See Your Last Breath.
U.S. Marshal Carrie Stetko tracks a killer in Antarctica, as the sun is about to set for six months.
Genre(s): Action, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller
Runtime: 101 minutes
Rating: 5.8/10 (687 votes)
Release Date: 9 September 2009
Country: USA, Canada
Languages: English
Company: Warner Bros. Pictures
Sound: Dolby Digital
MPAA: Rated R for violence, grisly images, brief strong language and some nudity.
Director(s): Dominic Sena
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Producer(s):
Don Carmody - executive producer
Susan Downey - producer
David Gambino - producer
Steve Richards - executive producer
Greg Rucka - executive producer
Joel Silver - producer
Writer(s):
Jon Hoeber - (screenplay) &
Erich Hoeber - (screenplay) and
Chad Hayes - (screenplay) &
Carey Hayes - (screenplay) (as Carey W. Hayes)
Greg Rucka - (graphic novel)
Cast:
Kate Beckinsale - Carrie Stetko
Gabriel Macht - Robert Pryce
Tom Skerritt - Dr. John Fury
Columbus Short - Delfy
Alex O'Loughlin - Russell Haden
Shawn Doyle - Sam Murphy
Joel S. Keller - Jack (as Joel Keller)
Jesse Todd - Rubin
Arthur Holden - McGuire
Erin Hickock - Rhonda
Music: John Frizzell
Don Carmody - executive producer
Susan Downey - producer
David Gambino - producer
Steve Richards - executive producer
Greg Rucka - executive producer
Joel Silver - producer
Writer(s):
Jon Hoeber - (screenplay) &
Erich Hoeber - (screenplay) and
Chad Hayes - (screenplay) &
Carey Hayes - (screenplay) (as Carey W. Hayes)
Greg Rucka - (graphic novel)
Cast:
Kate Beckinsale - Carrie Stetko
Gabriel Macht - Robert Pryce
Tom Skerritt - Dr. John Fury
Columbus Short - Delfy
Alex O'Loughlin - Russell Haden
Shawn Doyle - Sam Murphy
Joel S. Keller - Jack (as Joel Keller)
Jesse Todd - Rubin
Arthur Holden - McGuire
Erin Hickock - Rhonda
Music: John Frizzell
September 11th, 2009
Whiteout is a basic crime movie which has been done countless times. Alone officer, or in this case a US Marshall, has to solve a mysterythat may involve those closest to him or her. The difference is thatthis time the setting is one of the most dangerous places in the worldand not a major American city. Unfortunately, it isn't enough to makeWhiteout special.
Carrie Stetko (Kate Beckinsale) is a US Marshall suffering from thefatal shooting of her partner which she caused. Running to Antarcticato hide from herself and the shock of his death, she has spent twoyears in the cold and darkness dealing with drunken scientists. Herlife is a series of mindless patrols and reports which, beyond thesingle station, mean little to anyone. Thankfully, she has been able tobefriend Dr. John Furry (Tom Skerritt) who is another refugee from thereal world.
On her last night in Antarctica a body is discovered. Investigating thedeath, Carrie discovers that three US scientists discovered a crashedSoviet transport that carried within it a secret that someone iswilling to kill over. UN investigation officer Robert Pryce (GabrielMacht) believes that it is weapon material that could be sold toterrorists. Carrie isn't sure if she can trust him but realizes thatshe needs his help not only to solve the case but to stay alive.
What happens next is a series of clichés that are common in mostmystery movies. Carrie discovers who the murders are and what thesecret of the transport actually was. She then learns that the man sheleast expected (of course) was the one responsible for the crimes andthe deaths around her. Instead of leading to a climax that stands out,Whiteout ends on a less than interesting note which makes one wonderwhy he or she stayed so long to watch it. The idea of using Antarcticaas a scene for such a crime is interesting but it can't carry the wholemovie. Director Dominic Sena appears to believe that his use of sceneryand man vs. nature conflict would do just that.
