"To say the wheels fall off would be too kind."

Whiteout opens with a gunfight ... on an airplane in flight. It's 1957. The film then segues smoothly into a modern day Kate Beckinsale peeling off eight to 10 layers of clothing to take a nice piping hot shower in her room, location: Antarctica. So far, so good, right? This is a movie you can begin to appreciate. But then they start telling the "story" part and all hell breaks loose. To say the wheels fall off would be too kind as it would imagine a storytelling world in which the wheel had been invented. Yep, these guys are pre-wheel.

The plot is of the whodunnit variety -- Kate Beckinsale plays a U.S. marshall with severe trust issues, a body is found in the middle of nowhere, Antarctica (though I suppose technically most of Antarctica would be considered the middle of nowhere), and we're building a mystery. Tom Skerritt plays the kindly doctor at the Amundsen-Scott research station. Kate is the police force, all by her lonesome, but she's helped out when a U.N. investigator (Gabriel Macht) inserts himself into the case. The plane crash in 1957 evidently had international repercussions. There's also a plucky airplane pilot (Columbus Short) and a masked guy who wields a scythe the whole film. I believe we're to infer he's the killer.

Now then, as I mentioned before, the story is not all there, and it's not all there for a couple of diverse and interesting reasons. First off, there is danger constantly present ... but there are not really any clues you can follow as to the source of the trouble. It's a bit like a "free vacation" time-share presentation in that sense. So Kate B. wanders from crime scene to crime scene and she's occasionally attacked by a masked fiend. Hey, didn't they do that in Scooby Doo too? Then there is the logic to the equation. Plainly, it's not there. After the film it took around 15 to 20 seconds to come to the conclusion that it didn't add up. It's a case of making the script work for the filming as opposed to making it work for any sense of realism.

Oh, and the snow. Man, it certainly looks cold throughout the running time of Whiteout. Plus there are fights and chases in the snow, where people are tethered to lifelines, and they have to unhook and re-hook their carabiner to continue running away on a different lifeline. Thus the math is as such: it's so cold and dangerous that you have to be ATTACHED TO A LIFELINE whilst in COLD WEATHER GEAR to even survive ... and yet you can still find the time to chase hapless U.S. marshalls around with some sort of pickax too? Sheesh. I mean, really? Did we need that? Can't people try to kill each other in warm and cozy environments like civilized folk? What is the world coming to? Then again, perhaps Whiteout is a super scathing social commentary on the lengths people will go to to entertain themselves. It works on a lot of levels if that's the case.

The only odd thing about Whiteout is that Dominic Sena directed it. He cranked out Swordfish and Gone in 60 Seconds at the beginning of the decade. No, those weren't amazing films, but they were at least entertaining to watch. Not so with Whiteout. During one of the many "investigation" scenes one of the characters looks around for about three seconds, shakes his head, and says "There's nothing here. Let's head back." If only Sena had felt the same way upon reading the script.

Grade: D

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