Tony, there is a new standard to which you must aspire.

Behold I give you Sahara:

Namely, the discount bin at your local Wal-Mart superstore.

I'll begin my review of Sahara with the box it came in. A great movie should come in a great box, and Sahara does not in any way contradict this statement. On the front cover, we see our three heroes, arms crossed, hair blowing dramatically in the wind, arrayed in the classic "get a load of us" pose first popularized in Journey's groundbreaking 1983 video, "Separate Ways." Meanwhile, down near the lower right-hand corner, what appears to be an enormous penis protrudes from the desert floor, with an army of gun-toting horsemen thundering towards it. Although the giant sandstone penis scene apparently had to be trimmed from the final cut of the film, this is still a striking image, hinting at the even greater excitement that awaits us upon...

...the back cover, which informs us: "There is a legend of a treasure that claims all who seek it."

Well, no, actually, there isn't. Or maybe there is such a legend, but if so, it's not in this movie. There's a treasure, all right, but it's been lost, buried and completely forgotten, and no one but Matthew McConaughey seems to be seeking it anyway. Then again, you have to put something on the back of your box, I suppose, and that movie about the legend does sound pretty cool. (If anyone knows what it's called, please let me know.)

"Thumbs up!" exclaims a veritable chorus of movie critic, in large letters above this headline. The singular thumb in question, as you may have already surmised, belongs to Roger Ebert, applying his patented "If the filmmakers set out to make crap, and they made crap, then they must have done a good job" theory of movie reviewing to uncover yet another diamond in the rough. (But technically speaking, shouldn't the box say "Thumb up"?)

And now, at last, it's time for our adventure to begin--and begin it does, with a scene of a Civil War battleship attempting to sail out of its harbor at night while being attacked by Union troops (unseen, but armed with hundreds of CGI bottle rockets, which we'll be seeing plenty of). Explosions ensue. More explosions ensue. Then there are some explosions. This goes on for a while longer. Just when things are starting to look rough for the ship (due to the explosions), the captain suddenly orders his crew to cut the engines. For a moment, it looks as if he might have some clever strategy in mind, but after the engines are shut off, everyone just kind of stands there for a minute or two, glancing around at each other, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot, while the ship drifts slowly over toward the right edge of the screen. Then the opening credits begin abruptly, launching us forward to the present day, and hey, so much for that. But I'm confident that the captain's idea, whatever it was, was a great one. (Not to give away too much too soon, but his idea may well have been, "Hey, let's all sail to Africa for no apparent reason, and then die of a mysterious plague!" Take that, Union soldiers!)

During the opening credits, the camera swoops around a room lined with photos, postcards and dozens of newspaper clippings, which introduce us to one Dirk Pitt, a daring undersea explorer and Civil-War battleship enthusiast who, from the look of things, is also heavily into scrapbooking. While we're admiring his vast collection of memorabilia concerning himself, the names of the film's cast and crew fly past us, vanishing behind pieces of furniture, scooting around cabinet doors, and whizzing through the handles of coffee cups, all set to the sort of music that's supposed to make you instantly think "Fun!" and yet isn't actually any fun to listen to. Imagine the kind of opening credits sequence that David Fincher might come up with if he were Brett Ratner, and you'll have a reasonably good mental picture of this. By the time the credits ended, I was already convinced that I was going to dislike the director, the characters, and just about everything else in the movie. Nor did any of them disappoint me.

There are other good omens to be found in the credits: We see that the star of our adventure is also one of its executive producers, so we can count on seeing him shirtless and/or wearing a wetsuit a lot. The screenplay is credited to four different writers, which is always a good sign. And the film is directed by Breck Eisner, son of Disney CEO Michael Eisner, who somehow overcame the limitations of his difficult upbringing and managed to find work in the movie industry. The dream lives on!

Now we've reached the end of the credits. My, that was fun! Go back and listen to the music again if you don't believe me! Or, better yet, let us set sail...for adventure! (Which has a new destination!)

