“Whiteout,” from Joel Silver’s Dark Castle genre arm, is being sold as a funhouse white-knuckle arctic slasher movie, with researchers picking off scientists one-by-one in a high tech Antarctic research station; a sort of frostbitten “Ten Little Indians,” if you will.
But this is absolutely not the case.
What “Whiteout” (based on the Oni Press comic book by Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber) is, more or less, is a plodding crime drama, free of any tension or suspense or interesting characters. The only thing even keeping you mildly interested is the identity of the film’s MacGuffin, set up in a dizzying aerial prologue set in 1947, and once you learn that you may as well leave the theater in a huff. It’s that much of a disappointment.
But back to the nuts and bolts of it: Kate Beckinsale stars at the world’s sexiest U.S. Marshall (well, maybe second sexiest after Jennifer Lopez in “Out of Sight”) who is stationed in the godforsaken wasteland of Antarctica. (We learn she actually requested the move after an arrest went wrong. We discover this via color-saturated flashbacks that seem to take place in “Grand Theft Auto’s” Vice City.) She usually just investigates minor infractions and shoots the shit with a wizened scientist played by Tom Skerritt. It’s revealing nothing to tell you that Tom Skerritt ends up being the Big Bad. He might as well have walked onto the movie twirling his moustache and cleaning his monocle.
Wouldn’t you know it, on everyone’s last day before they get stuck there in a blast of arctic weather for the next six months, bodies start turning up and it’s up to plucky Kate Beckinsale to sort it all out. How does she follow through on her investigation? By traveling to a series of endless research stations, to snoop around the same, anonymous-looking hallways. This grinds on forever, to the point of audience exhaustion. (At least 45% of the movie must be set in snow cats as she drives from one location to the other.) Nothing really happens, per se. And for all of director Dominic Sena’s belabored efforts to conjure up the spooky, apocalyptic imagery of, say, John Carpenter’s masterful remake of “The Thing” or even the snowy Robert Altman movie “Quintet,” it just fails miserably and not an ounce of atmosphere or setting even manages to eke through. It’s rudderless; adrift in cheaply rendered snowy currents of its own design.
These kinds of movies live and die by their supporting character actors, and everyone in this movie is a blank slate. There’s no psychological probing into what this kind of prolonged isolation does to someone, and the station where Beckinsale is based doesn’t even have any character. It looks kind of like a submarine mixed with the Rebel Alliance’s base on the ice planet Hoth, and besides an interesting early-movie tracking shot through its windy corridors, we are so geographically clueless that this movie could have been set on the moon for all we know.
Beckinsale’s tough girl-with-a-sensitive-side shtick, cultivated through her work in the “Underworld” movies, is wearing thin, especially since she is saddled with ridiculous flashbacks to not only her time in Vice City, but also events in Antarctica that we JUST SAW that leave her gasping, crying, or zoning out, for no good reason. She has a grisly fate befall her, which results in two of her fingers being amputated, and she can’t even inject those scenes with any kind of intensity or emotional connection. Like Beckinsale’s performance, the whole movie just leaves you chilly. [D] – Drew Taylor