Over the weekend, I had the frustrating experience of seeing two movies based on books I’ve loved for years, both of which completely failed to capture what I find so appealing about those books. The first of these was Sahara, which, as the opening titles kindly point out to anyone who didn’t know, is “A Clive Cussler Dirk Pitt Adventure.”

If that means nothing to you, I’ll explain: Dirk Pitt is a character created by an author named Clive Cussler in a series of best-selling novels that read like a combination of Indiana Jones and James Bond, with a smidgeon of Jacques Cousteau thrown in for flavor. These novels don’t begin to qualify as good literature, but they are good reads — they’re fun, exciting page-turners that are perfect for lazy summer afternoons and long airplane rides. I first discovered them when I was in my early teens, and I’ve loved them ever since. I’m not at all ashamed to admit that Dirk Pitt was a hero of mine as I was growing up, and, like a lot of people who have favorite literary characters, I have a very definite image in my head of who and what he is.

That’s why I decided weeks ago that I wasn’t going to bother seeing Sahara. As I explained in an earlier entry, I had grave misgivings about the casting of the terminally bland Matthew McConaughey as Dirk, and I figured it would be best to spare myself (and my unfortunate friends and readers) the aggravation of seeing one of my heroes brought to life badly.
Fate, however, had other plans, and when my foursome couldn’t get into The Interpreter on Saturday night, I was outvoted on which film got to be our second choice. Anne braced herself for my inevitible post-movie tirade, while our friends Jack and Natalie both tried to convince me I should lay aside my preconceptions. None of them will believe this, but I honestly did try to judge the movie on its own merits and not compare it to the books I’ve known since puberty.

I will concede that if you’ve never read a Cussler book, then Sahara is a perfectly serviceable summertime action-adventure flick. There’s nothing particularly wrong with the film, at least not as far as action-adventure movies go, and there were some moments that raised a smile even from me.

The plot involves a pair of treasure-hunters — Dirk Pitt and his sidekick, Al — looking for a long-lost Confederate warship in the most unlikely of places, the Sahara desert. They cross paths with Eva Rojas, a doctor searching for the source of a mysterious African plague. Their mutual quests become intertwined and, in the end, the bad guys will be bested, secrets revealed, fantastical stunts performed, and a potential new movie franchise will be born. All fine and dandy. Except for that part about the movie being “a Clive Cussler Dirk Pitt Adventure.” Because that, my friends, it most definitely is not. As Anne put it afterwards, this is a movie in which the characters have the same names as people in a book I once read, but that’s about as far as it goes…

Interestingly, my primary complaint isn’t with McConaughey after all, although I still found him to be too laid-back and dimply-cute to be convincing as the rugged man’s-man Dirk. (I actually had a bigger problem with Steve Zahn as Al Giordino. In the books, Al is as competent and generally cool as Dirk himself, except when it comes to the ladies, but Zahn plays him as bumbling comic relief, a grubby redneck whose unfunny running gag is fretting about the loss of his favorite trucker cap. Arg.) No, the big problem for me was the film’s tone. The books may be intended for lightweight hammock reading, but they have a thread of darkness woven through them. There is some genuine brutality in any Cussler novel, and not all of it comes from the villains. Dirk Pitt himself can be a real son-of-a-bitch when the moment calls for it. But it’s not just the ruthless determination of the hero that defines a Cussler novel — it’s also the sense of wonder when historical treasures are brought back into the light, the near-reverence the regular cast members hold for the past. It’s the wildly unlikely stunts that Dirk and Al cook up to free themselves from a jam. It’s the harsh justice that ensures evil will be fittingly (if disturbingly) punished. And it’s the feeling of deep satisfaction in seeing how all the disparate threads of the plot fit together.

For me, a successful Dirk Pitt movie would have the same general feel as Raiders of the Lost Ark. (Not the later Indy films, which polished down some of the sharp edges in favor of comedy, but Raiders, which is a good deal grittier than many people remember.) As in Raiders, the stakes in a Dirk Pitt movie should be big, and the audience should really feel them looming over everything. You should wince in sympathy when the hero takes a punch. The jokes should be wry and understated, not laugh-out-loud slapstick or obvious punchlines. The hero should be, as Belloq notes of Indiana Jones, not all that different from the bad guys. And when the object of the hero’s quest is uncovered, it should be a moment of soaring awe, as when the sun hits the Headpiece to the Staff of Ra and shows Indy where the Well of the Souls is located.

Sahara the Movie gets none of this right. Instead, the film establishes itself as a forgettable trifle right from the opening credits when, instead of a hero’s march, the soundtrack gives us Dr. John’s “Right Place, Wrong Time,” a funky, early-70s, whacka-chicka song that suggests the film to follow is the cinematic equivalent of a beach party. In fact, the music is probably the best metaphor for what’s wrong with this movie — there’s nothing about it that distinguishes a Dirk Pitt movie from any other adventure film. The major sequences are scored by the same uninspired classic-rock selections that we’ve heard in a thousand other movies. “Magic Carpet Ride,” for example, throbs over the scene in which Dirk and Al transform a wrecked airplane into wind-driven “land yacht,” a painfully obvious choice, and I’d be perfectly happy to never hear “Sweet Home Alabama” in another film ever again. When we do get some instrumental scoring, it’s loaded down with brassy hits that are reminiscent of James Bond music. There should’ve been a distinct theme for Dirk, at least. (To be fair, there isn’t a lot of memorable movie music being composed these days, much to my dismay.)

The major action set-pieces I remember from the novel are here, but they feel curiously small, and when Dirk finally discovers his lost ship, he doesn’t seem all that wowed by it. (Neither is the audience, for that matter.) The family-friendly PG rating ensures that the plague never seems all that horrible, and I never bought that it was a genuine threat to the whole world, as the characters kept telling us it was. Instead of larger-than-life heroes who have a string of amazing discoveries under their belts, Dirk and Al feel like beer-drinking buddies who sometimes go out on the weekends with a metal detector. It’s as if the cast and crew were underplaying everything or something. There just isn’t any charisma on display here, not in the performances, not in the stunts, not in the music, not in the plot. Everything proceeds from point A to point B to point C right on schedule, but there’s no inertia to carry us along, none of the breathless urgency of the novels.

The problem isn’t that this movie totally sucks, because it doesn’t. The problem for me is that it isn’t a Dirk Pitt adventure. Not to someone who really knows Dirk Pitt.

Hey, I said I tried to judge the movie on its own merits; I didn’t say I succeeded.