Movie: Sahara

	Distributor:	Paramount Pictures
	Release:	April 8, 2005
	Genre:	Action/Adventure
	MPAA Rating:	PG-13 for action violence

This is an adventure/quest movie, reminiscent of ... well, all those adventure/quest movies you've seen - Indiana Jones, Jewel of the Nile/Romancing the Stone, The Mummy/Mummy Returns, National Treasure, to name the well known films of the genre.

McConaughey plays treasure hunter Dirk Pitt who has an obsession with finding a legendary battleship that disappeared near the end of the US Civil War. Zahn plays his partner, Al Giordino, but since McConaughey already has the rougish leading man part, Giordino ends up as the comic relief. Cruz plays Dr. Eva Rojas, the lady with the save our environment/world agenda.

The movie starts by introducing us to Dirk, then moves on to WHO doctors (Eva Rojas) worrying about a possible epidemic in West Africa. The doctors think the ground zero of the disease is in West Africa, Dirk gets a tip that his missing battleship might be in the same area, the doctors elbow their way into joining the Treasure Hunters, and the story picks up pace from there.

Dirk and Al have been best friends since childhood - that explains why Al puts up with Dirk's obsession with a battleship, even if it lands them in the middle of a desert. Both were in the Navy before becoming Treasure Hunters - which will explain why they know how to work guns and do some stunts when the latter part of the story calls for it.

I don't know much about the US Civil War, so I wouldn't know if the battleship mentioned here did exist. Neither am I knowledgeable of Africa's politics, geography and history. In other words, I enjoyed the movie without having to cringe about probable inaccuracies.

I think it's a given that the storyline of the missing battleship and it's treasure is more in the realm of make-believe. The "epidemic" storyline is what keeps this movie in the realm of the possible. We've heard of the Ebola virus, and for the first half of the movie, I thought the cause of the deaths was a virus similar to this ... and that added thrills to the movie of the "Outbreak" kind. The movie chose a less horrifying cause though - poison seeping into the water. That's where industrialist Massarde (Lambert Wilson) and his political backer, who happens to be the president of the country Dr. Rojas thinks is ground zero, come in. They're the bad guys here.

Our heroes get a little help from Dirk's boss and the CIA (?), and a lot of help from the "rebels" ... in fact they saved the day.

For all the fast action, the ending left me hanging though ... the bad guys corner our 3 heroes, then find themselves facing a larger army of rebels and so our heroes rejoice. All of a sudden I remembered I was watching a feel good movie, and the syllables "ho-hum" come out of my mouth. A better ending could have made this movie more memorable.