After a scan through a lab filled with computers, testing equipment, photos, and news clippings, we sort of meet the film's main characters: Dirk Pitt (Matthew McConaughey) and his lifelong sidekick Al (Steve Zahn). We then meet W.H.O. doctors Eva Rojas (Penelope Cruz) and Frank Hopper (Glynn Turman) as they uncover a mysterious contagious disease in a rundown section of Nigeria. Rojas suspects something wrong and when she's jumped by bad guys, our man Dirk shows up out of nowhere to rescue her as she passes out.

	"Sahara" Entertainment Art Directed by Breck Eisner Written by Thomas Dean Donnelly. Joshua Oppenheimer. John C. Richards and James V. Hart Starring Penelope Cruz, Matthew McConaughey and Steve Zahn

After a museum banquet at which we meet the inevitable charming but seedy French businessman Yves Massarde (Lambert Wilson), the action moves to Mali, where Eve and Frank suspect they'll find the source of the disease, and where Dirk, Al, and Rudi hope to find their Holy Grail — the American Civil War battleship Texas, reported as having crossed the Atlantic and disappeared 150 years ago. Once in Mali we meet the Big Baddy — dictator Kazim (Lennie James). The plot involves not only the long lost ship, but a solar power plant in the middle of the desert, its toxic waste, an ancient underground river, and a country divided between Kazim's city-dwellers and the rebellious desert-dwelling Tuareg.

Sahara feels at times like an Indiana Jones tale, but Matthew McConaughey has a more relaxed charm than Harrison Ford, and easily convinces us of Dirk's Naval training. Just when you think Dirk is the stud and Al is the dummy (he gets a lot of funny one-liners), McConaughey and Zahn display terrific partnership in escaping all manner of outrageous situations. My favorite: handcuffed to the siderails of a pickup truck, they get free using only a gold coin. And even though Cruz has her hair up and wears glasses in the early scenes, she exhibits an outdoorsy sexiness as the film progresses. She also climbs down a well to check the water supply, only to get stuck there during an attack by Kazim and his forces, emerging just in time to save Dirk's butt.

Mostly though, director Breck Eisner shows enough beautiful landscape shots — as well as real human poverty and misery shots — to give the film unexpected depth. The action is never detoured for lame love scenes and while Macy appears just enough to provide comic relief, his character is also essential to the plot. The bad guys are ruthless enough to keep it interesting, even though they make a couple of obviously stupid choices.

If you're a fan of the Indiana Jones series or the two recent Mummy movies or National Treasure from last Christmas, you'll dig Sahara, but it's better than any of those. Cruz is a more convincing and truly heroic woman, McConaughey's an easy-going, but tough-nosed heroic stud, and Zahn makes a terrific comic but heroic sidekick. Let the summer begin!

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