Surely a movie starring the delectable Penelope Cruz and William H. Macy can't be all that bad. Well, when you have Penelope cast as a doctor from the World Health Organization, and Matthew McConaughey as a surfer-like deep see expert and treasure hunter, it's pretty much downhill from there.
Sahara involves the adventures of Dirk Pitt (McConaughey) and his intrepid faithful sidekick Al Giordino (a rather forced Steve Zahn). Dirk has been searching for a Civil War Ironclad battleship that he and he alone believes somehow drifted from Virginia to Africa 140 years ago.
While he plies the water of the coast of Niger, Dr. Rojas (Cruz) is determined to locate the cause of a baffling new plague in Mali. Her search has no real connection to Dirk and Al's quest, yet they keep running into one another in the vast wilderness so that they can keep rescuing each other from gun-toting African militia.
The trio's escapades come to the attention of evil French entrepreneur Massarde (Lambert Wilson) and Mali strongman General Kazim (Lennie James) who send the entire Mali army after them to cover up the source of the rapidly spreading illness.
First-time feature director Breck Eisner does a respectable job in maintaining forward momentum and he enlivens the proceedings with some quirky moments, especially the banter between the actors. The film's action set pieces come off quite effectively, including a battle between boats on a river, breaking into a mysterious power plant in the middle of the desert, and various skirmishes between our heroes and the general's faceless soldiers.
But the movie is ultimately hampered by story is totally preposterous and unrealistic - a civil war ship ending up in a river in Africa! Please! There's absolutely no sense of plausibility to the plot and there's just to many leaps in logic as our heroes wisecrack their way through fights without a scratch. They also seem to have a remarkable immunity to bullets.
Perhaps Sahara would have been considered a good action film thirty years ago when movie going tastes for this kind of fair where not as sophisticated, but these days a movie like this comes across as rather stale and formulaic. There's nothing much to Sahara that we though we haven't all seen before: glamorous girl, evil megalomaniac, swashbuckling hero, comic sidekick etc.
I'm not sure whether Sahara's sloppily interconnected storyline comes from a blind fidelity to Clive Cussler's adventure novel or severe deviation from it. Whatever the case, you know that all is not right, when during the opening credits, you see an army of scriptwriters. I also can't quite fathom the inclusion of loud, clangy rock music into the soundtrack - surely African tribal music would have been more appropriate.
On the plus side, the film's otherworldly locations and sets neatly blend into the startling vistas and spruce up the otherwise generic and standard happenings. But generally, Sahara is as flat as the desert on which most of the action takes place. Mike Leonard September 05.
Sahara involves the adventures of Dirk Pitt (McConaughey) and his intrepid faithful sidekick Al Giordino (a rather forced Steve Zahn). Dirk has been searching for a Civil War Ironclad battleship that he and he alone believes somehow drifted from Virginia to Africa 140 years ago.
While he plies the water of the coast of Niger, Dr. Rojas (Cruz) is determined to locate the cause of a baffling new plague in Mali. Her search has no real connection to Dirk and Al's quest, yet they keep running into one another in the vast wilderness so that they can keep rescuing each other from gun-toting African militia.
The trio's escapades come to the attention of evil French entrepreneur Massarde (Lambert Wilson) and Mali strongman General Kazim (Lennie James) who send the entire Mali army after them to cover up the source of the rapidly spreading illness.
First-time feature director Breck Eisner does a respectable job in maintaining forward momentum and he enlivens the proceedings with some quirky moments, especially the banter between the actors. The film's action set pieces come off quite effectively, including a battle between boats on a river, breaking into a mysterious power plant in the middle of the desert, and various skirmishes between our heroes and the general's faceless soldiers.
But the movie is ultimately hampered by story is totally preposterous and unrealistic - a civil war ship ending up in a river in Africa! Please! There's absolutely no sense of plausibility to the plot and there's just to many leaps in logic as our heroes wisecrack their way through fights without a scratch. They also seem to have a remarkable immunity to bullets.
Perhaps Sahara would have been considered a good action film thirty years ago when movie going tastes for this kind of fair where not as sophisticated, but these days a movie like this comes across as rather stale and formulaic. There's nothing much to Sahara that we though we haven't all seen before: glamorous girl, evil megalomaniac, swashbuckling hero, comic sidekick etc.
I'm not sure whether Sahara's sloppily interconnected storyline comes from a blind fidelity to Clive Cussler's adventure novel or severe deviation from it. Whatever the case, you know that all is not right, when during the opening credits, you see an army of scriptwriters. I also can't quite fathom the inclusion of loud, clangy rock music into the soundtrack - surely African tribal music would have been more appropriate.
On the plus side, the film's otherworldly locations and sets neatly blend into the startling vistas and spruce up the otherwise generic and standard happenings. But generally, Sahara is as flat as the desert on which most of the action takes place. Mike Leonard September 05.