PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 04/07/05)

What's in a name? If it happens to be that of globe-trotting ocean-salvage maverick Dirk Pitt®, then name is everything. It's a one-two punch — Dirk! Pitt! — like the screaming word-bursts from an old episode of "Batman." D-I-R-K P-I-T-T spells "action," it spells adventure, and most of all, it spells the start of a major motion-picture franchise. Move over "we named the dog Indiana" Jones. Step aside Bond, James Bond. You're being replaced by a set of astro-white teeth and rock-hard abs with all the personality of a toolbox, but considerably more sex appeal.

A registered trademark of Clive Cussler, Dirk Pitt is the hero of a bestselling series of adventure novels just begging to be adapted to the big screen. From what I gather, Pitt is basically the Indiana Jones of the sea, a treasure hunter whose missions take him around the world underwater. The most successful of the Dirk Pitt books, Sahara serves a logical place to begin introducing the character to mass audiences, with just one problem: This particular adventure occurs almost entirely in the desert.

A wise Padewan once said, "I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere." Sahara, of course, is nothing but sand, and it's coarse and irritating all right. "Hell, every great thing that's ever happened to me happened in the water," Pitt quips, an intriguing line that suggests greenhorn director Breck Eisner picked the wrong Dirk Pitt outing to establish his hero.

There are a couple of marine connections in Sahara, but not enough to keep the movie afloat. For one, Pitt is fanatically hunting for a Civil War ironclad rumored to have shipwrecked deep in the heart of Africa. It's a terribly implausible premise. Even when the ship eventually resurfaces, that doesn't make locating it in Africa any less preposterous than searching for it in outer space. Beyond that, the other aquatic connection involves comely World Health Organization field agent Eva Rojas(®?), with whom Pitt uncovers a dangerous pollutant that threatens to devastate the world's water supply once it hits the ocean.

Rojas is played by Penélope Cruz, who's endearing enough, but still comes across coarse and irritating every time she attempts a role in English. The movie's saving grace arrives in the form of its comedic relief: Rainn Wilson (of the new American "The Office" series) plays a colleague clearly uncomfortable around gunfire, while Steve Zahn's hilarious wisecracking sidekick character achieves the closest thing to a personality in Sahara.

The noise, the sand, even the action-for-action's-sake sequences wouldn't seem so exhausting if we could only figure out who this Pitt guy's supposed to be. In lieu of a proper character introduction, this all-too-average movie gives us an elaborate three-minute tracking shot around his empty cabin, but the Bunsen burners, news clippings, and barnacle-encrusted ocean treasures only explain so much. In person, Pitt seems to get by entirely on dumb ideas and reckless luck. In the end, he's an action hero in name only.

—Peter Debruge