when it grows up—a thoughtful murder mystery, a slasher film or an action movie.

Perhaps it would have been better if I’d blacked out for most of Whiteout.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.