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Underwater Drama That Will Give You the Bends
Review of Sanctum
Alice Parkinson and Ioan Gruffudd in Sanctum
From executive producer James Cameron, no stranger to large budget waterlogged drama, comes Sanctum, a 109-minute panic attack disguised as an action adventure that will have all but the hardest core adrenaline junkies wanting out, long before the picture reaches the end of its journey into the heart of claustrophobia. Oh, and of course it’s in 3-D to add an extra element of submerged vertigo and simply because they can.
Directed by Alister Grierson (I’ve never heard of him either), and starring a competent cast of unknowns, it is clear that every penny of “Sanctum’s $30-million budget was spent on special effects, waterproof equipment and enough rigging to raise the Titanic. Too bad James Cameron couldn’t have set aside a few bucks for a decent script. Instead we’re treated to textbook adventure characters, albeit with fancy Australian accents, including Frank (Richard Roxburgh) a hard-nosed father and career cave explorer, Josh (Rhys Wakefield), Frank’s misunderstood teenage son, Crazy George (Dan Wyllie), Frank’s wisecracking sidekick, Karl (Ioann Grufudd), the expedition’s creepy millionaire financier and Liz and Victoria, the requisite damsels in distress (Alison Parkinson and Nicole Downs, I forget which was which). Together, trapped beneath the earth, the team delivers comic book quality dialogue and foreshadows action so telegraphed a flock of cave bats could see it coming.
What passes for Sanctum’s plot concerns a team of cave explorers with too much curiosity and funding for their own good, which enables them to pursue a treacherous, high-priced expedition through the largest and least accessible cave system known to people who know about this sort of thing. But when communications break down (hmm, maybe throwing away the cell phone wasn’t such a great idea) and a tropical cyclone forces the spelunkers even deeper into unexplored caverns, they must fight raging waters, deadly terrain and occasionally each other as they search for an as-yet unknown escape route.
Clearly, a huge effort went into filming this allegedly semi-true tale of Uh-Oh, and credit is also due to the actors’ endurance for what had to be grueling, finger-puckering conditions. There’s even an admirable literary influence when Frank recites Samuel Coleridge’s heroic opium-induced poem Kubla Kan as his personal mantra. But alas, all but the most extreme endeavor enthusiasts will find a pleasure dome in Sanctum.