Seems it took four screenwriters -- Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber, Chad Hayes, and Carey Hayes -- to come up with a few offhand remarks about the extreme cold for the characters to utter, to write the onscreen captions that inform the viewer that Antarctica is like totally the coldest place on the planet, and then to almost completely ignore the dramatic location from then on. (The Hayeses wrote the awful The Reaping and the worst 2005 remake of House of Wax and yet they still get work. Amazing.) And director Dominic Sena (Swordfish, Gone in 60 Seconds: more warning signs) deserves some of the blame, too, for shooting the whole damn film as if it were taking place in and around an office building in North Dakota in February.

Lonely? Forget it. Amundson-Scott South Pole Station is positively bustling -- it’s like Grand Central fucking Station down there. Now, sure, there really are hundreds of scientists and support staff hanging around and working and goofing off all summer in the real place, but this is supposed to be a movie that wants to be all dramatic and stuff about Antarctica, so they could maybe at least pretend that hundreds of people cooped up in a couple big tin cans without the possibility of getting a pizza delivered presents a few problems.

But nope, it’s only Stetko (Kate Beckinsale: Nothing But the Truth, Click) who’s got issues. (Well, someone else has issues, too, but if I tell you who that is, it’ll give away who the killer is. Not that you won’t guess from the moment that character appears anyway.) Her issues compel her, apparently, to take hot steamy sexy showers. That’s how we’re introduced to her: she stands before Sena’s camera and strips down to nothing and takes a nice long relaxing shower. Just like all cops with issues do when we meet them on film. Maybe Sena and the screenwriters wanted us to know that life at the Pole does have its little luxuries, like indoor plumbing. Or that, you know, Stetko has A Past. She is Haunted. Like all movie cops. Something Bad happened in her old post chasing drug runners, and so now she is driven to take long relaxing sexy steamy showers and to say things like this: “Ever since I saw Weiss’s body, it been like 85 degrees and 90 percent humidity.” Miami... she’ll never be over Miami.

Weiss is a geologist who’s been murdered and his body dumped waaaay out on the ice. But it’s 72 hours till the last flight out before winter closes in and no one goes anywhere for six months -- unless that thar storm blowin’ in forces that timetable up, which would be awfully convenient for the movie should it start to show a ridiculous hand and need to dummy up some suspense. So Stetko’s on the clock: find the killer, or... well, we never quite get why it’s so vital to solve the crime immediately. It’s not like there isn’t an exactly precise roster of who’s on the base. There are no walk-ins here.

It’s all just part of the absurdities Whiteout appears to be enjoying tossing at us. The idea that this, the first murder in the international territory of Antarctica, is something of an embarrassment for the UN, is floated -- in the person of Robert Pryce (Gabriel Macht: The Spirit, Because I Said So) -- and then forgotten. Pryce is supposed to be some sort of special UN cop who arrives, actually, almost as a walk-in, though he might as well be wearing a T-shirt that reads “Red herring... or am I?” But by far the most hilarious aspect of the flick is that Stetko, unlike most haunted movie cops with issues, is right to have issues. As the film opens, she’s about to hand in her badge: she doesn’t trust herself anymore after what happened in Miami. She’s afraid she’s a lousy cop. And it turns out she’s right: she actually is a lousy cop.

Except when the script requires her to psychically interpret a crime scene that’s nothing but white ice and snow. That she can do just fine. But if she were that psychic, you’d think she would have known to stay far away from this movie in the first place.

(You can read the whole first issue of the comic series this is based on at the site of artist Steve Lieber; it was written by Greg Rucka. But don’t hold this movie against them.)