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Penelope Cruz and her old friend, Black Guy Who Will Have to Sacrifice His Life to Save Hers Within the First Thirty Minutes of the Film, are two doctors who have come to Ghana to investigate a strange new disease which makes its victims' eyeballs dry out and develop large, radiating cracks in their pupils and irises before it kills them. This situation clearly calls for the intervention of Ben Stein, along with his trusty extra-large bottle of Clear Eyes Brand non-allergenic solution, but as fate would have it, two turban-clad extras from Raiders of the Lost Ark who are lurking nearby have rather more sinister plans for Ms. Cruz. Now that she has learned of the mysterious illness--whose existence said extras are attempting to hide from the world--she must be killed on a beach in broad daylight before she can tell anyone. Doing this will make their dastardly secret safe once more, since no one who lives in Africa has access to a telephone or knows how to operate one. No, only visiting doctors ever use those.

Fortunately, when the extras attack, Mr. McConaughey is sunbathing just offshore in a rubber raft with a speargun in it. (I told you it was fortunate.) He manages to spear one of the bad guys from a distance, then runs ashore and thoroughly confuses the other one with a quick barrage of Gladiator-style jump-cut editing that makes it impossible to figure out where he's standing or what he's doing. Punching someone, possibly, but it's hard to say. Whatever it is, though, it clearly gets the job done, and McConaughey takes the now-unconscious Cruz back to his ship to "meet his salvage team"--which, one can only assume, is the excuse he offers to all the unconscious women he carries back to his ship.

And what a salvage team it is! Steve Zahn plays one of the finest "dumbass whom you're supposed to find entertaining and likeable solely because he's a dumbass" characters to have graced the silver screen since the halcyon days of Armageddon. And we lucky viewers are in for a treat, because he'll be with us through the entire rest of the movie! Hooray! Now, McConaughey and Zahn are supposedly a couple of rough-and-tumble, ex-Navy SEAL adventurer types, yet they spend the majority of this movie looking like two hippies who've just smoked enough pot to defoliate Thailand. The crusty old admiral who leads the salvage crew is played by William H. Macy, looking every inch like the guy from Fargo dressed up in a crusty-old-admiral costume. And did I mention Penelope Cruz plays a doctor?

Also, Matthew Perry guest-stars as a ninety-two-year-old blind Chinese woman. No, wait, of course he doesn't! That would be ridiculous!

When we first meet these fun-loving salvage guys, they've just raised an ancient sarcophagus from the ocean floor and are winching it up onto the deck of their ship, along with wetsuit-clad Executive Producer McConaughey. (Told you so.) This might have been a good time for Macy to cement his salty sea-captain image by shouting, "Are you rrready, kids?" but instead he just tells everyone to hurry, because the sarcophagus "has to be at the museum in four hours" to go on display. (Many museums, as I understand it, like to recover their ancient undersea artifacts first, spend a little time cleaning them up, and then announce the opening date for the new exhibit, but apparently some salvage crews do better work if they have a solid deadline to motivate them.)

So, for those keeping score, McConaughey has so far gone sunbathing, speargunned some guy, rescued Cruz, carried her unconscious body back to the ship, dived to the bottom of the ocean, recovered a sunken sarcophagus, and is now on his way to the museum to help celebrate the latest addition to its famous "Pharoahs of the Deep" collection. It's been a busy day. Nonetheless, he finds time to make one more detour on his way to the party, in order to talk to some guy about a Civil War coin that has turned up in neighboring Mali. The presence of the coin tells him that the lost battleship of his dreams must be lying buried out there, somewhere in the middle of the landlocked desert. No, seriously, that's what it tells him. And since McConaughey was planning to pass through Mali on his way to Burning Man in a couple days anyway, he decides to check it out.

Meanwhile, back at the museum, Cruz meets a French guy who, even in his first two seconds of non-speaking screen time, manages to convey the twin messages, "Caution--evil industrialist coming through!" and "I am the only movie villain in recent memory who will actually out-lame The Fantastic Four's Victor Von Doom." Cruz and her doctor friend, we learn, are also on their way to Mali, hoping to find out more about the mysterious disease.

