Powerful

Good concept, poorly executed.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Roger Donaldson directed this undercover police thriller as small town southwest deputy sheriff Ray Dolezal(played by Willem Dafoe) finds a body in the desert with a suitcase full of cash, and no idea how or why it got there. Ray then goes to the extraordinary length of taking on the identity of the dead man in order to get to the bottom of the matter, and finds himself involved with rogue agents of the FBI(Samuel Jackson) & CIA(Mickey Rourke), and also involved with a beautiful woman philanthropist(played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), despite being happily married... Mediocre film has a good cast and director but an unconvincing and convoluted story that leaves the viewer unsatisfied.

A man has apparently committed suicide in he New Mexico desert and beside his body is a bag containing $500,000 so local sheriff Ray Dolezal decides to keep the dead man's rendezvous to unravel the mystery A lot of people have complained about WHITE SANDS being implausiable , contrived or over plotted . My complaint is that it's really none of these things but suffers from a fundamental flaw we're warned about at basic screen writing course " Show , don't tell " . For much of the screen time the plot twists and turns well enough but ion the last 15 minutes we have to listen to characters state " I'm not how you think I am , I'm really .... " or we listen to characters give away the plot which means the climax is very much spoon fed to the audience which is something of a shame since while not being a truly great thriller WHITE SANDS deserves to be remembered more than it really is . I guess the dislodge heavy last act conspires to make this a very forgettable movie

If there was a movie that was totally implausible and simply asks too much for one's "suspension of disbelief" well, it's WHITE SANDS. The story, about a small town cop taking the identity of a dead man in order to figure out who the dead man is, is by far the least convincing story I've seen in a long time. The idea itself is good. It's basically the same storyline as the one in Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST played straight. But unlike the Hitchcock film, this film suffers from the get go because one of major detail: The main character, played by Dafoe, has no reason or motivation to go through all the pain and trouble of what the main character is made to go through. He's a total blank going from one incredulous situation (his relationship with Mastrantonio's silly character) to the next (Rourke's real identity), until the truly anti-climatic ending. 40 minutes into the movie and I was already drifting away from total disinterest. The acting is actually good. It's a shame that the rest of the movie is irremediably unconvincing.There's a reason why this movie is forgotten. It's just not good.

If anyone wants to see Mickey's last serious movie (in which he was the lead... no cameo crap), you need to see this movie. OK, I forgot Double Team... that was pretty serious...Dafoe and Rourke have some interesting exchanges, and Samuel Jackson is a riot... and its not every day you get to see a real US Senator blow up a tank with a bazookaBy the way, its not sand ... its gypsum, gypsum, gypsum...