Whiteout

THIS DISTINCTLY average thriller, based on some comic or other, begins in the 1950s with a Soviet plane crashing spectacularly in the Antarctic wasteland.

Much, much later, Officer Kate Beckinsale – after briefly, needlessly removing her clothes to satisfy dumber viewers who didn’t pay to see the Beckster in an anorak – sets out to solve an apparent murder on a nearby base. She peers curiously at blood samples. It snows. She growls at a hunky guy in a jumper. It snows. She visits a strangely deserted Russian station. Hey, it’s snowing there too.

As events proceed according to established procedural procedure, you find your thoughts frequently returning to those suspicious metal canisters on that downed plane. If there aren’t killer lizard-things or alien hippo-people in there, then a large part of the audience is going to feel very cheated.

Well, it's only fair to reveal that Whiteouthas no supernatural or sci-fi elements to it whatsoever. Indeed, climaxing with a fight in a snowstorm that is almost impossible to follow, the film has nothing, bar its unusual setting, to distinguish it from an episode of a very ordinary crime show.

It's Taggart on Ice. It's CSI: South Pole. It's Antarctica, She Wrote. It is, in other words, not worth leaving the house to see.