Why did Kate Beckinsale do this movie? It is easy to see why thiswasn't a summer release simply because it really isn't that special.Not the worse movie this year, but a disappointment.
5/10
September 11th, 2009
I just took my wife out on the town to celebrate our 33 weddinganniversary.
We had a very nice dinner and then decided to go out for a movie. Therewas a weak line up of movies. After what we thought was the bestdecision, we chose the newly released White Out. Boy do I wish therehad been a "Black Out" in the city.
A very weak plot, terrible writing, as well as poor acting.
Looks like I won't get lucky tonight and may end up losing my bride.She says she had rather stayed home and watched Larry King.
Guys….there is a lesson learned here…Go see a chick flick even ifit hurts!
September 11th, 2009
As a huge fan of the original graphic novel by Greg Rucka and SteveLieber, I've been looking forward to this movie for a while.
I accept that changes invariably get made from source material to thebig screen. However, I think they changed this a bit too much. Thetitle may be the same but there is definitely a different feel to theplot.
Ultimately, it is a passable if uneven flick to kill a couple hourswith. If you are a fan of the comic novel though, I think you'll findyourself a bit disappointed.
For me, I decided to judge the movie on its own merits instead ofmaking the comparison between the two.
September 12th, 2009
Whiteout begins with a clever setup and even more interesting location.The bottom of the world. However, after the arresting opening aboard aRussian transport plane in 1957, the story reveals itself to be arather clichéd exercise in futility. A lot happens in the story, but,it's all artificial, uninteresting or unbelievable. A masked villaincomes out of hiding from the frozen environs. Kate Becinsdale's Carriesuffers an injury just to provide clues during the finale. The bigfight at the end is muddled and boring. I couldn't tell what washappening. Plus, the no-name supporting cast dosen't help either. Not afailure, but really not worth the efforts of the villains nor of thecasual viewer.
September 12th, 2009
"SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE" intones the opening caption, indicating that theaction takes place somewhere on the lower half of the planet Earth.Seconds in, and already I have the gnawing feeling that I am not aboutto meet a slickly-engineered, taut piece of storytelling like thissummer's "District 9" or "Moon". "Whiteout" puts the standard "policeprocedural" plot in an interesting setting, but basic narrativefailings, stiff dialogue, and inconsistent visuals rob it of itsimpact.
The structural failures seem to be the result of a poor translationfrom serial fiction. The action bumbles between locations with littleor no time to establish any atmosphere, as though checking off eventsin a longer, more patient narrative. On one occasion, a villain ischased to one place only so the heroes can chase him back. On another,characters become trapped underground for a not-exactly-nail-biting tenminutes of screen time, long enough to realise what happened in themovie's pre-title sequence and flash back to it, before escaping. Itgoes without saying that this flashback is utterly unnecessary, giventhat we've seen the events in question about half an hour ago. Themovie is littered with such re-runs, exposition speeches and dreamsequences, reminding or summarising events which remain fresh in thememory. Although surely necessary when the plot was provided in weeklyor monthly instalments, they were seemingly translated across to filmwith little regard for the absurdity of the result.
The acting throughout is competent, but the cast have little to workwith. Dialogue is functional, existing to further the plot andproviding essentially no characterisation, much less characterdevelopment, for anyone but the lead. Her backstory is dealt withthrough an increasingly repetitive sequence of CSI-ish flashbacks thatmercifully end around the half-way mark and which predictably explainthe heroine's icy response to her partner. This iciness ends abruptlyabout a scene later.
Visually, the movie alternates between the glorious and the irritating.As befits a graphic novel adaptation, there are manywonderfully-composed shots – including several establishing shots whichstumble out mid-flow simply to look good – but we move across orbetween them with no care or grace, and action degenerates into asub-Transformers shaky-cam mess. There's much to like here, but Iexpect it comes straight from the comic.
