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Grade: D
In its early scenes, Whiteout feels like it’s setting us up for an Antarctic Alien. There’s the scientific base far, far from civilization; there’s Kate Beckinsale nonsensically stripping down to her tighty-whities just like Ellen Ripley; there’s something spooky in a box; ther
e’s even Tom Skerritt, the interstellar captain of Alien, as Doc, sawbones of Camp Amundsen-Scott at the South Pole.
At this point, the parallels stop cold. Based on a much tauter graphic novel series, Whiteout is a ham-handed murder mystery that starts out average and heads south from there, falling apart under the pressures of graceless camera work, leaps of logic, and TV-movie production values.
The setting is novel, at least, and Whiteout fits neatly into the new forensic-pathology chic. Beckinsale plays a U.S. marshal named Carrie Stetko, but she could just as well be Dr. "Bones" Brennan for all the ghastly dead bodies she uncovers. The first has apparently been thrown from a plane. The second has his throat cut. Carrie’s very nearly the third.
Who is killing the geologists of the Antarctic? It has something to do with the contents of that box, buried under the ice in a Russian transport plane that crashed back in 1957. (If you’re hoping for something supernatural, don’t hold your breath.) Carrie investigates with the aid of Doc, a rafish pilot (Columbus Short), and a "special U.N. investigator" played both smugly and woodenly — no mean feat — by Gabriel Macht (The Spirit).
Beckinsale is her usual lovely and brittle self, but it says something about this capable British actress that she can go slumming in the funkiest of genre films — the Underworld series, the tatty motel horror film Vacancy — without ever appearing to enjoy herself. Why does Beckinsale keep taking these roles? That’s a greater mystery than anything on the screen.
After some decent opening banter and a few interesting tracking shot through the base station, Whiteout settles into a rut of barely acceptable professionalism. Director Dominic Sena (Swordfish) fails to combine the film’s elements into a coherent whole, which, when you think about it, is what directing fundamentally is. Chris Soos’s camerawork is overwrought; you can’t tell who’s doing what to whom during the indoor scenes, and forget about the snowstorms. John Frizzell’s Score is strictly hourlong television drama.
Worse, the characters keep walking into crime scenes and figuring out exactly what happened based on the most tenuous physical evidence; the low point (or high point; take your pick) comes when Carrie accurately reconstructs a complicated gun battle based on a pile of frozen 50-year-old corpses. There’s insight, and then there’s bad screenwriting.
The resolution is especially disappointing; a straight-up B-thriller like this shouldn’t make viewers feel like they’ve wasted their time. Whiteout fritters away its suspense, its setting, and our indulgence. You come away wishing someone had applied White-Out to the script.
In its early scenes, Whiteout feels like it’s setting us up for an Antarctic Alien. There’s the scientific base far, far from civilization; there’s Kate Beckinsale nonsensically stripping down to her tighty-whities just like Ellen Ripley; there’s something spooky in a box; ther
e’s even Tom Skerritt, the interstellar captain of Alien, as Doc, sawbones of Camp Amundsen-Scott at the South Pole.At this point, the parallels stop cold. Based on a much tauter graphic novel series, Whiteout is a ham-handed murder mystery that starts out average and heads south from there, falling apart under the pressures of graceless camera work, leaps of logic, and TV-movie production values.
The setting is novel, at least, and Whiteout fits neatly into the new forensic-pathology chic. Beckinsale plays a U.S. marshal named Carrie Stetko, but she could just as well be Dr. "Bones" Brennan for all the ghastly dead bodies she uncovers. The first has apparently been thrown from a plane. The second has his throat cut. Carrie’s very nearly the third.
Who is killing the geologists of the Antarctic? It has something to do with the contents of that box, buried under the ice in a Russian transport plane that crashed back in 1957. (If you’re hoping for something supernatural, don’t hold your breath.) Carrie investigates with the aid of Doc, a rafish pilot (Columbus Short), and a "special U.N. investigator" played both smugly and woodenly — no mean feat — by Gabriel Macht (The Spirit).
Beckinsale is her usual lovely and brittle self, but it says something about this capable British actress that she can go slumming in the funkiest of genre films — the Underworld series, the tatty motel horror film Vacancy — without ever appearing to enjoy herself. Why does Beckinsale keep taking these roles? That’s a greater mystery than anything on the screen.
After some decent opening banter and a few interesting tracking shot through the base station, Whiteout settles into a rut of barely acceptable professionalism. Director Dominic Sena (Swordfish) fails to combine the film’s elements into a coherent whole, which, when you think about it, is what directing fundamentally is. Chris Soos’s camerawork is overwrought; you can’t tell who’s doing what to whom during the indoor scenes, and forget about the snowstorms. John Frizzell’s Score is strictly hourlong television drama.
Worse, the characters keep walking into crime scenes and figuring out exactly what happened based on the most tenuous physical evidence; the low point (or high point; take your pick) comes when Carrie accurately reconstructs a complicated gun battle based on a pile of frozen 50-year-old corpses. There’s insight, and then there’s bad screenwriting.
The resolution is especially disappointing; a straight-up B-thriller like this shouldn’t make viewers feel like they’ve wasted their time. Whiteout fritters away its suspense, its setting, and our indulgence. You come away wishing someone had applied White-Out to the script.
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