A kind of pop-art remake of Antonioni's THE PASSENGER, Roger Donaldson's enigmatic WHITE SANDS is ultimately undone by its labyrinthine, cumbersome plot.
Willem Dafoe plays small-town New Mexico sheriff Ray Dolezal, who gets more than he bargained for when he investigates an apparent suicide in a remote part of his territory. The victim turns out to be an FBI agent who has with him a suitcase containing half a million dollars in used bills. Dolezal
deduces that the "suicide" was actually a murder; from evidence in the man's motel room, the sheriff reasons that he was on his way to a meeting with somebody to buy something with the money. Dolezal decides to assume the dead man's identity, and finds himself embroiled in an arms-dealing scheme
with Gorman Lennox (Mickey Rourke), a shady entrepreneur, and Lane Bodine (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), his rich, thrill-junkie girlfriend. Soon, Donezal is caught between the dangerous arms traders and the FBI.
Ironically, WHITE SANDS is at its best when it's least explicable. Its predecessor, THE PASSENGER, reaches a point of diminishing returns at about the time it becomes apparent that there isn't going to be much of a plot. WHITE SANDS tries to remedy this, however, by backloading itself with far too
much plot. When the real villains come forth in feverish profusion late in the film, they're forced to explain themselves in long, tiresome speeches that indict everything from the lack of accountability among elite law-enforcement organizations to the misconduct of American foreign policymakers.
Thus, instead of leading to a crafty, emotionally cathartic payoff, WHITE SANDS gets more tiresome and banal as it goes along and all its threads are tied up with neat, if outlandish, explanations. WHITE SANDS would have been a better film if it had remained more dreamlike and less tied to plot
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