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Learn from my experience: being beautiful but dumb isn't everything it's cracked up to be.
Yes, I'm ushered into all the Tri-Cities' most bumping clubs before I can slow down, but sometimes I wish the girls would ask me about my thoughts on life or American politics (no complaints!) rather than being so nervous to meet me they run away or accidentally spill their drinks in my face before I can finish saying "Hey, you're so sexy you make Arwen look like Shelob."
Beauty fades, but what's in your mind lasts until the syphilis kicks in. This is the reason a movie like Whiteout needs something going on beneath its pretty surface: otherwise it's nice to look at, but not much fun to spend time with.
In Antarctica, an American base is starting to bunker down for the long winter, and U.S. Marshal Kate Beckinsale is preparing to head back to the States for the first time in two years. Days before her departure, she gets a report of a body out on the ice.
She and doctor Tom Skerritt soon determine the death wasn't an accident--it was Antarctica's first murder. With winter storms closing in, Beckinsale's investigation turns up evidence of a lethal struggle over a Soviet plane that crashed some fifty years ago carrying an unknown cargo.
The only way a movie's setting can get sweeter than Antarctica is if it takes place on Bikini Atoll (they couldn't name it that if it weren't awesome) or on the ancient Antarctica where the penguins were twice as big. When you can be killed just by stepping outside without wearing a coat stuffed with an entire flock's worth of goose down, every scene carries an extra layer of tension. Also all that snow and stuff looks really, really cool.
Whiteout makes good use of its cruel setting by putting its characters through the cold kind of hell at every opportunity. Plenty of action scenes have taken place on glaciers, snowfields, and iceworld Hoth, but I'm not sure I've ever seen a chase where it would take a full minute for the chaser to close the forty feet of open ground between him and the chasee. Their struggle against the elements is so one-sided it often threatens to be funny instead of gripping.
So the Antarctica stuff's great. It's too bad, then, it's got so many damn people in it. In dialogue and character, Whiteout is offensively bland, as if it were written by a committee instead of a person.
Ah yes, that's because it was. It took four writers to unsuccessfully adapt their script from a graphic novel, including the braintrust behind House of Wax and The Reaping. You'd imagine four writers would make four times as many great lines, but since Whiteout has zero, it appears the Stripper Theory of Screenwriting once more holds true: get too many hands between the sheets (of paper, you pervert), and instead of having fun, you just end up confused and bored.
Generic writing could explain why all the acting except Skerritt's is so wooden Shaolin monks strike it to toughen their hands, but it doesn't make sense of why director Dominic Sera can't handle a simple flashback sequence without being hamfisted and intrusive. Whiteout's the kind of movie that gets much better when it's put on TV: that way it's free, and you can ignore all the parts without the killer snowstorms.
Grade: C