My last word is for the setting. Apparently as a tie-in, my localcinema is screening Carpenter's "The Thing", a movie which derivedgreat tension from the inhospitable isolation of the location. For muchof its run-time, "Whiteout" depicts Antarctica as a close-knit networkof outposts within a comfortable flight of each other. The danger islargely informed, that is, literally spelled out to us on screen, butrarely comes across in the action. A "boot camp" scene appears in thefirst act to spell out the behavioural effects of hypothermia, but theworst any character experiences is a plot-essential case of frostbite,and the entire exercise is undermined by the gratuitous and luxuriousshower scene which played out a few hundred hards away five minutesprevious. Isolation does kick in during the final act, but only longenough for a farcical action scene. No tension is derived from it.
"Whiteout" is a mess. The whodunnit plot is bolted, crudely, to asetting which is largely irrelevant, and is simply not told well. Thereare a few moments of visual splendour, but not enough to elevate themovie from the mediocre.
September 12th, 2009
Antartica, the coldest place on the planet. Freezing all the time,don't even mention about winter. In this case, this can be murder, andnot just the weather temperatures. "Whiteout" can just leave you in ablanket of snow if you don't follow through. Kate Beckinsale plays aU.S. Marshall following up a report of a murder in Anartica after aRussian plane crashed 5 decades earlier. At first it shows about thethe men having a good time on the plane, enjoying their vodka, whensuddenly, all hell breaks loose and no one on the plane lives.Following the crash, more people discover what was carried on the planeand each one decides to go to extremes the keep it. What was it? Seemseveryone involved in that mission gets offed by someone. Even thedoctor(Tom Skerritt) was one of the few who got more than he wanted.However, Carrie(Beckinsale) seemed to thought she has lost her edgefollowing one inside job she was involved with. But losing her fingersto frostbite didn't deterred her either. Seems like the movie was morefocused on Beckinsale than the plot, that doesn't bother me one bit.Anyone who enjoys Kate Beckinsale should see this on video. It was toogood for the big screen in my opinion. 2.5 out of 5 stars!
September 12th, 2009
The trailer to the Kate Beckinsale murder-mystery "Whiteout" makes itlook like a remake of the classic horror thriller "The Thing FromAnother World." Something crashes in the ice near a scientific researchlaboratory in Antarctica. A body that apparently fell from the sky isfound on the frozen tundra, and a desperate murderer with an ice axgoes on the rampage. The only person standing between this maniac andhis next casualty is a female U.S. Marshal who wants to resign and gohome now that her stint is almost up. She has a past that is cloudedwith drama. The story synopsis also appropriates the "30 Days of Night"gimmick. The outpost is about to be plunged into six months of wintryoblivion while our heroes battle the killer. Moreover, a tumultuousstorm forces the scientists to evacuate the base. In other words, thefilmmakers do an exemplary job of establishing the inhospitable settingwhich they inform during the opening credits is "the most isolatedlandmass on Earth." They put the heroine and her help between an icyrock and a hard place for the climactic showdown.
Unfortunately, "Whiteout" emerges as neither "The Thing" nor "30 Daysof Night." This thoroughly humdrum homicidal hokum lacks a sense ofurgency. The gratuitous Beckinsale shower sequence near the beginningas she flaunts her tidy whites should titillate males. No body doublesthere. Nothing else in "Swordfish" director Dominic Sena's frostbittenyarn, however, will titillate anybody. Sophomore scenarists Jon & ErichHoeber along with "House of Wax" (2005) remake scribes Chad & CareyHayes serve up nothing but formula from start to finish. Furthermore,they've altered the 2001 graphic novel by Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber.Chiefly, they have eliminated the second heroine, a British secretservice agent and replaced her with a bland United Nations investigatorwho may be the killer. A shortage of suspense, the expository-riddledbut convoluted storytelling, and lackluster villains sabotage thisshoddy saga. You might even call "Whiteout" a variation on the SeanConnery in space move "Outland" (1981) where he played a federalmarshal. The plot grinds to a halt too many times. As fetching andcredible as Kate Beckinsale was in the "Underworld" thrillers in herskin-tight leather suits, she looks all wrong for this comic bookscreen adaptation in parka and goggles.
