Whiteout: Critic Reviews

Whiteout is a conventionally jam-packed, dutifully ludicrous action thriller.

Has a perfunctory, by-the-numbers approach to its story and its characters.

Despite Beckinsale's impeccable features appearing to be rendered in porcelain, her performance is far from lifeless...she does the best with the material. It's just a shame the same can't be said for the film-makers.

While the setting can be mesmerizing, little else about this movie is captivating. It's a standard-issue thriller, with a twist you see coming a continent away.

A ham-handed murder mystery.

Sadly, Whiteout wimps out, starting out like The Thing and winding up like CSI: South Pole, wasting whatever it has going for it.

The film is all panicky zooms and badly staged action dotted with random forensic gross-outs. And, just for the fun of it, an amputation scene.

...the whole cast delivers numb, almost affect-less performances; the cold must have got to them.

Even in a whiteout, you can see the plot twists coming.

The film's slick and expensive looking but dumber than a dead penguin.

It'll take all day to list all the things that are wrong with Whiteout.

The movie then becomes one of those murder mysteries where everyone is a suspect, and the murderer himself is the least likely candidate of all. Dispelling all logic, you should be able to figure out this whodunit in the opening minutes.

Should fade faster than a polar bear in a blizzard.

The severely nonthrilling thriller Whiteout moves like winter in Antarctica. Who the flake greenlit this blobby blur?

For all its frozen blood, assaults with ice axes and killer weather, Whiteout turns out to be only a pale imitation of the thriller it might have been.

By eliminating so many suspects before the obligatory drawing-room denouement and final deadly confrontation, it's a given that the audience will feel cheated when the real bad guy turns out to be the only possible contender.

What's missing from Whiteout is the pervasive sense of paranoia that you'd expect, or hope for, from a thriller set on the coldest and most isolated land mass on the planet.

Stupefying journey to the bottom of the earth.

It's Kate Beckinsale on Ice.

No event occurs without a character telling us what we're seeing. This unwelcome commentary is so overdone that it becomes, by the end, an invitation for audience participation. All together now: It's a body! Looks like it's been shot in the head!

Dominic Sena, whose credits include 1993's 'Kalifornia' (good) and 1996's 'Swordfish' (not so good), can't seem to find anything new under the perpetually obscured sun.

If you'd forgotten that this title ever existed, well, so have I.

South Pole-set whodunnit is bloody but bland.

Okay, it's far from the best murder mystery you've ever seen, but I still can't help but liking this throwaway thriller. The ending was no surprise. Paul Chambers, CNN.