Liquid Paper (Whiteout)

Whiteout

starring Kate Beckinsale, Gabriel Macht, Tom Skerritt, Columbus Short

directed by Dominic Sena

The ‘thriller’ genre is one of the hardest genres to get right. If you have too many plot twists that don’t make sense, you fail. If it’s too simplistic for your audience, you fail. If there’s no actual thrill, you definitely fail. With Whiteout being the newest film directed by the man who brought us both the excellent Swordfish and the exciting remake of Gone in Sixty Seconds, you’d expect Dominic Sena to give us his next piece of the ultimate thriller genius. However, Whiteout falls into the category of thriller without the all important thrill part.

Carrie Stetko (Beckinsale) is the U. S. Marshall assigned to a scientific base at the South Pole. The entire facility is about to close down for the winter, and because of a massive storm known as a whiteout, the departures are being rushed. However, one of the pilots finds a dead body in the middle of no man’s land. Stetko goes to investigate, and it leads her to the Russian base a few miles away. Upon arriving, she is attacked by a hooded figure and barely manages to escape alive. With the help of U. N. Agent Pryce (Macht) Stetko follows the clues that leads her to a 50 year old wrecked Russian cargo plain, multiple murders, and perhaps the unearthing of a weapon of mass destruction. Sure, sounds like a nail biter, right?

Wrong. The film is slowly paced. The dialogue is horriblely uncomfortable and unnatural. The basic plot is there, but none of the characters give you a reason to care for them or what happens to them at all. The situations and answers just fall into the laps of Stetko and crew; they don’t really have to look or work for any of the clues. One character is thrown in for the soul purpose of throwing you off the real bad guy. He’s a red herring, and that is just unforgivable. It’s simply bad writing. And the ending is the worst part of the film; you come all the way through the lack luster plot and action to what promises to be an ultimate showdown, but instead you get a terrible, anticlimatic conversation. Yeah, a conversation that involves one party simply walking out into the white abyss. Cut scene. To sit through an hour and forty seven minutes of film just to see that is just bad film making. Period.

Not to mention the fact that the whiteout storm, the supposed title feature of the film, has no consequence on how the movie turns out or what it is about for that matter.

I wish there was something admirable to say about the acting, but there isn’t. I mean, it’s not bad or subpar, but no one really put their hearts into it. Beckinsale is nothing but a pretty face for the story, and she is completely unconvincing as a law officer. And incompetent, at that. There’s not much to say about her supporting cast, either. Macht plays a one dimensional standard agent. Doc (Skerritt) is the cool old man that acts like a surrogat parent for Stetko; cliche. There’s even the black guy with the cool lingo that happens to fly a plane (Short). The cast is nothing but cliches and tired versions of characters we’ve seen a million times.

I’ve seen much worse movies, sure. But there is a talent in making award winning movies, and there is also genius in some really, really bad films. You could even say intentially bad movies are an art form. One of the worst things you can do with a film is just make it dull and unmeaningful. Whiteout is so bad that it can’t even be good; And that’s just a true shame.