For a film that has a lot to do with freezing your bottom off in Antarctica, it sure doesn't take long for Whiteout star Kate Beckinsale to be stripped down to her knickers.
Just seconds into the English actress' character's (U.S. Marshall Carrie Stetko) first scene in the action-thriller, she enters her dorm at a male-dominated ice-field research station and proceeds to prepare for a steamy shower.
She ditches that pesky parka, and soon all we can see -- in closeup -- is her booty-shorted bottom and bare back.
It's a scene Underworld fanboys will love, and many more viewers will just shake their heads at because, well, it has absolutely no relevance to the film. Whatsoever.
Except that, maybe, if we were trapped on an Antarctic glacier, we'd want to take a hot shower too.
What Whiteout -- based on a 2001 graphic novel by Greg Rucka -- is about is the southern-most continent's first murder, which Beckinsale's hard-nosed cop Stetko is forced to solve during the area's brightest days of the year (before the dark winter sets in).
While battling a previous job trauma -- shown in flashbacks -- Stetko deals with the grisly popsicled remains of an American geologist who was dropped from a plane in the middle-of-nowhere base she shares with a research team studying meteorite fragments.
Joining her on the case is UN investigator Robert Pryce (The Spirit's Gabriel Macht) -- a dreamy, but unwanted partner she resents until they inevitably fall in lust.
Tom Skerritt (TV's Picket Fences) also lends his expertise as Dr. John Fury, Columbus Short (Stomp the Yard) plays brotherly Iraqi War vet Delfy and Aussie Alex O'Loughlin (TV's Moonlight) plays party-hearty pilot Russell Haden.
Even with a brainy support team and a shocking backstory, Stetko doesn't have a lot of depth. We can see further into the bodies (that's right, there's more than one) that she prods all CSI-like with Doc John's scalpel than we can into her soul.
And we're not sure if that's because Beckinsale is wrong for the role, or if the role is wrong for her. Or both.
Sadly, it seems like the stunning Underworld starlet -- who swaps her vampy leather cat-suit for a bobbed wig and snow-bunny sweaters -- was initially exposed in her undies because, let's face it: There's nothing sexy about frozen limbs and icicled eyebrows.
We can't speak for other Canadians, but where we're from (just two hours away from where some of Whiteout was shot, along frozen Lake Manitoba), gusting winds and dangerously dropping temperatures aren't entertaining; they're what we have to live in for half the year.
Whiteout conditions don't translate well to the action genre, either.
Unless you don't mind watching unidentifiable snow-suited folks grapple in -50C conditions with an also-unidentifiable icepick-wielding murderer as CG ice violently pelts down on them.
You almost wish they would knock off a few layers so you could at least make out who's who.
But we guess that's what they have the shower scene for. Right?
(This film is rated 14-A)
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