Sometimes, the kindest thing you can say about a movie is that it gave you a good excuse to eat an entire box of Whoppers.

I do enjoy those little chocolate-coated balls of malted crunch. Rarely do I pop in a couple or three at a time and munch away – instead, I’ve become expert at finding just the right spot on a single Whopper’s circumference to gently bite down like a nutcracker and split it into two perfect halves. Then I let the open surfaces dissolve on my tongue until the whole thing turns into a luscious, sugary mush and melts with the now-softened chocolate shell … ah, pure bliss.

Huh. The box is empty, and “Sahara” is still running. Rats.

You may be inferring that I cared more about my sugar fix than this movie. Let me assure you, that is entirely the case.

“Sahara” is the biggest wreck to come out of Hollywood in a long time. Despite taking place in some of the world’s most exotic locations, it’s visually weak and uninspired. The story is alternately so dull and then so preposterous, it’s laughable. Leading man Matthew McConaughey spends a lot of time flashing great teeth and biceps in a role with zero audience appeal, and his leading lady, Spanish actress Penelope Cruz, appears to be reciting her lines phonetically.

McConaughey and his “wisecracking sidekick,” Steve Zahn (yes, that’s what the movie synopsis on the Yahoo! Movies Web site terms his character), play Dirk Pitt and Al Giordino, former Navy SEALS turned treasure hunters for an independent agency headed by William H. Macy. Though their job is to find and collect ancient artifacts lost at sea and return them to museums in their countries of origin, Dirk’s hobby/obsession is tracking down a Civil War ironclad battleship that went missing after a battle in Virginia.

Cruz plays a gung-ho doctor with the World Health Organization, fighting the bureaucrats for permission to investigate a nasty plague she suspects originates in Mali. Dirk and Al cross paths with the doc as they follow clues to the battleship’s presumed resting place, buried under the sands of a dry riverbed in the Sahara Desert.

Utterly as expected, there’s a vicious warlord who knows good and well what the plague is and where it came from, a weaselly French industrialist, plenty of assassins, lots of gunplay, hand-to-hand combat, explosions, threats to the planet’s very existence, cannonballs and dynamite.

But in a shocking twist on the typical action movie, I actually found myself paying attention to the stunts, chases and fight sequences. Here, at least, there was something interesting going on. The rest of the scenes, or “plot and character development,” as they’re known in the movie biz, felt rushed, overlooked, unimportant in the grand scheme of “Sahara.”

The big difference between this overbudgeted, hamfisted flick and a fun little caper like last fall’s “National Treasure,” despite similar themes, is that the characters in “Sahara” offer nothing at all for viewers to care about. So Dirk wants to find this lost battleship. So what? He’s got nothing to lose. At least in “National Treasure,” Nicholas Cage had his family’s reputation and honor at stake. And Penelope Cruz does such a bad acting job that audiences don’t care whether she cures the plague or not. Only the irrepressible Steve Zahn gets any reaction at all, and only because we feel sorry that he keeps losing his hat.

“Sahara”

Rated PG-13 for action violence

Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Penelope Cruz, Steve Zahn, William H. Macy, Lambert Wilson, Lennie James

Directed by: Breck Eisner

Length: Two hours seven minutes

Now playing at: Astoria Gateway Cinemas, Cannes Cinema Center in Seaside

Short take: Hope you’ve bought plenty of candy – this movie’s gonna take a while. The action sequences are minimally attention-grabbing, but the story’s ridiculous and the characters never amount to more than words on a page.

Rating: Two stars (out of four)

Movie trivia: Novelist Clive Cussler is suing Paramount Pictures, alleging he never approved of the movie script as promised. What other Cussler novel was made into a movie the author was unhappy with?

Answer: Cussler was reportedly so dissatisfied with the 1980 movie version of “Raise the Titanic,” he vowed never to sell the movie rights to another one of his novels.