Talk about "Sahara" here:
Review by: Breanne Derby
Plot Summary
"Sahara" is a film about Dirk Pitt (Matthew McConaughey) and Al Giordino (Steve Zahn), two oceanographers and best friends who, while searching for a warship in
Africa, meet a doctor named Eva Rojas (Penelope Cruz). Eva has discovered a "plague" that is spreading throughout Africa, originating in Mali. The group travels to Mali, a dangerous country torn by civil war. They travel together, but are on separate missions; Dirk and Al to search for a warship from the American civil war, and Eva in search of the cause of her plague. As the group travels across the country they come to realize that the government doesn't want Eva to investigate too deeply into the cause of the sickness, and while trying to protect her, Dirk and Al discover that the plague may not be just a plague after all.
Review
For starters, very little of this movie actually takes place in the Sahara desert. There are maybe three or four scenes out of the entire thing that take place in Sahara. The enemy of the movie isn't the desert, and they're not trying to survive in the barren wasteland. The creators really could have and should have thought up a better title for this film. Throughout the entire first hour I found myself wondering how the characters were possibly going to end up in Sahara, and why the film was named after something that had virtually nothing to do with the rest of the plot, but end up in Sahara they eventually did, and so the movie was (somewhat) true to its name.
One thing I had a real problem with was the names of the characters. It is excruciatingly difficult to believe a story as far-fetched as this one (nuclear waste and "ghost ships") in the first place, and it's even worse when the main character's name sounds like a superhero alias and you're not watching a comic-book movie.
Unfortunately, Dirk Pitt was not the only cliche and phony thing in this film. The whole plot was bits and pieces of things we've seen over and over. The root of the problem is chemical waste, and the main "bad guy", General Zateb Kazim (Lennie James), is a dictator. The "science" of the film; how the toxic waste is spreading through the underground river system might be believable if there was an apparent reason that the plant even had toxic waste to begin with, and if they would have had a motive for burying it in the ground when they had a perfectly sanitary way of disposing of it (which also wouldn't work in the real world).
The concept of a corrupt governmental leader who is using the country for his own personal gain is also another one that has been beaten to death by Hollywood. Kazim is exactly the same kind of bad-guy as in many other films that have been made in the past. There is nothing original or exciting about the plot or the characters or the script or the acting. "Sahara" is essentially, a bore.
The only good thing about this film was Steve Zahn. He was supposed to be the sidekick to McConaughey's leading man, and it was his job to provide comedic relief. He did a fairly decent job in playing his part as the sidekick/funny guy, but he could have done so much more with a better script. He had a few good one-liners, but some of his antics that were intended to be funny, like his complete inability to hang on to his hat when things began to happen, ended up flopping when it came to producing actual laughter. Though Zahn really could have been the savior of this film, the script limited his abilities and therefore, potential humor was extinguished.
Another benefit to this film was the fact that the deleted scenes were deleted. The Kitty Mannock scene would have been too revealing and wouldn't have appeared to have any relevance to the film until the one scene when she was mentioned. That scene should have been cut also, it was ridiculous.
Conclusion
I've seen much better films than this one in the past but I will probably see much better and much worse films in the future. I was terribly disappointed at the lows to which Hollywood has sunk in moviemaking, as "Sahara" is an example of "rock-bottom". Some of the scenes in this film were just so ridiculous that I literally said "no way" out loud and my brain simply shut down in refusal to believe what was happening on the screen in front of me. The likeliness of these things happening was just so far out there, and it wasn't even a "well, that's just one scene, I can get over it" type of thing; the entire film was preposterous.
All in all, I did not enjoy this movie at all. It was successfully cheesy and cliche and unfunny all at once, which, before seeing this, I wasn't sure was possible. It had a good deal of potential in the beginning to be at least a bit better, but that was all destroyed when the toxic waste element of the film was introduced. The last half-hour was really abysmal, the worst of the entire film. Do yourself a favor and skip this flick, it's not worth seeing.
