Military Movies - Military Times

Wintry mix

There are some early tip-offs that the new action thriller “Whiteout” is drawn from a graphic novel.

The first comes in the form of a location subtitle in the second scene that reads: “Antarctica — the coldest, most isolated land mass on the planet.”

Thanks for the deep intel. I would have figured Bermuda.

A more important tip-off comes with the introduction of the main character, U.S. Marshal Carrie Stetko, played by the beauteous Kate Beckinsale.

Guys who have swooned for Kate since her skintight black-leather adventures in the first two “Underworld” films may well go into this one bumming at the wasteful idea of casting her in a role that will have her buried in bulky parkas and ski pants.

Not to worry! In her first scene, Kate’s character comes in from the cold to her private quarters at a U.S. research base, languorously, deliberately strips off many, many layers of clothing, and luxuriates in a hot, steamy, wholly gratuitous shower.

Once that’s out of the way, the actual story can begin. The “summer season” — if you can call a season in which the temperature never climbs much above minus 55 degrees Celsius “summer” — is ending in less than three days.

So all base personnel are focused on packing up and heading home, leaving behind a skeleton crew to “winter over.” Then a call comes from one of the staff pilots on an overflight who says he saw what looked like a body lying on the ice in the middle of nowhere.

Stetko heads out to investigate and indeed finds a body — the remains of one-third of a three-man team of geologists working out of a smaller, more remote outpost.

When she gets the body back to base, the staff doctor (Tom Skerritt, looking ancient), points out wounds on the body that don’t add up — including a caved-in skull and a crude leg suture.

Accident? Suicide? Or murder?

So begins a claustrophobic little mystery that clearly will have something to do with a prologue in which a Soviet cargo plane carrying an unmarked, padlocked strong box crashed in 1957 and was consumed by the icy wastes.

Stetko races to piece together the puzzle before the last flight out. For added incentive, a vicious storm is blowing across the ice pack, coming directly at the base.

There’s nothing remarkable about the story, which succumbs to the Hollywood B-movie maxim that overall clarity and crispness decline as the number of credited scriptwriters rises (here, it’s four).

But if you don’t set your expectations too high, the time-tested lure of the whodunit exerts enough of a pull to maintain interest. And to be honest, Beckinsale does more than expected with a rather thin part.

Stetko is in Antarctica because it’s as far as she could get from her last posting, fighting the drug wars in Miami, where a horrific bust gone bad (shown in a series of jagged flashbacks that are probably the film’s most sharply drawn scenes) has left her with some hefty post-traumatic stress.

A climactic outdoor fight scene with multiple combatants — all tethered to rope lines to keep from being blasted into the howling, subzero void — is nicely staged, but the payoff to the mystery is mundane, and the film ends with a whimper, not a bang.

So: “Whiteout” is a serviceable but unexceptional thriller that is moderately absorbing while onscreen — and will slip right out of your head when it’s done.

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Rated R for language, violence and that shower scene. Got a rant or rave about the movies? E-mail Chuck Vinch.