MANILA - My first thought when I heard about the action-thriller "Whiteout" was whether actress Kate Beckinsale had decided to star in a movie about office supplies.

After watching a special advanced screening of the Warner Brothers picture, directed by Dominic Sena of "Swordfish" fame, I was extremely disappointed to learn that I could have spent my money on Whiteout (the office supply) instead.

As many thriller-action-drama movies have done, this film starts with a dramatic gunfight that ends in a plane crash. The shootout is between some Russian pilots and Russian passengers, presumably during the Cold War.

To get the audience interested, one of the pilots is seen repeatedly glancing at a chained metal box in the cargo hold. What is inside it?

After all the Russians die in the gunfight and the plane crashes in snow, the film zooms forward into the life of United States Marshal Carrie Stetko (Kate Beckinsale), who is bored out of her skull 2 years into her job as a patrol officer at a US research center in Antarctica.

The continent is defined in a subtitle as "the coldest most isolated part of the planet." I give points to the actors and production team for bearing the cold temperatures of Manitoba, Canada where the film was shot.

Sexy

To get the audience interested, Stetko strips down into her underwear and runs a nice hot shower barely 3 minutes after the title credits.The "male gaze" plays this out perfectly.

Yearning for sun and having recently resigned from her post, Stetko says her goodbyes to old friends like Dr. John Fury (Tom Skerritt), the center's kindly old doctor, and is all set to leave in 2 days before the long winter.

However, before she leaves, her team finds the dead body of a geologist - badly battered and sporting sinister injuries - in the middle of the snow and far off from their camp. What was the body doing out there and why did he die?

The first key mysteries would have been enough to keep the audience hooked, but the film fell apart shortly after.

Mainly, there were too many loose ends in the plot and ineptly-introduced plot points that made a circus out of a dull thriller.

Here are some goofs.

1. Carrie Stetko, why is your brown snow suit so thin and flimsy? Perhaps it is to keep the semblance of her womanly figure amid the more reasonably clothed extras. Or perhaps it is the hot showers she takes to keep warm in subzero temperatures.

2. The rogue slasher. Moments after she gets called to the eerily abandoned Vostok Base in Russia, Stetko gets attacked by a man in a black snowsuit wielding a pick-axe. This character shows up in random locations, as long as he is in close proximity to a geologist.

As the film "I Know What You Did Last Summer" proved, you can only go so far with a mystery character wielding a deadly weapon.

3. The United Nations guy. The audience is introduced to Robert Pryce (Gabriel Macht), an ex-military UN officer who is sent to follow the case of the murdered geologists. He arrives at the Vostok base completely out of the blue, prompting questions on whether he dropped out of the clouds and into the snow.

The introduction of a character in the oddest of circumstances widens the field of suspects and heightens the risk that Stetko cannot trust those around her.

However, Pryce is neither suspicious nor menacing. He is bland, blonde, likes to open his shirt and stare deep into Stetko's eyes as he speaks, and might as well have been shrubbery for his wooden acting.

4. Carrie Stetko's lame back story. Her flashbacks show up in increments, so you really won't know until the latter part of the movie why she escaped to Antarctica. Is it worth finding out? Let's see.

As a cop in Miami, Stetko and her cop partner bust a criminal they've been tracking for a while, bring him to a hotel room, handcuff him to a bedpost, and... take naps. If this speaks bad cop skills to you, there's more.

Stetko wakes up, sees the criminal is gone, and her first response is to... go to the bathroom to wash her face. At this point, the criminal grabs her hair and smashes her face against the mirror in front of her.

After fending him off, she finds out that her partner had been paid off to let the criminal loose and kill her. She shoots him and the partner falls off the hotel's balcony (a few feet away from where he was previously standing inside the room too).

The disillusionment, high crime rate in Miami and trauma of the incident propels to her to go to Antarctica. Poor Stetko, with her bedroom eyes and washboard abs, she could have gone to Canada. In the end, this speaks of a failure to clinch the audience's sympathy.

5. What would finger amputations accomplish? Except to gross out the audience somewhat (there were "ughs" and "ohhhhs" when the finger amputation scene came), it is odd why Stetko had to lose two fingers.

The amputation scene happens while Stetko and Dr. Fury are having an inane conversation about trees and dogs (the call of home). Was it to add to her already shallow bucket of pain? Again, no sympathy here.

6. The dizzying tussle in the snow (read: fight scene). The sequence epitomizes the meaning of "Whiteout", defined early on as thick snowstorms characterized by zero visibility.

This thick snowstorm is the scene of one of the movie's many dull fight scenes. While the near-blindness of the characters could add to the suspense of where the bad guy will attack from, it was dizzying and messy, such that my seatmate had to ask me how many people were involved in the fight because it was hard to keep track of who's who.

7. Oh... he's the bad guy? The kindly old doctor may be named "Fury" but he is not at all furious, making him one of the worst bad guys ever.

Even when Stetko finds out that he was behind the geologist murders and that he has been hiding diamonds (the precious Russian cargo) inside dead bodies, his excuse is something to this effect: "I've spent all my life in Antarctica and have nothing to show for it, so the diamonds pay back what they took away from me, like a compensation for all my lost opportunities - having a family, developing my medical talent, etc."

It wasn't established that he was greedy (apart from stealing Stetko's pack of instant noodles) and he wasn't disgruntled at any other part of the film. Since he is the least likely suspect for the crime, this is a twist, but an awkward one.

8. Finally, what was the deal with that Russian plane? At this point, you may be wondering about the plane crash at the beginning. We know that the gunfight was a tussle over diamonds. But what caused the Russian pilots to kill those in the cargo hold? Who were the Russians in the cargo hold? That's a 50-year-old historical mystery kept hanging.

There is a happy ending, though. Stetko solves the case, and decides to stay in Antarctica because she found out that police work isn't so bad after all.

However, her pretty face looking at the first shot of sun and the dancing Aurora Borealis is not enough to compensate for 96 minutes of shoddy execution. Report by Kristine Servando, abs-cbnNEWS.com/Newsbreak. Photos taken from www.whiteoutmovie.warnerbros.com.