Financial Times (London,England)
September 3, 1992, Thursday
A thriller built on sand
By STEPHEN AMIDON
WHITE SANDS, Roger Donaldson
KNIGHT MOVES, Carl Schenkel
THE POWER OF ONE, John Avildsen
STRAIGHT OUT OF BROOKLYN, Matty Rich
COUSIN BOBBY, Jonathan Demme
WHITE SANDS is a thriller that will grip only those keen on deducing how a veteran director and strong cast could produce such a dud. Willem Dafoe is a small-town New Mexican sheriff who stumbles on a corpse clutching a briefcase full of money on his desert beat. He sets out to investigate the crime on his own – a rash decision that soon brings him into contact with rogue FBI agents, a lovely con woman (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and a shady arms dealer (Mickey Rourke). Dafoe soon finds himself both a suspect in the investigation and a target of the assassins. Though the first few minutes suggest a good if conventional crime story, director Roger Donaldson and writer Daniel Pyne soon tangle matters in a forest of tenuous exposition and improbable plot twists. Worse still, gaping holes in the story are filled with vapid mumblings about CIA conspiracy and the ‘military-industrial complex’. Dafoe’s laconic style allows him to keep his dignity throughout, though Mastrantonio’s bemused mugging is out of place, and Rourke looks as though his bag of tricks is just about empty. Another thriller that fails dismally to thrill is Knight Moves, a bloodlessly schematic tale of chess and serial killing. Enigmatic Grand Master (Christopher Lambert, woefully miscast) is forced to match wits with a maniac who is carving up young women on the Washington State island where a chess tournament is in progress. The police suspect Lambert may be committing the crimes, so they enlist a young psychologist (Diane Lane) to probe his psyche. Her examinations move from sofa to sauna to bed. Writer Brad Mirman and director Carl Schenkel are so intent on carrying through their strained metaphors of criminal gamesmanship that they sacrifice character to bad dialogue and implausible motivation. People move through the film with the stiff determinism of chess pieces. Lane’s character is particularly absurd, a supposedly astute psychologist, without apparent thought or scruple, jumps into bed with a man suspected of slaughtering young women. The Power of One is a standard coming-of-age film that strives unsuccessfully for importance by setting itself in 1940s South Africa. It tells the story of PK (Stephen Dorff), a young white orphan who is transformed by events from a bed-wetting schoolboy into a champion boxer and anti-apartheid activist. After his father is run over by an elephant, our hero is sent to an Afrikaner boarding school where his English ancestry makes him the subject of horrific bullying. He spends most of his time at the local prison, where he is taught to box by an wily old inmate (Morgan Freeman). Then it’s off to a posh college, where he falls in love with the daughter of a racist minister. The story ends with him forgoing a place at Oxford in order to teach English in the townships. The film could have conceivably worked as a crudely energetic boy’s tale, had its makers not tried to pack it with a political message. But by setting it in South Africa, director John Avildsen, who brought us Rocky and The Karate Kid, dissipates whatever power his story may have possessed. A far more credible depiction of the black experience can be seen in Straight Out of Brooklyn, the first effort by 19 year old writer/director Matty Rich. The film portrays a family on New York City’s notorious Red Hook housing estate. The father, Ray (George T. Odom), is an embittered service station attendant who drinks to drown his sorrows, leading him to batter his long-suffering wife. Ray’s son Dennis (Lawrence Gilliard Jr) is a bright young man who, fearing a future as bleak as his father’s, decides to help the family move straight out of the ghetto by robbing a local drug dealer. Although the film is filled with honest energy and some impressive moments, Rich is too inexperienced to bring these elements together in a compelling framework. He fails to develop the film’s key father-son relationship, so that we wonder why Dennis would remain devoted to a brutal wife-beater. Another eyewitness account of New York’s desolate ghettos comes in Jonathan Demme’s Cousin Bobby. Demme’s last undertaking, The Silence of the Lambs, was one of the great critical and commercial successes of recent cinematic history. So what does he do for his next project? – a low-budget 16mm documentary about his cousin, a crusading priest in Harlem. Father Robert Castle is a Sixties relic, a man who once gave Black Panthers sanctuary in his church and cannot speak more than three sentences without referring to institutional racism or social justice. Nowadays, he’s fighting the good fight in upper Manhattan, trying to stem the tide of drugs and crime that is destroying whole neighbourhoods, organising everything peace marches to a campaign to fill holes in the road. The film seems more a series snapshots of a life than an overall picture. Demme fails to get to the heart of the man. There is also a nagging sense of futility and melancholy about the reverend’s undertakings – cousin Bobby’s only real accomplishment in the film is to get a pot-hole filled. It proves a fitting metaphor for a man who once fought to change the world, but now must content himself with plugging a few gaps.
