Like its cousin the Hollywood musical, the Hollywood action movie manages a dialectical relationship between narrative and spectacle. Antitheses though they may be, they’re unthinkable without each other. Each plot turn produces as its inevitable outcome an awe-inspiring action sequence which, in turn, gives rise to more plot ingenuity. Something is always happening, even if we are also always waiting. For, within the genre, neither action “numbers” nor narrative twists can be wholly satisfying in themselves—particularly if they are to successfully and continuously pass the baton of audience interest back and forth to one another. More often, however, a hackneyed plot stops on a dime to allow us to savor endlessly and pointlessly varying flavors of spectacle. Heinz’s 57 varieties pale in comparison—in quantity if not always in sophistication—to the smorgasbord of improbable, wonderful, amazing, and terrifying explosions, chases, earthquakes, and fights of personal, national, planetary, or cosmic import that Hollywood has on offer, particularly during the summer months. This year, summer has appeared improbably early with the April release of Sahara.

Sahara’s unfortunately named protagonist, Dirk Pitt (Matthew McConaughey), is Indiana Jones with an upgrade for the new millennium: beefier, manlier, showier, but simultaneously less intelligent, intellectual, or spiritual. The important question, though, is not precisely one of character. Is Matthew McConaughey’s Navy-trained, thrill-seeking underwater salvage specialist with a six-pack sexier than Harrison Ford’s reluctant archaeologist who teaches classes and wears bowties?

It’s not just McConaughey’s impressive build (has he always been that big?) that makes his Dirk Pitt more macho than mannered. His first onscreen moment is a rather uninspired fight sequence—beating up mysterious bad guys and rescuing the damsel in distress, W.H.O. doctor Eva Rojas (Penélope Cruz)—shot from her helpless point of view in a jerky, out-of-focus, hyperkinetic anxiety accompanied by her loud and labored breathing. In his first minute of screen time, Pitt shows up shirtless and sweaty, kicks some ass, and saves the girl. If I wasn’t exactly surprised, I also couldn’t help but nearly swoon, and almost sighed, “Our savior!” when McConaughey looks down into Eva’s eyes/the camera/at us.

Gender relations here misfire beautifully. Cruz plays her feisty epidemiologist deftly, and with a heavy dose of third-wave feminism to counter McConaughey’s smart but slightly regressive former Navy S.E.A.L. A maverick international aid doctor who calls a plague a plague and who goes fearlessly into African war-zones, she’s also not afraid to break out a truly fabulous black gown for a diplomatic reception. Or to wear entirely more makeup than I imagine is generally available in the middle of the Malian Sahara desert.

More interesting still, though, is how the movie’s narrative manages gender. Sahara’s plot is par for the Hollywood course in its standard coupling (or, perhaps, simple concatenation) of work and romance. In this particular admixture, the work life of the central couple takes obvious precedence, with the romantic tension and resolution feeling like an afterthought. However, unlike the classical formulation, both members of the central couple have work objectives. While Pitt is searching impossibly for a wrecked American Civil War ironclad steamship in the middle of the Sahara in a landlocked country in West Africa, Dr. Rojas is searching for a plague seemingly emerging from the depths of war-torn Mali. And furthermore, the two plotlines pass the impetus for further plot development back and forth, with the doctor’s (read: woman’s) plague research finally taking precedence over the sea explorer’s (read: man’s) desert escapades. Although the two finally do converge, and—of course—end happily, Eisner did the right thing, and gave more weight to the salvation of the earth’s sea life from mega-pollution (yes, originating in the Sahara Desert) than to the discovery of an old ship that’ll just get stuck in a museum somewhere.

In addition to the absurd masculinization of Dirk Pitt, Eisner’s other prime tendency is an almost pathologically hyperactive camera. The film opens with a complicated long-take dolly during the opening credits, and the first establishing shot is an elaborately orchestrated over water helicopter shot closing in on a W.H.O. jeep speeding along the waterfront of an African city. The camera simply doesn’t stop moving. I tried counting shots that didn’t have camera movement, but they were so far apart that I couldn’t remember the number from one to the next. Eisner uses camera movement of some type in nearly every establishing shot, in most of his shot-reverse-shot figures, and just about everywhere else he can possibly excuse them. It gives the film a slightly dizzying quality, but it also, I think, manages to keep the film moving along.

