Whiteout
Starring Kate Beckinsale and Tom Skerritt
Directed by Dominic Sena (Swordfish)
Rated R for violence, grisly images, brief strong language and some nudity
Appropriate for ages 15+
Based on the graphic novel by Greg Rucka, Whiteout follows U.S. Marshall Stetko (Beckinsale), haunted by her own demons, as she tracks a killer in Antarctica just before the sun is about to set for six months.
The first few minutes of the film start out with a Russian plane that crashed fifty years ago. All the audience knows from the opening is that the plane was military and they were carrying something very valuable that will play into the story somehow. Not a bad opening.
Then Beckinsale walks in to her modern day Antarctic lodging, takes off all of her clothes in a very sexy manner, and gets in the shower. After that, it’s very hard to take the film seriously. OK – it’s impossible. The basic premise itself is pretty good and I can see why Warner wanted to put a lot of money behind it, but the script is just laughable. At first I thought they were trying to do a film noir thing with the dialogue, but then I realized that it was just bad writing made worse by horrendous line delivery.
Then there’s the action scenes. Most of the big scary scenes are done outside where the wind and snow are blowing so hard that they can kill you if you aren’t attached to a rope. The problem is that everyone is moving so slow that it’s hard to get excited or scared. Again, just laughable.
From start to finish, this film turns out to be nothing more than a failed experiment with lousy execution from the production team. D