Then things really kick into high gear when--

Nah. You know what? Screw it. The fact is, this movie (**WARNING -- SPOILERS AHEAD**) sucks. Like, really sucks. Like, American Ninja 4 sucks. So let's just skip ahead a bit and try to wrap this up:

You've probably guessed already that the evil industrialist is operating an unsafe solar-powered toxic waste incineration plant conveniently located fourteen feet away from the site of the buried battleship, and that the plant is poisoning the groundwater and making everyone in the region sick, and that the industrialist has also decided to locate his personal office inside of this toxic facility. (Okay, that last part actually was kind of surprising.) You might have further guessed that the mysterious plague that killed the entire crew of the lost battleship was somehow connected to all these nefarious goings-on...but no, I'm sorry! That one was just a regular old mysterious plague after all. Thanks for playing!

(Incidentally--how did a battleship happen to get lost in the middle of the desert, I hear you ask? Well, some explanations are offered along the way, but ultimately, it's for the same reason that a mummy got lost in the middle of the ocean: Shit happens. Things get lost, you know? Deal with it.)

There's also an evil warlord ruling these parts who's trying to kill our heroes. He has troops and tanks and attack helicopters and machine guns. Fortunately, the three lead characters are all surrounded by some sort of reverse magnetic field that causes bullets to simply bend around them and hit whatever they were standing in front of, so that's no big deal. Trust me, these people could have strolled across the beach during the Normandy invasion wearing t-shirts with red bullseyes printed on them, and they still would have been just fine. They may make the occasional pretense of ducking behind a car seat or a sand dune as several thousand bullets chew up the ground all around them, but that's just for show. In spite of this remarkable ability, however, someone still has to give up his life to save one of them at around the 30-minute mark. (I won't say who it is, since that would spoil the big surprise.)

Did I mention yet that the toxic waste from the evil solar plant is also leaking into a nearby river, and if it reaches the ocean, then it will...um...harm the ocean in some manner? Irreparably? Or something like that? Well, it is, and it will. When Cap'n Macy and one of the lesser crew members figure this out, they immediately rush off to warn the U.S. ambassador--though not before putting together a really cool PowerPoint presentation on their laptop to help explain it to him. See, there's this map of the Earth on the screen, and then all of the water in the oceans gradually changes from blue to red. Yes, red!! Clearly, this is serious. You can't have all your oceans just turning red on you, for god's sake. Something must be done.

Oh, and Delroy Lindo shows up for about two minutes, though I may be overestimating the time. Someone must have promised him a bigger part in the sequels (which is kind of an amusing thought in its own right) if he agreed to show up for this one. Either that, or his scenes were the ones involving the giant sandstone penis.

And finally, there are some local tribesmen whom the evil warlord is trying to wipe out, though it's hard to see why he's bothering, because in spite of the inspiring faux-native music that begins playing loudly whenever one of them is anywhere in the vicinity, their master plan seems to be: 1) Sit around their devastated village dying from the toxic drinking water. 2) Wait for the evil warlord to kill them. 3) In the meantime, play a little soccer. And yet, one senses that these people could accomplish so much more, that they truly could rise up and fight back if only they were properly inspired. Yes, if only some nice white man were to come along and point this out to them, then perhaps...

Ah, but I've said too much already. If you want to learn more, my friend, then you must follow this adventure to its destination. A new destination. A destination that lies upon the treacherous sands of...Sahara!

I'm having dinner with him tonight so I'll print this up and give it to him.

This review is spot on. Sahara sucked, made no sense at all, and did not even entertain.

My favorite quote from the review:

they spend the majority of this movie looking like two hippies who've just smoked enough pot to defoliate Thailand.

Funny! Who wrote this? Does (s)he review movies regularly?

Blake

My favorite quote from the review:



Funny! Who wrote this? Does (s)he review movies regularly?

Blake

No Idea. I think my friend just randomly found it on the web. I'll try to find out more.

I cannot remember a thing about "Sahara," which I saw in the theater, except for the utter magnificence of Matthew McConaughey's body. 'Nuff said.