The mise-en-scène also provides some eye candy—of varying quality and political correctness. The opening sequences of the film supposedly take place in Lagos, Nigeria, and the shots of “African city” are bright, quick, and pretty. (And, ignorant American that I am, I couldn’t tell that the film was shot in Morocco.) As our adventurers—Pitt and Rojas and their sidekicks—Rojas’s W.H.O. partner Dr. Frank Hopper (Glynn Turman), Pitt’s childhood-friend turned loyal-sidekick Al Giordino (played by inimitable scene-stealer Steve Zahn), and the wonderfully dorky science officer and doctor played lovably by Rainn Wilson (who’s almost as good here as he was in Six Feet Under)—travel up the “Niger” River, we get expertly executed “African countryside” shots, from boat, helicopter, and truck. Eisner’s Disney roots are here embarrassingly visible in several shots of African children running through various urban landscapes.

These last shots betray a sentimentality and patronizing attitude inherent in the film’s setting. Rather than managing to invoke “Humanity” writ large over the machinations of individuals both good and bad, all they did was remind me that this is a Hollywood movie featuring the story of two Westerners setting out on an adventure in Africa—one out for profit, the other aiming to help mankind—who end up saving the world from the criminally negligent and evil French businessman Yves Massarde (Lambert Wilson), overthrowing the regime of the power-hungry and evil African dictator General Kazim (Lennie James), and funding oppressed terrorists… ahem… freedom fighters—the Tuareg—with Confederate gold. Oh, and incidentally, discovering and recovering a long lost Confederate civil war battleship in the middle of the fucking desert.

If you were paying attention to certain bits of the newspaper a few years ago when VW came out with its SUV called the Touareg—a slightly different transliteration of Tuareg—you would have noticed that American dealerships were pissed off at European headquarters for (whatever the connotations might have been on the Continent) labeling their newest luxury item with a word that is (a) unpronounceable for the average American and (b) the name of the tribe of some of the last slave owners on the planet. Yup, folks: the Tuareg in Niger—right next to Mali; different country, same tribe—still semi-legally own slaves. Turning them into heroes against a military dictator doesn’t in itself imply callousness; these situations are complicated, and often nobody’s really the good guy. But: Mali is a multiparty democracy, and has been for more than 10 years. Their oppression at the hands of a military dictatorship and their rebellion against it are not so much outright fabricated as the result of twisting historical facts beyond all possible recognition.

The first democratically elected president of Mali came to power in the same year the source material for the film was published, so Clive Cussler is more or less off the hook, even if he also wasn’t entirely scrupulous with the politics. But in a film that doesn’t slavishly reproduce the novel, this fast and loose treatment seems fantastically irresponsible—just to set a proper backdrop for Westerners (an American and a Spaniard) to have wondrous escapades that involve the Confederate gold dollar and high tech methods of vaporizing the world’s toxic waste. In a thoroughly ironic moment, evil dictator Kazim quips, “Nobody cares about Africa!”

Yet raising an objection like that against a movie like this seems so wrong-headed that, although I can’t avoid bringing it up, I also can’t really hold it against Eisner. Sahara may not be the most intelligent action film ever—it’s more likely engaged with Dianetics than dialectics—but its redeeming quality is a nearly flawless execution of classical Hollywood illogic. There is an honesty and a kind of honor in this. It’s the centripetal force that rends the film apart from any aesthetic unity or center it might have had. It is what the film demonstrates at every turn if looked at with the slightest critical eye. And it also speaks well of Eisner’s already-good prospects in Tinseltown.

In the end, I almost always enjoy movies with this kind of illogic. How could I not? Dirk Pitt sets out in search of an ironclad battleship in Africa motivated by some dark and incomprehensible obsession, and what we get is not a portrait of dark and incomprehensible obsession, but Dirk and Al sailing a wrecked airplane across the desert trying to save the girl and the world from a fastidiously dressed Frenchman.