The movie opens with a prologue set in 1957. A Soviet cargoplane—clearly a CGI replica–whips into view, like the evil spacecruiser in "Star Wars," in the first shot. The restless co-pilot wantsto kill the three guys in the bay who are guarding a locked safe with asecret cargo. The co-pilot botches the job, and a gunfight eruptsinside the fuselage. Everybody catches a slug in the shoot-out, and thecargo plane crashes in the in the Antarctica. Fifty years pass and theplane still hasn't been found. Meanwhile, U.S. Marshal Carrie Stetko(Kate Beckinsale) is serving out the last couple of days in hertwo-year shift. She holed up at the outpost because of trust issues.Sena intersperses flashbacks of her partner turning rogue on her afterthey arrest a drug smuggler in Miami. He tries to kill her, but sheblasts him. Of course, this is to assure us that she can fire a gun.Now, she is the law at the South Pole. Mostly, Carrie walks a beat andsometimes even contends with a misdemeanor. The last couple of daysbefore everybody heads home, our heroine discovers the corpse of ageologist in the middle of nowhere in 65-below temperatures with halfof its head caved in and no trace of how it got where it did. VenerableDr. John Fury (Tom Skerritt of "M.A.S.H.") is the head physician andmeans something more to Carrie than Sena and his scribes ever shown.Again, it looks like a case of role & gender reversal from "Outland."Carrie crosses paths with a mysterious U.N. observer Robert Pryce(Gabriel Macht of "The Spirit") and a happy African-American pilotDelfy (Columbus Short of "Cadillac Records") flies them all over thestunning, snow-swept terrain. At one point, Carrie and Pryce try totrack down where the dead geologist had been working. Robert and Delfywatch as Carrie takes one too many steps and plunges into the snow andlands alongside a buried cargo plane. This familiar discovery plot hasbeen used in many films, such as the 1981 opus "Treasure of the YankeeZephyr." They investigate and find several shot-up stiffs. They locatea smashed metal safe and find empty but ominous looking canisters.Meantime, a madman is on the rampage killing people with an ice ax. Ofcourse, he is covered from head to foot in a parka, hood, and boots.The scriptwriters litter the action with obvious red herrings galore.The quartet of writers who wrote this forgettable thriller retread allthe usual clichés. The only suspense occurs in the exteriors whenpeople have to attach themselves to a life-line cable to keep frombeing blown away or lost in the Antarctic blizzards. At one point, ourheroine eludes the murderer, but she winds up sacrificing two fingersfrom frostbite.
Beckinsale gives it her best and she really looks smashing in herundies. Tom Skerritt of "M.A.S.H. plays the kindly base doctor whowould not harm a fly. Macht is poorly used. The CGI work is horriblyobvious, but cinematographer Chris Soos does a skillful job of usingscenic Quebec and Manitoba masquerade as Antarctica. Somewhere in thispredictable whodunit lurked a better movie. Typically, the term'whiteout' is a synonym for poor visibility. "Whiteout" qualifies as awashout.
September 13th, 2009
When a body is found in the Antartica, Marshall Carrie Stetko about endher tour sets out to investigate, and uncovers a mystery involving acrashed Russian plane from the 1950's……
Whiteout is yet another movie based on a graphic novel. However, unlikemost this isn't a superhero movie. Instead it's a thriller with arather unusual setting.
The cast, led by Kate Beckinsale as Marshall Stetko are all good.Beckinsale here shows she is a convincing leading actress. Thedirection from Dominic Sena is pretty good. He stages some pretty goodaction sequences and as said, gets good performances from the cast.
