Whiteout: A Perfect storm of predictability

By Vanessa Ho

Whiteout, a mystery-thriller based on the graphic novel by Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber, starts off in 1957 with a gun fight involving Russians in the air over who knows what and ends with the plan crashing in the icy tundra of Antarctica.

Then it switches to the present day and we see U.S. Marshal Carrie Stetko (Kate Beckinsale) finishing her rounds of a U.S. Station in Antarctica. The basic premise of the film is that Stetko is three days away from her tour of duty in the frozen tundra and is about to return to the States just before 6 months of Winter darkness descends and a whiteout that would pretty much keep the people at the station trapped inside for the entire winter. She as she is preparing to leave, a body is discovered out of the middle of now where and she goes to investigate but has a tight time frame or else she would be trapped with a killer on the loose. Of course her investigation does tie into the beginnings fo the film. Helping with her investigation is a UN operative (Gabriel Macht).

Now I am not sure if the graphic novel was predictable but the movie sure was. I pretty much figured out who did it early on and knew that this person wasn't working alone. If you remember what Yoda said in The Phantom Menace: "Two there are: A master and an apprentice."

And this second person was also easy to predict. It was almost like a Murder, She Wrote. Pick the least likely person to be the killer and that person will be the killer.

Beckinsale was fine but Macht was pretty terrible as Robert Pryce, who was supposedly to have some sexual chemistry with Beckinsale's Carrie Stetko but nothing really came of that. Aside from the lack of chemistry with Beckinsale, his other problem was his line delivery was very flat and also he acts so suspicious all the time that you are supposed to think that he is the killer when you know that the most suspicious person in any mystery usually never does it.

The film used Manitoba as a stand-in for Antarctica and one of the things that director Dominic Sena did well was capture the coldness of the place. I have felt the cold of the Prairies and -40 celcius temperatures so I could relate to what the characters were feeling.

As a thriller, the film really does fail. I wasn't scared at all. The only thing that scared me was when Beckinsale's character got frostbite and had to have some fingers amputated.

In the end, Whiteout had more chills (temperature-wise) than thrills.