Sanctum Review: “Sanctum? It Nearly Killed ‘Em!”

“To Cave or Not to Cave?” That is the question Sanctum begs to ask in an often harrowing, but mostly sloppy, adventure-yarn milieu. Off in a small corner of Papua New Guinea, a new underwater cave system is discovered by the singularly named “Frank” (Richard Roxburgh). He and his team are set to dive into the inner-most reaches of the structure, where literally no man has ever gone before. They are bogged down by excess baggage in the form of Frank’s son Josh (Rhys Wakefield), who has no passion for exploration and has an incredibly large chip on his shoulder when it comes to his father, who spent most of his life caving than raising his child. So why is he even here? This fantastically relevant question goes more or less unanswered for the duration of the film.

Prior to the start of the expedition, billionaire playboy Carl (Ioan Gruffudd) arrives with girlfriend Victoria (Alice Parkinson) in tow.  Carl has funded the entire project right down to the remote underwater camera rover named “Virgil,” but don’t get too excited; this is not the second coming of The Abyss. Carl embodies all the manic peccadilloes of his moniker and is immediately classified as the oil to the science crew’s water. In one instance, where most normal people would carefully rappel down the mouth of the cave opening, he chooses to strap on a parachute and base jump. Clearly, he is a man who plays by his own rules. In case you didn’t pick up on that, here’s an actual line from the movie, RE: the base jump: “He likes to play by his own rules.”

Once everyone reaches base camp, the expedition gets off to a rocky, fatal start, but hard-nosed Frank chooses to press onward, much to the angsty chagrin of Josh. As the team gears up for Attempt #2, an epic storm swallows the tiny island and begins to flood the cave system almost immediately. The team tries for a futile escape, but are ultimately overwhelmed by the sheer power of the rushing waters and become trapped inside the caves. Their only hope of escape is to actually go deeper into the system to try and find an ancient vein that will lead them to the ocean and freedom. The problem here is not with the fairly riveting set pieces, which make something as simple as getting from Cave A to Cave B teeter with suspense, rendering it difficult not to become invested in the eventual outcome. The problem is all of the scenes orbiting the set pieces, which make up the human drama of the narrative. Here, the dysfunctional father/son relationship of Frank and Josh comes into the spotlight, making every predictable move right through to its eventual climax. Other character arcs and relationships are just as woefully cliché and overwrought. It’s not that it’s heavy-handed, it’s just all incredibly obvious, which in turn becomes dull.

To Richard Roxborough’s credit, his performance gives dimension to a character that lies flat on the page; the by-any-means-necessary scientist who knows nothing but that which he studies. Ioan Gruffudd also gives his character more heft than the material allows, but with less than stellar results. The film tells us at the very beginning that it is based on a true story, which is basically correct; screenwriter Andrew Wight’s day job is deep sea diving, and he once became trapped while caving with fourteen other people who all ended up finding their way out in a fashion similar to our fearless Sanctomites. Wight, however, should most certainly keep his day job. The script is water-logged with bad dialogue and ho-hum dramatic confrontations that escalate to such ridiculous heights that by the time the second act winds down, you’re wondering how any of this can be remotely true at all. Ioan Gruffudd’s character specifically has the most absurd final moments of any character in the film, and this more than anything else in the movie becomes the most suspect example of artistic license. Ultimately, the beats of Sanctum are way too “movie” to be anything else but, and the experience suffers since the filmmakers believe they can fool an audience into believing that such furious melodrama is capable of happening during such a survival crisis.

Shot with the Pace/Cameron Fusion 3D camera system, the picture’s 3D varies from “Epic Win” to “Epic Fail,” making it clear that the DP and his crew did not fully understand how to shoot in 3D, as well as the various post houses which handled the back-end fine tuning. Some shots look as subtle and immersive as Avatar, while others literally look like a bad Photoshop composite job.  At the end of the day, Sanctum is a mixed bag. The enduring fight to live while one is dangling above the maw of death is always a riveting tale to tell, but it is only as compelling as the richness and dimensionality of the characters in peril. In the case of Sanctum, neither of these traits is befitting of any of the characters, leaving the filmmakers with the hope that they can treat them as they do their instant food rations: Just Add Water.

Images courtesy of Rogue Pictures and IMDbPro