However, despite all this good work, there is one major fault. Themystery is rather predictable. According to the credits, fourscreenwriters were involved in writing the script. I've not read thegraphic novel this was based on, but to need four screenwriters doessuggest the script needed a lot of work.
The scenes set in the storms are very well shot, although there is ahint of CGI involved in some of these scenes. I'm not sure how much CGIwas involved, but apart from a scene at the end, I have to say it neverbothered me.
As a thriller it's certainly not the worst I've ever seen. And having arather unusual setting makes it different. It's just a shame that it'aall rather routine.
September 14th, 2009
After reading some of these user comments, you'd think all the armchaircritics had a background in film-making. I try not to read user reviewsbefore I see a movie that looks appealing to me, only the actual moviecritics, because I know they tend to, well, criticize, for theirpaycheck. I go in without too many expectations and just hope the filmis entertaining enough to take my mind off everything around me. Ienjoyed the film, as the acting was good, even if the plot was a littlepredictable, and the action/scenery was enjoyable as well. It irks mewhen people compare one medium to another, as what you read andvisualize just cannot be captured in a film, which is someone else'svisualization. Frankly, the only part that really bothered me was whythey had Kate wear a wig during the frozen scenes?
September 14th, 2009
It's not that bad. It does have that TV movie feel with interior setsthat look like they've been borrowed from House. Kate's beauty is theonly thing she has going for her in this pic. I don't care howbeautiful you are, you're not going to look that good in the Arctic,excuse me, the Antarctic.
Why would pilots be allowed to act like stupid frat boys and what couldpossibly be the reason for grown,liquored-up men to want to run outsidenaked or fly planes? If they fell down, their member would immediatelyfreeze and break off, wouldn't it? I couldn't buy the killer followingCarrie to a remote site, trying to kill her, but letting her pilot live(when he had just murdered another man in the same hut. How did he getout without the pilot seeing/hearing him? Why wasn't the pilot killedwhile she was sleuthing? He lives to nurse her after she managed tokind of lock the killer outside. Then a UN investigator happens to showup alone to the same remote site.(How did he get there? Where's hisplane or his pilot?) Neither she or the pilot shoot/hit/kick first andask questions later? Where was the killer during all of this? Surely hehad to fly out of said remote site. Did no one hear an airplane fly by?When Carrie, the UN guy & the good pilot rappel down to an old planecontaining a treasure, where was the villain? Shouldn't someone havestayed above in case the rope broke, or the killer came back? Thenthere was the topper. The killer substitutes jelly beans for thetreasure. Here is what I learned from this movie- You can get asteaming hot shower in a glass shower stall in your private apartmentin the Antarctic; Your private apartment is warm enough that you canstrip down to your undies, and you get to wear upscale,stylish clothes& makeup if you're a female federal marshall (like Angie Dickinson;)Apparently, the substation is party central,the booze flows freely andtropical party theme supplies are readily available; They have a candystore (or possibly the Easter bunny?) down there (here's a clue, wholoves to eat & horde jelly beans?;) Who knew remote sites were suchbusy places, where people come and go without being noticed?; Who needsa transport plane when you can fly a Cessna during blinding snowstormswith hurricane-force winds just as well?; If you find yourself strandedfor another winter, electrical power, food and water will be no problembecause everything fits neatly in a windowed lab that resembles aresort and doesn't apparently breakdown; Once the villains have beenblown away by a hurricane, you will still make rounds in case theymanaged somehow to survive or mutate or bigfoot lives nearby, oranother treasure-laden plane is buried in the ice nearby (hence morevillains) or the Easter bunny is still around; Who needs a doctor? Oncehe's operated on your stab wounds, you and your friends can treatyourselves (he only knows how to sever limbs & stitch people upanyway;) And, if you commit a couple of murders, you'll be allowed tokill yourself, rather than be arrested and detained until Spring hasarrived.
I did like the soundtrack!