Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Penélope Cruz, Steve Zahn

5 out of 10 stars

If you ever wanted a lesson in anti-charisma, look no further than the solidly made but otherwise rather bland Sahara, starring two of the most high-profile blank spaces in acting, Matthew McConaughey and Penelope Cruz. Both blessed with magazine cover-ready good looks (Men's Fitness and In Style, respectively) and lean, tan bodies, it takes more than a jump start to get any energy from these two actors. They can smile, smirk, and look appropriately shocked or saddened as any given scene calls for, but when it comes to connecting with other actors (not to mention audiences), both of these familiar faces fall flat.

McConaughey, ever since his high-profile turn in A Time to Kill (where he was upstaged by both a sweaty Ashley Judd and his own khaki-fitted butt), has struggled to achieve true leading man status. Jostling around in various action films, he's achieved only relative success opposite Kate Hudson in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, where he played a straight (literally and figuratively) version of Rock Hudson from all those Doris Day comedies. And poor Cruz, despite some loving attention from Pedro Almodovar, can't muster up any goodwill or acting talent when appearing in English language films; her tabloid antics with Tom Cruise have proved to be far more engaging than any of her recent performances. In fact, both of these stars are more welcome – and appear more comfortable – in the pages of Us Weekly than they do playing explorer Dirk Pitt and World Health Organization doctor Eva Rojas in this adaptation of Clive Cussler's bestselling airport read.

Which is not to say that Sahara is entirely awful. Going into this blockbuster wanna-be, I was hoping to be able to skewer the directing talents of Breck Eisner, a man who has to live down not only being named after shampoo but being the son of Disney bigwig Michael Eisner. I'm somewhat pleased to report that, in his feature film debut, Eisner is not a horribly incompetent director -- his work is rather solid, his action scenes well-orchestrated, and his work with actors light and breezy without being negligent. Rather than going for a bang-`em-up, cuss-`em-out style like Michael Bay, Eisner backpedals on the action violence and turns up the adventure aspects, making his movie less about the thrills and crashes and more about the chase and rescue; the explosions and fights are fun, but actually do exist in the service of some kind of plot. And when it works, Sahara plays like an amiable cross between James Bond and Indiana Jones, tech-friendly but winkingly fun, not too serious about itself but very serious when it comes to putting its cast in peril and staging cliffhangers galore. In taking care of all this business, though, Eisner pretty much misses the opportunity to build a story or a pace or any momentum – in many ways, this Sahara is as flat as its namesake, and just as parched for any creative nourishment.

The lack of energy in Sahara, though, may be attributable to the obvious wrangling it took to get a 576-page book (in paperback, no less) transferred into a two-hour movie. No less than four screenwriters (working in three teams, if WGA attribution is to be believed) took a crack at translating explorer-adventurer-all-around-good-guy Dirk Pitt from page to screen, and the wear and tear does show a bit in the short-hand characters and easy archetypes; in addition to Hunky Adventurer McConaughey and Hot Doctor Cruz, there's Comic Sidekick (Steve Zahn), Hissing French Villain (Lambert Wilson, forever doomed to play French baddies), Crusty Yet Benign Financier (William H. Macy), Nerdy Scientist (Rainn Wilson), and the most enduring of them all, Evil Masked --- or in this case, Turbaned -- Villain (sorry, didn't catch his name – the turban, you know!).

Fortunately, there's little backstory to sit through. As the movie opens, the strapping Pitt manages to rescue comely Dr. Eva from two nasty thugs as well as a gold sarcophagus from the bottom of the ocean. Anchored in Western Africa, Dirk's about to decamp for Australian adventures when he comes upon a gold coin – not any gold coin, but one of only five ever commissioned by Jefferson Davis for the Confederacy. Four were given to Davis' generals, the fifth to a family friend who disappeared along with a Civil War ironclad ship. There were rumors that the ship somehow it made it to Africa, a tall tale Pitt's been chasing all his life. With the coin turning up in close desert proximity, could it be Pitt has finally found this ghost ship?

At the point where you'd think you'd set out on a rollicking adventure, somebody pulls a "not so fast there!" maneuver and instead Pitt and his trusty sidekick Al (Zahn) are thrown into an international conspiracy involving a plague, chemical waste, the aforementioned nasty French industrialist, and two warring countries. It's a credit to Eisner that he manages to make the left turn from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to Beyond Borders somewhat credible and intriguing, but ultimately, it's a move from which Sahara never recovers, as you're left with the standardly earnest, condescending Western vision of Africa (scary but with nice small children) and a need to foil a nefarious world-destroying plot that's only a couple notches above Austin Powers. You keep hoping for Pitt and company to stumble across clues to the ironclad's whereabouts – and the finally do – but the chemical poisoning story and the cool warship in the desert story never really dovetail up until the very end. And by that time, you've forgotten exactly why there are gunfights and helicopter chases and explosions all over the place, and the first look you get at the warship doesn't conjure up "Oh cool, it's the boat!" but rather, "Oh yeah, there's the boat…"

Sahara's journey, while ultimately wearying, is enlivened a bit by Zahn, who's always capable of fleshing out a one-dimensional comic bit into at least two dimensions, and here he's the best audience fallback you could hope for; Macy, criminally unused, runs a close second. Eisner must have realized that, for Zahn's given just as much play as McConaughey (who's appropriately windblown but not much more) and much more than Cruz, whose doctor character appears to have attended the Hot Babe University that also beget Daryl Hannah's astronomer in Roxanne. McConaughey and Cruz's lack of onscreen chemistry is so nonexistent that I can't even remember if the two of them ever kissed, even in the beach-blanket epilogue. When you're not even sure if your two hot stars have hooked up or not, you know your attention span for a movie has been seriously compromised.