The funWife and I watched Sahara over the weekend. I enjoyed the breezy buddy action part, but it had a big problem. No, not the part where the helicopter had a limitless supply of ammo, but the the McGuffin in Hitchcockese. As Dirty Harry at the Liberty Film festival notes in a post about how Hollywood wouldn’t be able to make Jaws again:
I don’t think so because the straight-forwardness of the script would be lost in today’s agenda-driven Hollywood.I think a woman would be put on the boat. Probably in the Dreyfus role. Not because she would be better — who could possibly be better than Dreyfus? — but for politically correct reasons. And she’d of course be a liberal environmentalist feminist who would remind us ad nauseum sharks don’t normally do this. And finally we’d learn the shark attack is “our” fault. That man, specifically America – specifically corporate America – had committed some environmental crime that affected the shark’s natural habitat, and with no choice the shark came to Amity to feed. In other words, poetic justice liberal style.
So in Sahara we have Penelope Cruz as a WHO doctor who’s character could have been male and it would have changed nothing. And the McGuffan is toxic waste that not only is poisoning the groundwater in the desert(!), but is about to reach the ocean, react with salt water, and destroy all marine life worldwide. The bad guy is a businessman who is incinerating hazardous waste but when there’s a snag in the process carelessly stores the leaking drums in a cave. Miles and miles of concrete and steel, lavish spare no expense set up, high tech computer controled facility, but they store leaking toxic waste in a cave that apparently is just above an underground river. Why o why couldn’t they have just had an evil African dictator who was trying to cover up an actual plague as the bad guy – or even a bunch of long lost Confederates (as in American Civil War) who were running the show in Mali and trying to cover up a plague so that nobody would investigate and discover their secret existance? Because then it wouldn’t be about the evils of businessmen and pollution.
As Forrest Gump would say, stupid is as stupid does.
