Here's a quickie review of something I got round to recently--2005's Sahara, which is largely known for costing eighty wazillion dollars and then making about fifty cents and a loose and possibly counterfeit milk coupon in returns. It's based on a novel by Clive Cussler, who made most of his living filling up airport bookstore shelves with tales largely of people messing around underwater and describing their sweat in great, slightly uncomfortable detail. Surprisingly, this is only one of two adaptations of his work, which perhaps isn't surprising as both tanked badly! Does this one deserve it, or was it simply down to the sub-Michael Crichton material? Let's find out.
Matthew McConaughey and Steve Zahn play a pair of treasure hunters who specialize in underwater discoveries, recovering historical artifacts to bring back to their nations (and for a tidy finder's fee of course). McConaughey's character seems to be not so subtly hinted as being on crack half the time, which explains why he hits on the idea of tracking down an American Civil War ironclad...that ended up in the African desert. Somehow. It's even better in the book, where that same Confederate ship apparently captured Abraham Lincoln at one point. Somehow.
Anyway, both him and Zahn end up venturing to Mali, where they encounter Penelope Cruz as a WHO doctor that ends up tagging along, and by sheer bumbling luck, it turns out there is something to the stories of this old warship! We can only assume it ended so far off course thanks to copious amounts of southern whisky that can lead one to assume that desert dunes are the same as ocean waves because they're all bumpy, right? Unfortunately, in their path is sleazy a French businessman played by Lambert Wilson, and a stereotypical African dictator (Lennie James).
The tone is all over the place--at first, the film tries to be aiming at a somewhat somber look at modern Africa, which is then immediately contrasted by McConaughey and Zahn running roughshod over it in various chases. You probably wouldn't see such a happy go lucky approach to such nations these days. Then, we forget about the whole ironclad plot once it turns out there's a toxic waste dumping operation going on--one that's going to leak into the river and despoil all the oceans in the world! They even have a computer simulation graphic showing, no joke, every square meter of seawater on Earth being contaminated by this! Most films would just be content with a treasure hunt against despotic bad guys, but no, this one is brave enough to throw in the the theme of ecological apocalypse halfway through!
The general feeling of weirdness continues throughout, as we pile on the lunacy thick in the last third. We go from somewhat half-grounded interactions between businessman and dictator, which feels relatively true to life as far as these sorts of things go, and then we cut straight to our heroes making a land sailboat out of a rusted plane they stumble on the desert. It's not quite Hotel Rwanda if Don Cheadle pulled out a laser gun in the middle, but it does feel like it's trying to get there at times.
Oh, and at the very end the heroes find the desert-dwelling ironclad after forgetting about it for most of the film, literally just tripping over it at random. If you want to see McConaughey take on a helicopter gunship with a 150-year old cannon, well, this movie delivers! What makes it so hysterical is just how shameless this whole thing is--just going from one pile of dumb to another with the sort of exuberance that I must admit held my attention.
It all ends with a happy ending, naturally, and we leave off on an attempt to fuse Bond, Indiana Jones, and I guess Brendan Fraser's Mummy movies, albeit with a lot of alcohol and crack apparently involved in the process. Honestly, while it's a pretty stupid film, it's watchable enough in the right mood, and if you have a soft spot for eager but clueless action flicks from this era, there's enjoyment to be had. It might be tone-deaf and unrealistic to the point of being borderline demented, but that might just only enhance a beer and peanuts fuelled watch. Lord knows I've seen dumber and even more clueless films that turned more profit than this.
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