‘Sahara’ Another Desert Dustbowl

Last year’s Hidalgo transported us to the Middle East for a 3,000 mile Tour de Arabia that was as dry and sand-filled as the arid landscapes it portrayed. Just over a year later, Sahara, an adaptation of Clive Custler’s popular Dirk Pitt tales, takes us on another barren escapade, this time through the bland backlands of Africa’s great desert. With this film, a sense of Déjà vu is strong, only this time we get a dustbowl that holds even fewer thrills and duller damsels than last year’s subpar look-alike.

Sahara’s teaming of Matthew McConaughey (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) and Penelope Cruz (Vanilla Sky) creates an immediate rift that is noticeable throughout. Although McConaughey delivers his role with the ease of a natural, giving us a Dirk Pitt that has a constant twinkle in his eye and a brimming charisma, Cruz is what she seems to be in most of her films: beautiful, smart-looking, and terribly dull. She is admirable only as long as she has no lines, and her character is so overly serious and fun-less (except for a pointless scene where she gleefully prances in a bikini) that she can easily be considered one of the most colorless tag-along heroines in some time. Thus, the Cruz/McConaughey chemistry feels lopsided, and with a screenplay that never even attempts to seize upon the pair’s romantic possibilities, any natural excitement they might have generated is completely killed off.

Other elements of Sahara show a similar disharmony. The film often and quite appropriately emphasizes the culture of its African locale; the hard living of river life, the dingy environs of its poverty stricken people, and their solemn rituals. But this respectful tranquility seems out of keeping with the rest of the film’s doubloon-chasing shenanigans and yahoo antics. At times the movie plays like The Mummy, at others, like a PBS documentary.

For a supposed action-adventure, Sahara suffers some surprisingly bland stretches. What action there is very standardized: lots of guns (surprisingly little killing), and some fancy, Houdini-like stunts, and, of course, lots of baddies pouring from every crack and crevice. It’s all generally absurd stuff, but McConaughey and his comedy-relief sidekick Steve Zahn (Daddy Day Care) do make it tolerably fun.

The biggest surprise, at least for those of us unacquainted with the novel, is that Sahara is far less about finding buried treasure and more about finding buried barrels. Its plot, which begins with a civil war battleship and its fantastic voyage into the Sahara, is a solid premise from which to start. But the story veers away, and it becomes fairly obvious that the film is really nothing more than a smokescreen for an environmental message and a few and political potshots. Sahara is actually A Civic Duty in the clothing of Raider’s of the Lost Ark.

Only in its latter stages does Sahara ever begin to resemble the summertime popcorn picture we’d expect. By then, most won’t notice or care.