Steyn on Sahara

Steyn on Sahara April 20, 2005

I still haven’t seen Sahara — the wife took my brother-in-law to the preview while I was on the Kingdom of Heaven junket — but I have to say, after reading Mark Steyn’s negative review, I want to see it more than I did before. Here’s his opening paragraph:

Until James Bond came along in the Sixties, the most successful movie series to date had been the Road pictures with Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour. Sahara seems to be an ill-advised attempt to merge the two into one almighty eternal franchise. It eventually winds up with our hero and the gal running around the villain’s remote high-tech lair trying to figure out how to switch the ticking thing off before it blows sky-high. But before that there’s a lot of scenes in the desert with two buddies riding around on camels bantering. The guys are bantering, that is, not the camels, though the alleged sparkling repartee wouldn’t have been any less sparkling if they’d given it to the dromedaries. Penelope Cruz takes the Dorothy Lamour role, and Matthew McConaughey and Steve Zahn are Bing and Bob, and that’s where it all starts to go awry.

Well, what can I say. As one who grew up watching Bob Hope & Dorothy Lamour films (but not the Road movies, curiously; I was more into films like Caught in the Draft and My Favorite Brunette), any movie that can make a critic make this kind of analogy has to be worth seeing at least once!


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