An 'Arctic thriller' that'll leave you cold

Some films feel off from the get-go. They don't hang together, despite the best intentions.

Whiteout, a singularly unsuspenseful, unexciting, unthrilling Arctic thriller starring Underworld's Kate Beckinsale, isn't exactly one of these. It's even worse.

Directed with minimal conviction by Dominic Sena (Gone in Sixty Seconds), Whiteout is a wipeout.

The film opens with an exciting gunfight in a Soviet cargo plane as it speeds over Antarctica. It's 1957 and the plane is carrying some super-secret, super-important, and super-mysterious thing - the flick's MacGuffin. The Soviets shoot each other and the plane crashes, sinking deep into the ice and snow.

Thus begins a treasure hunt for the buried Thingamabob that is supposed to drive the seamlessly plotted story forward to its inexorable conclusion with speed, tension, and lots of thrills.

At least, that's what's supposed to happen.

Whiteout proper (to use an oxymoron) opens in 2009 at a U.S. scientific camp near the South Pole, which is watched over by Beckinsale's eagle-eyed, swift-acting supercop, U.S. Marshal Carrie Stetko.

Except that she's not so quick to act. Carrie, who was once stationed in warm Miami, is haunted by her past. She keeps having flashbacks of being attacked by a slimeball bad guy whom she ended up killing.

The filmmakers repeat the Miami footage over and over again, lest we don't get it: Supercop is t-r-a-u-m-a-t-i-z-ed.

Carrie, who has spent two years getting over it in the frozen wasteland, shares her feelings with the camp's doc, John Fury (Tom Skerritt in one of his trademark mellow-guy roles).

But her world starts to fall apart when a badly mangled body is found in the ice. It's the first-ever murder in Antarctica, says United Nations secret agent Robert Pryce (Gabriel Macht), who inexplicably pops up in the story. You know the rest: Robert and Carrie team up. They find the Soviet plane. They investigate. They're attacked by the bad guy - in the middle of a blizzard.

It'll take all day to list all the things that are wrong with Whiteout. Nothing fits. Not the score - we hear vaguely Spanish classical guitar music when Carrie and Robert are buried under 20 feet of ice. Nor the acting - there's no chemistry between Beckinsale and Macht. Nor the plot - which took four screenwriters to contrive.

Sure wish someone at Warner Bros. Pictures would have taken the Wite-Out to Whiteout before it ever went into production and saved the company the flick's reported $40 million budget.

If you really want some Arctic scares, you'd do far better renting John Carpenter's beautifully gory The Thing; the vicious vampire flick 30 Days of Night; or Larry Fessenden's brilliant enviro-thriller, The Last Winter. Each cost a fraction of what Warner sank into this disaster.

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