‘Sahara’

The forte of this treasure-chase movie is its quick pacing and nonstop, violent action, all in the nick of time.

By: Bob Brown

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Penelope Cruz (left) and Matthew McConaughey and hunt for a missing Civil War ship in Sahara.


   Not since Indiana Jones has there been a screen hero quite like Dirk Pitt (Matthew McConaughey). Director Breck Eisner (son of Disney’s star-crossed executive Michael) hasn’t quite got the Spielberg touch. And Mr. McConaughey is not as wryly hard-bitten as Harrison Ford. But since we can’t have that magic combination ever again, let’s settle for Sahara.
   Novelist Clive Cussler conceived his hero on a whim. His first adventure to hit big was Raise the Titanic, an action-packed ocean thriller that made a mediocre movie (1980). Dirk Pitt was played by the late Robert Jordan. What marks the character of Pitt apart from other soldiers of fortune is his specialty: underwater retrieval. He’s a diver extraordinaire, sort of a James Bond with SCUBA gear, or Lloyd Bridges with testosterone.
   Sahara takes a bit of history and twists it into a treasure chase. There’s a vague resemblance to the recent National Treasure, where the Declaration of Independence and the back of a dollar bill are the secrets to an 18th-century hoard that Nicholas Cage is bound to protect.
   The parallel in this desert adventure is a Confederate ironclad that disappeared off the Southern coast in the waning days of the Civil War. Legend tells that it wound up in Africa. Pitt is obsessed with finding the ghost ship. He has slogged along with the National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA) in a project headed by Admiral James Sandecker (William H. Macy). Mr. Macy, who habitually accepts roles in quirky independent films, has broadened his horizons. But he’s still the oddball, sporting a grizzled beard and sucking on torpedo-shaped blunts (a running joke). Sometimes a cigar is a lot more than a cigar.
   NUMA is doing good by bringing up African treasures from the deep and donating them to their cultures of origin. But Pitt really wants a crack at the old Civil War wreck, which went down with its crew and the last piece of Confederate gold that Jeff Davis struck. His work table bears a scale model of the craft, serving as a constant distraction and annoyance to all around him.
   By his side, like a yapping Chihuahua, is his soldier-mate, Al (Steve Zahn), who has the requisite number of screws loose. Zahn, the best thing in the movie, gets most of the funny business. The running gag is that in every hair’s-breadth escape he loses his hat. Pitt’s romantic interest, if you can call it that, is supplied by Penélope Cruz as Eva Rojas, an agent with the World Health Organization. Rojas has discovered what appears to be a plague that is originating from war-torn Mali. That also happens to be where a gold coin from the Confederacy has turned up.
   Thrown together with Dirk and his loopy crew (including Rainn Wilson as the geeky biologist Rudi), Eva finds the inner strength to pop off rounds from an automatic weapon when the plot calls for it. Otherwise, she merely looks terrific in close-fitting khaki. Clinches with Dirk are few, owing to the requirements of the genre. A truly lone wolf mustn’t be tied down while there’s a treasure to find.
   What you expect from an action adventure in the desert is what you get — Tuareg tribal warlords, a corrupt Mali dictator, a suave French entrepreneur (Yves Massarde), and a massive, health-damaging nuclear waste dump in the middle of nowhere that threatens to destroy civilization.
   The plague plot doesn’t make a lot of sense. But with so much noise and busyness, who’s keeping track? It’s a device to get Eva into the thick of things with the boys.
   The forte of this movie is its quick pacing and nonstop, violent action, all in the nick of time. It’s literally a cliffhanger (or wallhanger). How many times have you seen the hero dangling by his fingertips from a ledge or a rail, just as he’s about to be thrown down? Eisner borrows liberally from the cliches: a bit of 007 here, a smidgen of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid there, and a whole lot of Temple of Doom. McConaughey has the muscle, but not the weight, to carry it off convincingly. He’s Indiana Lite. And there’s more chemistry in the blood tests Eva keeps running on the sick Tuaregs than there is between her and Pitt.
   As in most movies set in the North African desert, Morocco stands for just about anywhere. It’s one of the few countries in the region that welcomes Western film companies and is relatively safe (except for the water supply). There are plenty of wide-open spaces to stage spectacular explosions and mass cavalry charges. If you’re environmentally sensitive to eco-damage, forget it. Aside from sparsely vegetated oases, there’s not a twig or desert rat in sight.
   We’re in early spring yet, but this movie is a harbinger of mindless summer blockbusters to come. Just jump in and let the thing pull you along, enjoying the sights and sounds and ignoring the sense.
Rated PG-13 for action violence.