A Year of Bad Movies # 7 — “Whiteout”
Whiteout — 2009
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 8 out of 100
Metacritic Score: 32 out of 100
IMDB Score 5.9 out of 100
“Whiteout” is not a terrible film — it’s just not a terribly good one.
Kate! Watch out for that snow leopard hiding behind you!
The Antarctic murder mystery’s biggest crime is that its just too dang boring — something that a movie about murder set in one of the Earth’s most interesting places has no right to be.
Essentially “Law and Order: South Pole Unit,” “Whiteout” stars Kate Beckinsale as a U.S. Marshall attempting to unravel the mysterious murder of a research scientist on an Antarctic base days before she is finally set to leave the frozen hell-hole for good.
Unfortunately, the mystery isn’t too mysterious and the murderer is not unlike anything you would see on any one of television’s numerous crime procedurals.
The worst part is, it really is a terrible shame that I didn’t enjoy “Whiteout” since the film combines two of my childhood dreams into one cinematic fantasy smoothie.
As a child I harbored dreams of going into law enforcement. Raised on the teat of high-octane action films, I dreamt of shooting guns in the air as I leaped across rooftops, pursuing criminals and other assorted ne’er-do-wells.
At one point, I even donned a costume and patrolled my neighborhood as a masked vigilante, practicing for my eventual debut as a Supercop.
As I grew up and became increasingly out-of-shape and increasingly afraid-of-bullets, my dreams of law enforcement vanished as childhood dreams often do. I still watch “The Shield” with the heavy-heart that comes from a life half lived, but that ship has sailed.
Another of my fantasies as a kid involved moving to an inhospitable environment for a couple of years in order to prove myself to the world. While I wasn’t the best athlete, scholar or playground lothario, I felt I had something special in me that was just waiting for the moment that would provide a catalyst for my metamorphosis.
Batman’s parents were shot. Superman’s planet blew up. I figured I would find my hero-maker by surviving a harsh environment on my own.
I was drawn to stories about children who found themselves castaways on desert islands, isolated mountaintops or after-hour shopping malls. I would eat up any nature documentary that dealt with such extreme locations as the Australian outback, the South American rainforest or, yes, Antarctica.
So its no surprise that being a movie about a crime fighter in Antarctica would have blown my childhood mind.
Maybe that’s the lesson I learned from “Whiteout.”
Childhood dreams aren’t all they are cracked up to be. I’m sure that if I were to actually be an Antarctic cop, I’d find life to be just as dull and mundane as “Whiteout” turned out to be.
I wonder what other childhood fantasies wouldn’t prove to be as lustrous a lifestyle if they were an actual reality.
If I were to have a pet dinosaur, would that one day become passé. I can’t imagine myself ever growing bored of playing fetch with a T-Rex, but last week I never thought I would have yawned during a movie about a gunslinger in Antarctica.
