Sahara (2005)

Is there a movie that you remember as being very good, but whenever you bring it up to others, they describe it almost as though it was a completely different film? For me, that movie is Sahara, a movie that I probably watched a dozen times at least as a younger man, and movie that I will go to my grave defending, even despite all of its troubles and legal issues.

Sahara is an adaptation of a Clive Cussler novel that stars Matthew McConaughey as literary hero Dirk Pitt. Cussler’s Dirk Pitt novel series isn’t quite as popular as, say, James Bond, but it wouldn’t be wrong to say that an adaptation of the series was something many were excited for. It follows Pitt as he attempts to track down an old Civil War ship that he’s convinced ended up in Africa some time after the war, but in doing so, he stumbles into a conspiracy involving an outbreak of deadly disease that a Malian warlord is desperately trying to keep covered up. He ends up dragging his buddy Al Giordino (played by a favorite of mine, Steve Zahn) into a bloody adventure to help WHO scientist Eva Rojas (played by Penelope Cruz) expose this disease’s existence to the world while General Zateb Kazim (Lennie James) attempts to have them silenced.

I’ll have to start by acknowledging the elephant in the room - Cussler hated this film. He even sued the production company, Crusader Entertainment LLC, for failing to consult him on the script, a legal move that would end up biting him in the behind when the judge found that he didn’t have final approval rights, and was instead an obstructive presence to the film company. This ended with a ruling with him paying the company for something to the tune of $13.9M in legal fees. By the end of the whole mess, and after an overturning, however, neither side was found a winner, and both walked away without a single claim in their favor.

To some, this means this movie is dead in the water, a failed adaptation that closed the coffin door on Dirk Pitt in cinema. While that’s certainly true to some extent, as Cussler would never again give away rights to his books for film, all the way up until his death in 2020. This was intended to be the start of a Dirk Pitt franchise, after all, but ended up grossing just over half of its own cost in production, and thus, goes down in history as a flop.

I, however, adore this film.

For starters, I love a good adventure, and Sahara is something like a mix between Mission: Impossible and Indiana Jones. The characters are all larger than life, intellectually capable badasses, and the quest is equal parts “save the world” and “find the treasure”. Dirk and Al are a hilarious duo, and it’s a crime in and of itself that McConaughey and Zahn didn’t get to continue playing this vitriolic pair of best buds. They both were in the military together, and both are extremely adept at combat and improvisation. In a interesting twist, while Pitt is the suave, adept leading man, Al is actually just as good at this sort of thing, and is most often armed to the teeth with guns upon guns upon guns. One of the best scenes of the movie involves them discarding their weapons, with Al having to unpack an obscene amount of rifles, pistols, and more.

In this scene alone, Al is the only one actually armed.

This dynamic is improved upon by the inclusion of Eva, who is whip-smart and headstrong, but is never looked down upon for it. She isn’t as able-bodied when it comes to the physical tolls of adventuring, but she’s an intelligent doctor who is trying her absolute best to save a group of people who are under foot. When it comes to ribbing, though, she can hang with the boys easily, and gets in some of the best quips of the film.

The entire plot is just shy of fantastical, riding that edge of realistic and ridiculous that is perfect in films like this. There’s numerous sequences that are worth the price of admission on their own, and the action is always tight, clever, and fun to watch. There’s a sequence later in the film that involves naval cannons and a helicopter that just needs to be seen, and every encounter has some stellar tension to make it all worthwhile.

I imagine where many found fault with the film is the greater plot elements, such as the attempts to find a Civil War-era ironclad vessel in the desert wastes of the Sahara, but it should be noted that some of the more out-there elements of the plot are straight out of the novel itself. In this way, one has to wonder if a Dirk Pitt series ever would have succeeded at all, which is a shame. Accepting such nonsensical things is part of the fun of adventure films. Ancient mechanisms that should have rotted away still work perfectly. Historical truths become historical gray areas. Technology that can’t possibly exist does regardless. It’s all in the spirit of the genre, a genre whose most famous scholar once unearthed an actually-supernatural Ark of the Covenant that would go on to kill an entire squad of Nazis.

To me, this movie goes down in history as a hidden gem, a fun, wild ride into the blowing sands of Africa that somehow manages to tell a tale of wonder and spirit without trampling on the abilities of native peoples. Much of the plot is only possible because of the Tuareg people, a native tribe of nomads who are at war with the Malian dictator, and who prove to be very capable at every turn.

However, maybe it’s fitting that such a movie be lost to the sands of time, only to be seen by those who truly look for it. It is, as I said, a hidden gem, and that’s something that Dirk Pitt himself would probably enjoy.