SANCTUM (Alister Grierson). 103 minutes. Opens Friday (February 4). For movie times, theatres, and trailers see Movies. Rating: NN
Sanctum combines two of executive producer James Cameron’s current interests – underwater exploration and 3-D photography – for an intermittently entertaining adventure about trapped cave divers trying to find their way back to the surface. As a test run for low-light 3-D digital cinema, it’s a little wobbly. As a movie, it’s considerably more so.
John Garvin and Andrew Wight appear to have built their screenplay from a beat sheet left over from The Abyss, with a disaster plot forcing an estranged couple to confront their feelings for one another.
This time, it’s a father-son dynamic: the world’s greatest caver (Richard Roxburgh) and his resentful son (Rhys Wakefield) have to work stuff out while trapped “2 vertical kilometres” underground in a massive cave system near Papua New Guinea (actually a bunch of soundstages and digitally augmented environments in Australia).
Also along for the ride are their money guy (Ioan Gruffudd, doing an American accent even worse than the one he uses in the Fantastic Four movies), his girlfriend (Alice Parkinson) and a diminishing handful of sidekicks.
Director Alister Grierson keeps the action moving at a decent clip and offers up a couple of impressive set pieces early on – including an underwater drowning that’s horrible in its simplicity – but can’t quite sell the declarative dialogue and roughneck character details that come so easily to Cameron. (About halfway through Sanctum, I found myself wondering whether Cameron made this movie to demonstrate that he is, in fact, a pretty decent screenwriter.)
The IMAX 3-D presentation doesn’t help matters much. Sanctum was shot in digital 3-D, but the spatial effects are disorienting in daylight sequences – where foregrounded objects refuse to come into focus, giving live-action scenes the feel of bad CGI – and fairly pointless once the action descends underground.
It also doesn’t help that our expectations for this sort of movie have been altered in the wake of The Descent and The Cave, which offer rather toothier subterranean threats than claustrophobia and the possibility of drowning. The Abyss might have worked without the aliens, but Sanctum isn’t The Abyss.
normw@nowtoronto.com
