Review: 3-D 'Sanctum' visuals help embarrassing script

(CNN) -- John Lennon wondered how many holes it would take to fill the Albert Hall, and now we know: If it's the Esa'ala in the South Pacific, then one will certainly do the job.

In the film "Sanctum," this is "the mother of all caves," an unexplored abyss in the Earth's crust and the site of an ambitious spelunking expedition led by master caver and all-round hard-ass Frank McGuire (Richard Roxburgh) and bankrolled by businessman-adventurer Carl Hurley (Ioan Gruffudd).

A sudden storm cuts the team off from the surface -- the tunnels flood "quicker than a blocked dunny" -- and they're forced to head deeper. If they can locate the subterranean river that runs into the ocean, then they might yet survive -- assuming they don't drown, suffocate, starve or kill one another first.

Fans of producer James Cameron's work will know the "Avatar" director is an avid diver himself, and has exhibited a faintly perverse fascination with death by drowning in movies like "The Abyss," "Titanic," and, uh, "Piranha 2: The Spawning."

Although Cameron didn't write or direct it (that would be John Garvin and Alister Grierson respectively) Cameron's name is all over the marketing for "Sanctum," and it takes less than 15 minutes before someone's oxygen tank springs a leak, with predictably grim results.

There's nothing original or surprising about Garvin's screenplay ("inspired by" co-writer Andrew Wight's own caving experience), an adventure scenario with hand-me-down dialogue and the dynamics of a horror picture. We know that only the fittest will survive; the fun (such as it is) comes from watching the cracks appear in the others and guessing the order in which they are going to snuff it.

Unlike the British caving chiller "The Descent," there aren't any underground predators lurking in the shadows -- nor the dinosaurs of Jules Verne's "Journey to the Centre of the Earth."

Instead, Grierson zeroes in on the strains within the group, and repetitively on Frank and his alienated son, Josh (Rhys Wakefield), replaying "Red River" down under. Not that Wakefield is the new Montgomery Clift -- he's more like a charisma-free Justin Bieber-clone -- but Roxburgh (who played Dracula in "Van Helsing") does pretty well to suggest an emotional recluse who feels most at home buried under a mile of rock. That is, until he starts spouting Coleridge.

Embarrassing to listen to, at least the movie gives us something to look at. Its legitimate selling point is the 3-D: not retrofitted this time, thankfully, but shot with cameras Cameron developed for "Avatar."

Generally I'm not a fan of 3-D, which is rarely the immersive experience it is made out to be. The early open-air scenes here have that familiar, distracting cardboard cut-out feel. On the other hand, the 3-D is seamless in the underwater sequences, and it's also effective in the dark reaches of the caves, where space contracts and expands around every corner. (Both claustrophobics and agoraphobics might want to give this one a wide berth.)

In these fleeting moments, "Sanctum" does grasp something of the elemental grandeur of this pre- (and post) historic world, but even then it only makes the human drama seem puny in comparison.