McConaugheMay Day 17: Sahara
New readers may not know, but longtime Ziah-heads may recall that when visiting my family, my dad has an active aversion to any movie that I want to watch, that my sister wants to watch, that my mom wants to watch, or any combination of the three, even if the movie in question is one that he has both already seen and definitely likes. Since I'm back home during McConaugheMay and I'd rather watch a movie with the family I'm visiting than stay up until 2 A.M. once they go to bed to watch a movie, I figured I'd offer Sahara as a middle-ground movie night. I had a memory of my dad showing it, my mom liking it well enough, and thought that might be enough.
Nope, didn't work, which meant I watched half the movie with my sister once they went to bed and then stayed up until 2 A.M. to finish the movie for my silly little challenge. What a life we lead.
Sahara is one of Matthew McConaughey’s surprisingly few straightforward action films in which he plays an Indiana Jones-esque figure named Dirk Pitt investigating various lost treasures and battling against evil terrorists. The treasure in question here is a lost Confederate boat filled with gold that was lost during the Civil War and might, for some reason, be lost in the Saharan desert. Along the way, McConaughey’s joined by his best friend and sidekick Al (Steve Zahn) and a sexy WHO doctor Eva (Penelope Cruz) as they battle against the evil machinations of a billionaire (Lambert Wilson) who’s secretly spreading a horrible epidemic as a result of his new factory.
I had somewhat pleasant memories of the film as a kid, but as an adult, it doesn’t quite fit. That said, it’s kind of fascinating in the ways that it's not good, though. Steve Zahn is genuinely incredible in this, so charming and likable that it almost becomes explicitly strange in the movie why McConaughey is the lead and what he brings to the movie at all besides a six pack and some charm. There's a bit where Zahn is literally disarming a quasi-nuke solo while McConaughey very poorly fights an Arabic stereotype armed with a knife—the conclusion of the latter doesn't matter at all compared to whether Zahn can literally disarm a bomb, and that approach to action scenes continues through the whole film. Feels a bit like watching an episode of Hong Kong Phooey or something at a certain point.
Great Dudes in this: Zahn, Delroy Lindo, William H. Macy, Glynn Turman, Rainn Wilson, Lambert Wilson... Some nice "hey, that guy" vibes, plus Penelope Cruz. She's not given anything to do, because why would a woman in a mid-2000s mainstream movie get anything to do, but she is still, to quote a classic nothing line, a welcome screen presence.
Kept expecting there to be some reason that Dirk’s Indiana Jones search was for some confederate army gold and not like... anything anyone would care about and it never came. Were these books just libertarian southern boy Indiana Jones fanfic? I don't know, not really interested in finding out. That said, am somewhat surprised McConaughey never tried to dig deeper into the action hero mines. He's not good here, but he doesn't need to be—he's extremely fit and handsome and smiles after someone dies, that's kinda all you needed.
Steve Zahn really should've had a bigger career, I'm just always happy to see that guy.