The snow-drenched action thriller "Whiteout" was originally titled "Walking Supply," after the 25-minute, 2016 Canadian short it's based on. (When the title card flashes on-screen, you actually see a millisecond of the original title before it immediately changes to the new title.) But I'm assuming distributor Saban Films demanded a title change since they're apparently marketing the movie as a tense outdoor actioner, and the original title kinda reveals how extreme this tale of survival really gets. (They could've found something better than "Whiteout" since that's also the title of a 2009 snow-drenched action thriller starring Kate Beckinsale.)
For the first hour, you do get something resembling an action thriller. The stretched-out—and stretched-thin—story follows Henry (co-writer James McDougall), an electrical engineer who gets kidnapped, along with his fellow office co-workers, by Russian thugs (the movie is supposedly set in Russia, but you know every ice-capped mountain you see is Canuck as hell) and sent to work in a labor camp.
Henry soon gets recruited by a couple of English-speaking prisoners (Joel LaBelle and co-writer Douglas Nyback), looking for men to help them with an escape plan. But once they do escape, they still have to deal with the frozen wilderness, looking for train tracks that'll hopefully lead them back to civilization. While those prisoners are former soldiers who are trained to rough it, our bald, meek, schlubby hero Henry is figuratively and literally dead weight, getting on the soldiers' last nerves with his lack of survival skills. The only survival know-how Henry gets is from Victor (Ian Matthews), a Russian escapee who tags along and practically becomes his defense instructor/life coach, teaching him how to trap food, hold a gun, and properly get out of hyperthermia. (It mostly involves a lot of running and shooting.)
"Whiteout" will have you thinking you're getting a generic man vs. nature tale. And, for much of the 91-minute running time, you do. Along with McDougall and Nyback, stuntman-turned-director Derek Barnes makes a hard-bitten — and frostbitten — debut feature where wandering, bastardy men have to begrudgingly learn to trust each other if they want to brave the elements.
And then we get to the inevitable macabre twist, which takes "Whiteout" from snowy action-adventure to squirm-inducing horror show. I had a feeling the story would go down this road, especially once the characters started looking all paranoid at each other and a small axe got pulled out more often. But even if you see it coming, Barnes and company still drop that monkey wrench in a jarring, gory fashion.
Unfortunately, the twist is the only surprising thing about "Whiteout," which is just an hour-and-a-half of a guy getting bullied, bruised, abused and physically/psychologically scarred before he decides to man up and suddenly become a wounded warrior in the climax. As Henry, McDougall is pathetic, sad-eyed and, of course, utterly sympathetic. For all his bumbling actions (he even cracks a lame joke about wanting to go back to the gulag), his doughy, pitiable demeanor makes it so that rooting for him to fail is not an option.
It helps that he's surrounded by characters who are written simply as sadistic, loathsome alpha-thugs, from the goons who initially kidnap him to the soldiers he's forced to follow. (Even at their most snarling, the actors never rise above douchey shiftiness.) They're even joined during their trek by another escapee who they all know as the guy who tried to sexually assault Henry back at camp. And if that scene isn't cringe-inducing for ya, there's a scene where Victor encourages Henry to punch his attempted rapist — just so bygones can be bygones, and they can swig a bottle of vodka together.
An outdoor odyssey that feels like it's fueled by Prime energy drinks and daddy issues, "Whiteout" is grim, grisly, DIY dudebro-horror for guys who thought that Liam Neeson vs. wolves nailbiter "The Grey" wasn't savage enough. It tortures its protagonist (and the audience) in its quest to present a low-rent, low-down survival chiller where the only thing that truly makes it out alive is twisted, toxic masculinity. The world is so cold, indeed.
