Twenty-five years after making his first cinematic appearance in the box office bomb Raise the Titanic, Dirk Pitt, hero of many a Clive Cussler novel, returned with this loud, derivative and frankly rather dull action movie.
Think Indiana Bond and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what the producers were aiming for here. We go from Bond style boat chase, complete with Bondian score, to a desert action sequence that gives us a glimpse of what Indiana Jones might have been like if it had a talentless hack like Breck Eisner at the helm. I like Matthew McConaughey, in the right part he can be quite effective, but one thing he isn’t is an action hero. He’s not helped by a script that feels like it was put together by committee, which, given the number of writers who worked on it, is probably close to the truth.
It’s not just McConaughey who underperforms; Penélope Cruz looks like she’s just there to get a tan while Steve Zahn does the comedy-sidekick-by-numbers. William H. Macy has his eye on a potential cash cow with the ending setting him up as a Mr Waverly type in what could have been The Man from NUMA (that’s National Underwater and Marine Agency in case you were wondering).
Bad though this film is somehow director Breck Eisner has managed to get his name linked with two remakes that should have film fans blood running cold with terror – Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Crazies. It’s one think to allow him to mess with the works of Clive Cussler and his unintentionally amusingly monikered hero (I always hear the Scottish guy from Dad’s Army in my head saying “t’was a deep dirk pitt”) but you don’t fuck with the classics.
Horror and Western film buff, Marvel comic geek, music lover and occasional gamer. 