The film's main characters are treasure hunters Dirk Pitt (Matthew McConaughey) and Al Giordino (Steve Zahn), a couple of wild and crazy guys who have known each other from kindergarten and pretty much spent every waking moment of their lives together - school, the military, and now their "adult" jobs, working for an archeological society. Dirk's pet project is discovering the location of a lost Civil War iron boat that he believes to have made it across the Atlantic to Africa. When he discovers a clue to its possible whereabouts, he's off in pursuit. Tagging along is Eva Rojas, a doctor for the World Heath Organization, who is looking for the source of a new plague. Her destination - somewhere in the Sahara - is roughly the same as the guys', so they team up. The bad guys, for the record, are a wealthy industrialist (Lambert Wilson) and an inhumane dictator (Lennie James). They're covering things up, and when our intrepid heroes get too close to the truth, things get dangerous.

Sahara takes the action/adventure story to new heights of preposterousness. In a way, that's not a bad thing, since it allows a certain level of guilty enjoyment