No, Whiteout is not a thriller about a correctional-fluid coverup following a huge typing mistake.
But for all the intrigue and excitement it doesn’t generate, it might as well be.
It’s a murder mystery set on the frozen tundras of Antartica, where — like someone disoriented while wandering around in a blizzard — the movie seems to lose control of its own narrative. You better really like snow because that’s pretty much all you’ll remember seeing.
Kate Beckinsale plays Carrie Stetko, the only U.S. Marshal assigned to unforgiving Antartica, who must investigate a brutal murder, Antartica’s first homicide, at the local research station. Annoyed by the isolation and claustrophobia involved in dealing with this hostile environment, and looking forward to getting back to civilization after two years here, she discovers a frozen corpse and dutifully presses on in icy detachment.
But this is no relaxed investigation, this is a race against time. Because in three days, when she had planned to turn in her badge, the sun will set for the last time in half a year as the dark six-month winter sets in at the South Pole. And if she’s still here, she’s stuck here for the whole winter.
That means more time on the planet’s most isolated land mass, six-million square miles of ice, which will be under a black sky for that long, where it will be bitter cold, with no horizon and no shadows, with glacial winds gusting to 200 miles per hour, and no one able to see anything or anyone more than a few inches in front of them — and therefore not be able to see whoever has committed the murder.
In other words: cushy assignment, yeah.
Things get worse, much worse. Early in the investigation, the killer attacks Carrie and leaves her to die in the storm. She manages to survive, but loses two fingers because of cold-related injuries.
Gabriel Macht co-stars as a United Nations operative also investigating the murder. And Tom Skerritt plays a physician and Carrie’s father-figure friend. Everyone else gets lost in the snow, what with the thick parkas and blinding conditions. Like the movie itself, the ensemble cast leaves you cold.
The script by Jon and Erich Hoeber and Chad and Carey Hayes, based on a graphic novel by Greg Rucka and illustrated by Steve Lieber, is on the shapeless and sometimes confusing side, with odd flashbacks doing little to help us orient ourselves. It’s not just the environment that’s grim. Were the screenwriters chilled and typing with gloves on?
We keep waiting and waiting for the plot’s cylinders to click into place and they never do. By the time we get to the disappointing climactic revelation, a ho-hum solution to a mystery if ever there were one, we feel that the experience has been all exposition and no payoff. This was the secret being kept from us?, we say to ourselves? What a letdown.
Director Dominic Sena (Swordfish, Gone in 60 Seconds, Kalifornia) apparently focused all his creative energy on the CGI blizzards at the expense of the plot. Are the wintry action sequnces visually convincing? Well, yes. But so what? They’re also overly frenetic, dramatically inert, and thus minimally impactful.
For a film that emerged from a graphic novel, this one is sufficiently graphic but well short of novel. It plays for much of its running time like a snowy western, but ultimately becomes a shaggy dog story in winter garb. For this we paid attention for two hours?
This is a visually respectable thriller that’s a storytelling snow job. As murder mysteries go, Whiteout suffers a blackout.
Bill Wine – Celebrity News Service Movie Critic/ AHN
101 minutes
In theaters September 11, 2009
Rating : R, Thriller
