Sahara

Clive Cussler is what we, at Barnes & Noble, would refer to as an airline author - he's one of those guys you always see businessmen reading on trans-continental flights. Here's the list, as best I can recall:

(1) Tom Clancy
(2) Michael Crichton
(3) John Grisham
(4) Scott Turow
(5) Clive Cussler

I bet JK Rowling's on there by now...

I have never read any Cussler. I had always thought of him as kind of the B-grade Tom Clancy. The Dean Koontz to Clancy's Stephen King, if you will. But judging from the first big-screen Cussler adaptation, Sahara, his Dirk Pitt adventure novels aren't at all what I imagined. The film is essentially a buddy action movie cross-bred with an Indiana Jones riff.

I'd say it's probably the best of the recent Indiana Jones rip-offs. It's far less reliant on big, chaotic CG-enhanced set pieces than The Mummy. Matthew McConaughey proves a more likable adventure hero than Angelina Jolie's sexy-but-distant Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider films. And though Sahara clocks in at a slightly over-long 2 hours, it's far more breezy and entertaining than that National Treasure slog, with its endless travel montages and puzzle-solving.



This is a dumb film. The comedy is dumb, the premise is really dumb, even the musical choices are dumb. For example, why does "Sweet Home Alabama" play as adventurer Dirk Pitt's yacht takes off down the Niger River? Hasn't that song now appeared in enough films, to where it should only be used when perfectly complimenting the on-screen action?

But you know what? I don't really care how stupid a movie is when it's this much fun to watch. Sahara has a few great assets that basically salvage what could have been an overblown, ludicrous disaster.

First and foremost, the casting of Matthew McConaughey and Steve Zahn together. McConaughey's Dirk Pitt is just like all the rest of his characters (at least, his good characters). He's laconic, he's charming, he's goofy and he's fun to watch. Dirk Pitt in this film is basically Wooderson from Dazed and Confused, only with an extensive knowledge of survival skills and American history, and not just Aerosmith tunes.

Zahn, as Pitt's sidekick Al, doesn't get as many opportunities to show off his comic chops, but it's just nice to see him again in a film that doesn't cast him as a total buffoon.

Their scenes together are the best in the film, including a wonderful action sequence that finds them escaping from the back of a flat-bed, handcuffed, in the middle of the desert. "Now we're home-free," Zahn deadpans. This stuff almost reminded me of Hope and Crosby's Road pictures, in that it's essentially a plotless little stretch of film focused entirely on the charisma of its two stars. Plus they're riding camels.

Another great asset, utilized wonderfully by director Breck Eisner (son of Michael!), is the expressive desert cinematography by Seamus McGarvey (who also shot High Fidelity and The Hours, and is working next on Oliver Stone's 9/11 movie). This is one of the best-looking studio films of this year so far. Even the action scenes are smooth and clearly-realized, unlike most of the choppy, spastic montage crap you usually see.

So when it slows down to take in the scenery, or to focus on the likability of the characters, Sahara is something of a triumph. For most of the first hour, I was totally with the movie.

Unfortunately, when it's time to actually tell a story...well, it's pretty ludicrous. Two salvage experts (McConaughey and Zahn) sponsored by a wealthy American capitalist (William H. Macy, totally and utterly wasted in a thankless expositional role) venture to the war-torn African nation of Mali to search for a Civil War battleship they believe sailed there 150 years ago. (Why? How? Never explained...)

While in Mali, they encounter and befriend a World Health Organization doctor (Penelope Cruz) studying the effects of a horrible plague. Eventually, through a series of bizarre and unbelievable coincidences too complicated to enumerate, they discover that the secret to both of their quests lies together, in a polluting solar-powered factory run by an evil European businessman (the shitty French actor who played The Merovingian in Matrix 2, equally unconvincing here) and a local warlord.

It's not just that this story would be far-fetched for a cartoon (although it would). It's that the narrative constantly relies on insanely unlikely coincidences. To judge from the film, the Sahara Desert itself is about 10 miles wide. Characters constantly stumble into one another, find themselves right next to a downed plane or a well-concealed hideout. At one point, McConaughy actually manages to find a pay phone to call his boss.

A pay phone! In the middle of the Sahara Desert!

Also, you keep expecting some sort of satisfying solution to the ship-salvage storyline that never comes. Oh, they find the ship, and I won't get into all the details, but there's really no investment at all in the majesty and mystery of finding a Civil War ship, perfectly preserved, under the desert floor in Africa. That would be a pretty wild, far-out thing to see, yet everyone reacts more like tourists at Knott's Berry Farm's "Pan for Gold" attraction.

"Oh, hey, look at that. That kind of looks like gold. Neato. How long is the line long for Montezuma's Revenge?"

But there's no time for thematic closure when the entire last half hour of your film is gunplay. Sahara kind of turns from a genial action-comedy into a Bruckenheimer-ian exercize in violent excess towards the end. Chase scenes give way into one another, fistfights break out, there's even a shootout between the aforementioned battleship, a helicopter and a regiment of tanks.

But why end the film this way? I understand you want a big action climax with lots of explosions, but it seems silly to take a film with such an impressive and unconventional setting and then set the end inside a bland factory set, having Steve Zahn disarm a bomb while Wooderson kicks a guy's ass on the roof.

But still, with all these problems, this is still the best of the recent Indiana Jones rip-offs. It at least carries with it Spielberg's sense of wacky fun - these are big, exciting, over-the-top event movies that (mostly) have the feel of smaller, character-driven pieces, where the cast genuinely seems to be enjoying themselves.