Whiteout

Director: Dominic Sena
Starring: Kate Beckinsale, Gabriel Macht, Tom Skerritt

Kate Beckinsale is a beautiful woman. To make sure you don’t miss this, the guys who made Whiteout have her take off all her clothes in the first scene and get into a steamy shower. This will help hook the channel surfers when this thing plays on cable. We need a close-up of Kate’s skinny ass in her panties right up front, ’cause since the film is set in Antarctica, she’s gonna spend the rest of the time in bulky sweaters and a parka. You can just see some studio slob looking at the first draft of this script going, “Parkas? When do I see Kate Beckinsale’s ass?”

Or maybe it was in the first draft. Plenty of writers are credited on this movie, and none of them have ever done anything that’s any good, so it’s really hard to guess where that sort of thing might’ve come in. But it’s hilarious, because there is absolutely no story need for it, none—it’s just there because in movies, pretty girls take their clothes off. Slowly.

And that brings us to the point: The most notable thing about Whiteout is that it seems to have been written and directed by men whose only knowledge of the world comes from having watched movies. The film is a fairly brisk little murder thriller, and it’s like these guys had an outline of the plot, a book called “Screenwriting for Hacks,” and a pot of crummy coffee. Let’s make a movie!

Maybe you’re the sort who’ll forgive the way things happen because the movie needs them to happen. And it’s not like you need those things explained because, duh, you’ve seen a movie before, right? You might not even mind that Kate Beckinsale is an interesting actress only about 35-40 percent of the time. Then you can enjoy this film.

It’s got multiple mysteries—what was aboard a Russian plane in 1957 when it crashed, in the first scene, amid sudden violence? Who killed the dead body, found in the present day, in the middle of Antarctica, and how did it get out there? What past horror causes the U.S. marshall there, Beckinsale, to freeze up and endure oversaturated but always incomplete flashbacks every ten minutes or so? Why is it that the only person who covers his face outdoors in minus-60-degree weather, which could, like, freeze the skin off your cheeks and the water vapor in your lungs, is the mysterious killer?

The real attraction here, once Beckinsale towels off, is Antarctica itself (or its Canadian standin). The geography is a stark, forbidding wasteland, and there is a sense of claustrophobia (poorly exploited by a middling director) to the research stations there, and there’s a deadly storm, sure to maroon everyone for the entire winter (it’s called a whiteout!) bearing down on them. This is where the film is interesting. For instance, the climactic fight scene would be pretty dull, but it’s shot in the midst of the storm, where everyone has to be clipped to safety lines, creating a novel setpiece that might allow you to overlook how muddled the pacing and storytelling are.

The graphic novel it’s based on does a better job of dealing with all this—you get the feeling comics writer Greg Rucka did a better job with the research and has known people outside of movie characters—but the film does a fair, if superficial, adaptation, with some notable changes (“Add a guy—we can’t have an action film with just chicks in charge!”). The movie has been sitting on a shelf for two years now, apparently forcing Beckinsale to make more of those unbearable Underworld films. Maybe we should all see it, twice, and buy the Director’s Cut DVD, just to boost her career enough that she won’t do any more Underworld. That’s as good a reason to see this movie as any other.