The Quest for Confederate Gold

We’ve slowly slid into an era where Indiana JonesTapping into the classic serial adventures of the 1940s, this franchise has gone on to spawn five films, multiple video games, a TV series, and so many novels and books., and all its copycat stories, have lost their significance. Most recently we saw Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny flop hard at the Box Office, which did feel like an inevitability considering it was made on an absolutely astounding $352.3 Mil budget, meaning it would have had to make north of $1 Bil to break even (via Hollywood match). Spoiler: it didn’t even make $400 Mil. But before that we had a string of contenders that also failed to meet expectations.

The third Universal Mummy film, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, was a modest success that didn’t lead anywhere narratively and (for now anyway) helped kill the franchise (and Tom Cruise didn’t help matters). Lara Croft has struggled to make headway at the Box Office with her own tomb raiding adventures, with both the Angelina Jolie sequel and the Alicia Vikander-led reboot fizzling at the Box Office. And then, before all that, there was Saraha, a film that could have been a modest hit if just about everything on the film didn’t go wrong.

Sahara was the 2005 film that was supposed to be the first in a long series of adaptations of Clive Cussler’s very popular Dirk Pitt Adventures. Matthew McConaughey, Steve Zahn, and Penélope Cruz and, on paper, had everything going for it. It was an Indiana Jones style adventure back when those were still popular (three years later Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull would come out and make over $786 Mil during its run). It certainly seemed like there was no way that Sahara could ever fail. And then it did, making only $119.2 Mil against its absolutely bloated $160 Mil budget. What happened?

In short: mismanagement, at every level. For starters, the film was budgeted for $80 Mil, but that ballooned quickly. Stars were grossly overpaid for the kind of film being made. Sequences were shot and then never used (including a $2 Mil sequence that was thrown out entirely). Bribes were apparently paid all over the place, and lots of money was pocketed and never seen again. And all for a film that, when you watch it, probably could have been made for $50 Mil or so, easy, back in 2005. If the budget had been kept low, its theatrical run would have been a success. Instead it was so wildly expensive that all future plans for the franchise were scuttled and the author has never allowed anyone to adapt his books again.

Which is a real shame because, honestly, Sahara is a lot of fun. I’m not going to try and sell this as some kind of high-art masterpiece. Sahara is kind of brainless, fairly silly, and at times outright preposterous. But at the same time it does try to ground itself with its characters, it has easy chemistry among its actors, and it knows how to let loose and have a good time. It’s the kind of film you can put on, sit back, and enjoy because it’s just a casually fun adventure flick. It’s not trying to be anything more than that, despite its massive budget. It’s a fun film to watch every once in a while, and it’s one I go back to, time and again, just because it’s such a breezy, good time.

The film stars McConaughey as Dirk Pitt, a treasure hunter for the National Underwater and Marine Agency. His job is to find rare items in the sea and drag them out, restoring them back to the nations that lost them so history can be properly preserved. On one such dive off the coast of Mali, Pitt ends up stopping an attempted murder on the life of Eva Rojas (Cruz), a doctor working for WHO, working to study a strange outbreak in Nigeria. But while her work is interesting, Pitt is more inclined to follow a different lead: a gold coin that might just lead to a missing Confederate warship, the CSS Texas, that might just be loaded with gold.

After rescuing Eva, and making sure she’s safe, Pitt and his best friend, Al Giordino (Zahn), drop Eva off back in Mali before they head up the Niger River to try and find the missing Confederate ship. But forces don’t seem to want them to make any progress. Men with guns, sent by warlord Brigadier General Zateb Kazim (Lennie James) try to kill the men as they sail up the river. This leads Pitt and Giordino to head back to Mali to save Eva as they assume she’s in danger, too. And all of this, they have to guess, has something to do with the mysterious disease spreading across Africa… and maybe the Confederate ship as well.

In some ways Sahara is a bit messy. It has a lot of plotlines going on, not all of which properly connect. Kazim wants them dead because he knows what is causing the disease, and it’s all related to what Eva is digging up. But Pitt and Giordino are there simply because it’s their story and not because what they’re searching for actually has anything to do with the main plot of the movie. They want to find the Confederate ship but (spoilers) in reality everything dealing with the ship is a red herring. It’s the treasure they’re after, yes, but it isn’t actually related to the story.

In that way this film does fail to really connect with the Indiana Jones kind of adventure it’s trying to tell. A key part of these stories is that the magical McGuffin everyone is after has to actually be the key thrust of the story. But because the Confederate ship is only there to motivate our heroes to go into Africa and isn’t, actually, key to the story it means that, without the lure of the ship, our heroes would have no reason to be here. It’s not, in fact, their story even though they keep showing up in it. Put another way, if Kazim hadn’t sent his men to shoot up their boat (which they do after Dirk and Al dropped off Eva and not before) they’d have left the story and we’d never hear from them again. That’s not really a great way to engage your heroes in their adventure.

It feels like the story is trying to be smarter than it is. In reality all we need is these guys on an adventure for gold battling against a bad guy that wants the treasure for himself. That’s how all the other Indiana Jones clones work. Hero sees a treasure, thinks it belongs in a museum. Bad guys see the treasure, realizes it could bring them power. Their hubris is their downfall while the hero gets to put the treasure in the museum. Sahara is missing that connective tissue that actually brings it all together and it’s weaker for it.

With that said, it honestly doesn’t matter because, ninety percent of the time, you aren’t really caring about the story. What makes Sahara work is the easy, lived-in chemistry between McConaughey and Zahn. Their characters have this great friendship, and then two of them quip back and forth constantly, adding fun and lightness to the story. It’s a whip-cracking adventure (just without any whips) fueled by two stars having a grand old time hanging out and living life. It should be terrible, and it is pretty dumb, but it has fun with itself and that actually works well in its favor.

Also, the action isn’t bad. There are some good set pieces, like the big boat chase and a later set piece at a solar power plant, that work really well. The film moves along at a good clip, dropping its action in and keeping its pace lively. And then any time it has to slow down it lets the characters take center stage. It knows how to balance itself, letting Sahara be a fun and breezy time all the way through. Just don’t expect high cinema from it because it’s not that kind of film.

It’s understandable why this film failed at the Box Office. It cost too much, and then the studio didn’t want to put good money after bad so it barely invested in marketing, letting Sahara die in theaters. It’s a film that should have been made for much less so that it could have a chance to thrive. Instead it died at the Box Office, wallowing on video store shelves until people (like me) found it. But it is a bit of a hidden gem, a fun little movie to put on and enjoy. And in the grand pantheon of Indiana Jones clones you could do much worse than Sahara. Much worse indeed.