United States Marshall Carrie Stetko (Kate Beckinsale) is counting down the hours. For the past two years she’s been serving in Antarctica, monitoring the relatively benign comings and goings of the scientists, administrators and personnel making the frigid multinational outposts built there run. It’s a lot of time to spend in an environment that can kill you almost instantaneously, getting to a tropical climate and procuring a tan the only thing currently on the law enforcement officer’s mind.

Kate Beckinsale is lost in the snow in Warner Bros' Whiteout

Things change when she discovers the body of murdered scientist out in the middle of the frozen wasteland, supposedly the first in the continent’s history. Forced to partner with a cocky representative of the United Nations (Gabriel Macht) and assisted by friend and confidant Dr. John Fury (Tom Skerritt), the group suddenly finds themselves at the mercy of a madman wielding an ice axe, a secret long-buried deep within the ice the key to solving the lethal riddles preventing them from boarding the plane for home.

Based on a graphic novel by Greg Rucka that I have never read, Whiteout is a frustrating mess. The seeds for an incredibly solid mystery-thriller are all there, just the setting alone enough to create a palpable mood of eerie suspense that’s highly discomfiting. But the screenplay is a massive jumble of nonsensical moments and ideas, while director Dominic Sena (Swordfish) mishandles things so thoroughly finding the bits where thins run smoothly is like finding a needle in a gigantic mountain of powdery snow.

It doesn’t help that things start off on a colossally wrong foot. An opening bit inside a Russian transport plane is completely inane. It’s not exciting, it’s not pulse-pounding and, most of all, it isn’t remotely believable. Problem is, this is the key event that sets everything else after it in motion, the fact it is so nonsensical ends up creating a hurdle the rest of the narrative can never quite overcome.

Not that the filmmakers don’t find numerous ways to shoot themselves in the foot all the same. The dialogue is so wooden you can almost see the actors groan while they’re saying it, some of the discussions and debates about as fluid and crisp as having someone pound on your foot with a wooden mallet. Sena, meanwhile, pours on the slow motion and the CGI as if they were maple syrup drowning a stack of pancakes. These sequences are so showy they become off-putting, calling attention to themselves so frequently all I could really do was squirm in my seat and silently groan.

None of this compares, however, to the seemingly endless onslaught of flashbacks (and flashbacks upon flashbacks) that frequently stall the movie out cold. They are stupid and absurd but, even more than that, they serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever. All they do is force the viewer to do their best to suppress unintentional giggles, every single one of them so silly I almost gave in and started to audibly laugh myself.

The thing is, the seeds of a solid little thriller are all here. The basic story is intriguing, the mystery itself satisfyingly twisty and relatively probable. There are also a small handful of sensational sequences, not the least of which is heartbreaking moment between Beckinsale, Skerritt (who is excellent) and a pair of clippers that is a model of both restraint and tension. I also found three-way fight near the end in the middle of a raging Antarctic snowstorm to be positively spine-tingling, the flurry of tethered bodies bouncing and colliding and pounding off one another leaving a lump in my throat that refused to disappear.

If only this were enough, Sena and company drop the ball with such resounding ignominy I don’t know if I’m more frustrated that they ruined a movie with tons of potential or that I was forced to have to sit through the whole thing in the first place. Watching them stumble and bumble around when all they had to do was back off and let things evolve organically on their own is downright depressing, Whiteout another major Hollywood wipeout that sadly takes a promising storyline and does nothing of interest with it. 

Film Rating: êê  (out of 4)  

Additional Links:

• Whiteout Theatrical Trailer