White Sands (film)
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- This article is about a film. For the location in New Mexico, see White Sands National Monument. For the weapons testing facility and spaceport, see White Sands Missile Range .
White Sands is a 1992 movie directed by Roger Donaldson and written by Daniel Pyne for Warner Bros. The movie is about a small U.S. southwestern town sheriff who finds a body in the desert with a suitcase and $500,000. He impersonates the man and stumbles into an FBI investigation. It stars Mickey Rourke, Willem Dafoe and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.
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[edit] Story
New Mexico Deputy Sheriff Ray Dolezal (Dafoe) is called out to the desert to look at a body in the White Sands desert alongside a suitcase with $500,000 that was discovered by two tourists. The town morqutican (Bert Gibson) is content to have the death remain a mystery, but Dolezal seizes upon the mystery to escape the boredom of being a family man and a sheriff in a small town where not much seems to happen.
They track the man's last name, Spenser, and his last know residence to a local motel. During the autopsy they find a phone number written on pieces of paper inside the stomach, and Dolezal calls the number, poses as Spenser, in order to set up a meeting at a local motel in the hopes of solving the mystery. The ruse seems to work, as at the motel, two females (who seem to be Basic Instinct lesbians) attack him at gunpoint, grab the money and instruct him to meet Gorman Lennox (Rourke) at a restaurant. Later on that night Dolezal is also kidnapped by an FBI agent named Greg Meeker (Jackson) who informs him that the Spenser was an FBI agent working undercover and since Dolezal handed the money over to the bad guys, he may as well continue to pose as Bob Spenser in an effort to regain the money or help the FBI make a bust.
At the restaurant he meets up with Lennox and the beautiful and wealthy Lane Bodine (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) to learn that the money is being used to buy some illegal arms in an effort to fund some left-wing freedom fighters that are apparently being slaughtered by some right-wing militia somewhere in South America. However, the arms dealers want $250,000 more for the weapons, and Jackson is not about to give Dolezal more money, and thus Dolezal romances his way into Lane's life so that she will attract some of her wealthy humanitarian donors to donate the needed money.
The plot thickens as two FBI from internal affairs start looking for Dolezal, thinking that he killed Bob and took the money, and the fact that Lane knows that Dolezal is not really Bob, but agrees to keep the secret and raise the money because she finds Dolezal attractive, and sees him as a nice, honest alternative to a past relationship she had with the violent Lennox. However, Dolezal suspects that something else is going on and when he attends a radeo with Lane, he meets Noreen (Maura Tierney), who had an affair with the real Bob, and explains that Bob was working with some else in the FBI that likely killed him. However, Noreen runs away in fear, (to be killed by the obviously corrupt Meeker) and Dolezal is grabbed by the internal affairs agents, and they are soon run off the road by Lennox.
Lennox kidnaps the two FBI internal affairs agents, and takes Dolezal out into the desert to drop another bombshell; he knows who Dolezal really is, because he is a CIA agent that wants to ensure that the arms deal goes through in order to ensure the survival of the military-industrial complex through warfare. Lennox kills the two agents and informs Dolezal that he has also kidnapped Lane and that Dolezal needs to find where she hide the $250,000 and then meet Lennox on a deserted military base in the White Sands desert.
Dolezal, finds the money in Lane's horse's stall, beats up a FBI agent that Meeker had tailing him, and kidnaps Meexer and takes him out to the White Sands location, handcuffs him to a pipe inside an abandoned building and explains that Lennox is CIA, that the FBI internal affairs will be arriving soon and that Meeker can either face punishment for killing Bob and stealing the money or try and flee. Dolezal leaves a gun behind, so that with some effort Meeker is able to grab it and hide behind a bathroom stall in the building.
Soon afterwards Lennox arrives explains that Lane is alive down the road a few miles and that he plans on calling for the assistance of Dolezal again. Dolezal has placed the briefcase in the abandoned building, so that when Lennox walks into grab the money, an angry and scarred Meeker shoots and kills him. Dolezal drives away and picks up Lane, who wants them to live happily ever after, but Dolezal plans to return to his family.
A small army of FBI arrive in cars and helicopters, and Meeker has escaped from the handcuffs and runs out into the White Sand desert with the briefcase. Dolezal has left enough money behind so that the FBI will no longer be after him, but the FBI notice tracks going out into the White Sands. Just as the FBI catch up with him, Meeker drops the briefcase, causing it to open up and reveal that it does not have the money in it, just White Sand.
The film ends, with Dolezal driving across the southwestern desert back to his normal life as a sheriff and family man.
[edit] Critics
The film opened to mix reviews. Peter Travers of the Rolling Stones magazine wrote, that the storyline was both predictable and when Lennox is revealed to be a CIA agent utterly confusing [1]. Most reviewers did feel that the film's highlights include work from cinematographer Peter Menzies and composer Patrick O'Hearn, but that neither men could make up for the problems with the script. As Desson Howe of the Washington Post wrote, it is never really explained why Dafoe's character has this obsession to find out the truth about Bob's death, or the various other unexplained oddities that occur in the film such as the lesbian ninja-women, or the fact that Mastrantonio falls in love with Dafoe's character for no apparent reason [2].
Despite being made in the 1990s some people found parts of the film to be rather offensive or politically incorrect. A shower scene between Dafoe and Mastrantonio was criticized both for being gratuitous and for the fact that in the end nothing happens between the two characters. Aside from the brief and odd cliched usage of lesbians in the film, and a throw away reference by a motel manager as to how he hired a "fairy" to decorate the motel rooms, the film also has a whiney African American character (Jackson) who seems to be taking advantage of civil rights legislation when he reminds Dafoe's character that no one will believe him because Jackson is a "senior minority agent." Critics noticed a similar depiction of African Americans in the film, also scripted by Daniel Pryne, called Pacific Heights where the African American police officer who is utterly convinced that his two white friends did not rent a room to him because of the color of his skin, when in fact the film shows that the application accidentally gets lost.
[edit] DVD
The film is available on DVD with a few special options. It includes English and French language and subtitle options, a filmography of the some of the cast, and trailers for this and a few other films by Morgan Creek.
