VIVE LE MERV!!!!

::Whew...:: The madness on the MxO has blown past, and I *won't* be pulling the plug on watching the events unfold. Thanks goes out to everyone who's reassured me that the old dragon ain't going anywhere.

"Mark my words, boy, mark zem well: I 'ave survived your predecessors and I will survive *you*."

--The Merovingian, "The Matrix: Reloaded"

Movie Review: "Sahara"

***1/2 out of *****

There's some films that just exist to be fun, just something you can kick back and watch and get a good laugh and some good excitement out of, and this is one of them. The plot is intricate, though not well-developed in a literary way: Think Indiana Jones meets James Bond (Even the film score sounded like something that belonged with a James Bond flick, only not quite as sophisticated sounding). Two guys (Matthew McConaughy, Steve Zahn) from a ship salvaging company follow the path of a lost Confederate ironclad ship that appears to have ended up in a dried-up river bed in the desert in Mali, their path intersecting with that of a female doctor (Penelope Cruz) with the World Health Organization, who is tracing the source of a mysterious plague, which a French billionaire industrialist (Lambert Wilson) seems to know more about than he's letting on...

Now, it's not a great film, and I can see why Clive Cussler, author of the novel it's based on, is more than a bit mad about its treatment: the script is weak but not horrible. It works, and that's what counts. Personally, I think Matthew McConaughy (sp?) is a mediocre actor who really didn't do justice to the part of Dirk Pitt, but hey, it ain't Shakespeare. Steve Zahn, who plays his buddy, was a lot more fun to watch and for that reason, practically steals the movie.

( Cue the drooling... )