Cinema
White Sands ('15', selected cinemas) Knight Moves ('IS', selected cinemas)
Plumbing the shallows
Vanessa Letts
White Sands raises the question: how intelligent do you have to be to understand everything that's going on in it? And sec- ondly, if you did happen to have an IQ of 190, would you enjoy its merciless compli- cations anyway? For those of us lurking down around the 159 mark there are few intellectual treats in store. The story is so contorted that we simply lean back and sneer as the characters are cruelly mistreat- ed by fate.
Deputy Sheriff Raymond DoseIle (Willem Dafoe) is a toad amongst the New Mexico buzzards. Out in the desert he finds a dead body, a suitcase containing half a million dollars, and trouble. He gets a pathologist buddy to poke around inside the corpse and there in the stomach they find a piece of waxed hamburger paper with a telephone number scrawled across it. He calls the number. Things happen. From these small beginnings we are rapidly catapulted into a world where people are 'as persistent as dogs with two dicks', where 'money talks' and 'bullshit walks': a world of MI6 sidearms, C4 explosives, mines, anti-tank missiles, smashed watches and mobile surveillance vans. Willem Dafoe plays the little man out of his depth and, shallow as this depth is, any sub-159er will be out of it as well.
The plot is just about all this film has to offer. Despite a star cast, which also includes Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Mickey Rourke, the magic moments come when baddies shock you by saying things
like, 'I'm C bloody IA', and then turn out to be baddies in any case. If, instead of worrying about these twists and turns, you peer hard at the corners of the screen, you'll notice spectacular shots of gypsum deserts, stormy skies and rift valleys. The grandeur of the scenery only serves to high- light the fruitlessness of evil machinator Gorman Lennox and the wicked people who say, 'Cop to cop, straight up' and, 'You're not bored any more, are you?'
Knight Moves is one of those films where every time there's a sex scene, as well as concentrating on the visuals, you must lis- ten to a song of the calibre of: 'Two people coming together, trying to work it all out', etc. This movie is in fact a highly contem- porary look at the feverish world of inter- national chess competitions. It is not altogether original to see chess as a metaphor for life, but here, injecting vast quantities of tension into the moves on the board, chess becomes a metaphor for death as well. Christopher Lambert stars as a champion chess genius who may or may not also be psychopathically bumping off 5'5" blondes.
The action takes place in an American hotel where the bellboys are dressed as Beefeaters and where there is a dungeon conveniently semi-flooded by an archaic pump mechanism. One gets the feeling that some bright spark worked out a natty plot for this film and then the producers and the money men decided to jack up the odds by adding in a few appalling clichés. The most notable is a curvy and beautiful psy- chologist who tries to figure out whether or not Lambert really is a mass-murderer before she goes ahead and falls in love with him. Part of the figuring-out process, need- less to say, is one of those coming-together let's-work-it-out sessions. In a frantic attempt to analyse him she says, 'Show me who you are, Peter,' and, 'You have to face the things you feel.'
Fortunately this hogwash isn't enough to stem the murders, and the plot keeps chug- ging along. People make valiant attempts to work out the logic behind the killings, scribbling their thoughts on handy black- boards so that we can keep up with them. When the psychopath is finally cornered he says pathetically, 'You don't understand.' This is absolutely true, but in Knight Moves we do at least follow what is happening.
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