White Sands

Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Willem Dafoe

Directed by: Roger Donaldson

RS: Not Rated

1992 Drama

Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, last seen as a luminous Maid Marian to Kevin Costner's droopy Robin Hood, has enough pirazz to make any movie watchable. Even this one. Well, some of the time. Or at least until you realize that Daniel Pyne's thriller script isn't going anywhere and that director Roger Donaldson isn't delivering suspense with the same kinky élan he demonstrated in No Way Out, with Costner and Sean Young.

Things start promisingly. In some Indian ruins in the New Mexican desert (moodily shot by Peter Menzies Jr.), tank-town deputy sheriff Ray Dolezal (Willem Dafoe) finds a dead man rotting in the sun. There's a gun in his hand and a briefcase nearby with $500,000.

Murder? Suicide? Dolezal and county coroner Bert Gibson (M. Emmet Walsh) scratch their heads at the autopsy until Gibson digs a phone number out of the corpse's stomach. It sounds gross, but Dafoe and the amusingly macabre Walsh have an easy rapport. Dolezal decides he will assume the dead man's identity and wait in his motel for the crooks to come for the money. So he leaves wife Molly (Mimi Rogers) and heads out of town.

At the motel, Dolezal is attacked by two women. One kisses him at gunpoint; they both take the money. Then an FBI agent, vigorously played by Samuel L. Jackson (Jungle Fever), steps in. He uses Dolezal as bait to nail a slick arms dealer (Mickey Rourke) and his former ladylove (Mastrantonio), a social butterfly who robs the rich to give to good causes.

It's easy not to give away the plot because even die-hard crime buffs like Rourke's idol John Gotti won't get it. In one of the few erotic scenes, Dafoe finds his devotion to his wife sorely tested when Mastrantonio sheds her clothes to join him in the shower. But from the moment Rourke mumbles, "I'm C fucking IA, baby," White Sands blows away in a shit storm of irredeemable incoherence.

PETER TRAVERS
RS 630