Hoping to capture the same magic as The Mummy in 1999 as the action film that leads off ahead of the latest Star Wars film, Sahara manages only to be the dopiest thing I've seen in sometime now.
The main cast reads as if the producers were trying capture segments of the movie going audience with each actor. Let's see... Matthew McConaughey will get the chicks, Penelope Cruz will get the horny teenage boys, Steve Zahn will get the comedy crowd and William H. Macy will grab the art house crowd too brain damaged to notice this is a big budget nightmare. The plot sounds like something that was coughed up by somebody who just wandered across the Sahara and is now suffering severe sun stroke and delirium. McConaughey plays Dirk Pitt (from a series of Clive Cussler books), a deep sea explorer and treasure hunter. For reasons I can't even begin to try and process without rupturing something in my brain, Dirk comes to believe that an American Civil War battleship somehow came from Virginia to the middle of the damn desert. Apparently 150 years ago, the Sahara was really ocean. That sound you just heard was my head exploding. Dirk is accompanied by his trusty sidekick Al Giordino (Zahn), who in a stroke of amazing originality, is the happy go lucky sort who always has a cute one-liner at the ready for every situation. Of course you need a girl so Penelope Cruz keeps stumbling into the path of these two, even though her own mission has nothing to do with theirs. She's trying to track down the cause of a plague for the WHO. Her search causes a Mali warlord to send his whole army after them and similarly, Dirk and Al piss off an evil industrialist played by Lambert Wilson. It's always nice to see Wilson and realize that thanks to the Matrix Reloaded, we're going to be stuck with his irritating accent for years to come. Oh and in case you were wondering where William H. Macy falls into all of this, his job is to receive regular radio reports on the progress of our heroes. Seriously. All is not lost. Those of you who enjoy movies that are so wildly over the top that they take on an effective, if accidental, humor will be delighted. Last year's The Day After Tommorrow is an excellent example. It can work and be fun if you don't think about it at all. It's not an accident I cited the Mummy movies. Let's be clear, this is a bad bad movie. But it is watchable if you don't take it at all seriously, which I think is how most people work. That's really the only explanation for the success of most summer movies. This one provides lots of silly action that would never ever work in real life. But that's not why we go see action movies, so they might as well be way over the top, right? - Harry Barber
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