Kate Beckinsale’s career has officially hit a pothole. Before the
boring Antarctica mystery Whiteout, she was in two
straight-to-DVD ventures: Nothing but the Truth and the
deplorable Fragments. Whiteout should’ve probably
suffered the same fate.
It’s not completely awful, but there is no real reason to see
it—except for a Kate Beckinsale shower scene that happens just
minutes after her U.S. Marshal character is introduced. After a plane
crash, director Dominic Sena gives us a long, useless and presumably
expensive tracking shot as Beckinsale’s character, Carrie, walks to her
living quarters. She then strips out of her parka and other clothes
until she’s in her underwear.
She walks to the shower and bends over to turn on the water,
sticking her butt into the camera lens. It really is quite glorious …
I think I might’ve cried. We then get a full body shot of her in the
shower from the outside, but the damn glass is steamed up. I hoped we
might actually get nudity, because this thing is R-rated, but no such
luck.
After the shower, the real movie starts, and one wishes she’d just
stayed in the stall. The messy plot involves some mysterious cargo on
the plane that crashed, a mangled body found on the ice, and somebody
running around and killing people with an ice ax. Beckinsale’s Carrie
is supposed to head back to the United States, but she finds out she
will be in Antarctica for the winter, what with people getting killed
and all.
Tom Skerritt shows up as a crusty doctor; the interesting Gabriel
Macht appears out of nowhere as some sort of international agent; and
Beckinsale remains in heavy clothing for the rest of the movie.
There are plenty of scenes with characters struggling in snow
storms, yet only one featuring Beckinsale in her panties just before
showering. I got to thinking: Was the shower scene written into the
original script, or did they decide to shoot it when they realized
their movie kind of sucked?
The film, based on a graphic novel, wants so much to be a mystery,
but since there are only a few true suspects, figuring out who the bad
guys (or girls) are is pretty easy.
What’s hard to figure out is why they didn’t just base this whole
film in the shower. Seriously: Ditch the whole Whiteout thing
with the snow and stuff; call the thing Kate’s Impossibly Brilliant
Ass; and never let the camera leave the shower. Skerritt can stay
in the movie as a towel boy. You can’t tell me a major release movie
called Kate’s Impossibly Brilliant Ass wouldn’t gross more than
$100 million.
Thanks to John Carpenter’s The Thing, which had a similar
setting, I kept expecting some sort of alien monster to enter the fray.
That vibe was further helped along by the presence of Skerritt, one of
the original stars of Alien. Yeah, a monster in the movie
probably would’ve made things more exciting.
In case you are thinking I’m some sort of freak with a one-track
mind because all I’ve basically done is talk about Kate in the shower,
go see Whiteout. I think once you’ve seen it, I will be
vindicated. The shower scene is, without a doubt, the only moment in
this movie that makes an impression.
This article appears in Sep 17-23, 2009.
