White Sands

White Sands is a 1992 crime thriller set in New Mexico. A deputy sheriff named Ray Dolezal is called out when a body is found in the desert, a gun in one hand and a briefcase holding half a million dollars nearby. Rather than treat it as a routine case, he takes on the dead man's identity to work out what happened to him. Doing so pulls him into a world of arms dealing and drug trafficking, and into the orbit of figures whose loyalties are hard to read: a weapons dealer named Gorman Lennox, his enigmatic associate Lane Bodine, and an FBI agent, Greg Meeker. The town sheriff's ordinary working life gives way to a much larger and more dangerous set of interests than he anticipated.

Roger Donaldson directed from a screenplay by Daniel Pyne, with Scott Rudin and William Sackheim producing. It was Donaldson's fifth film as director, following Cadillac Man in 1990 and preceding The Getaway in 1994. Willem Dafoe leads as Dolezal, with Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Mickey Rourke, Samuel L. Jackson, M. Emmet Walsh and James Rebhorn among a credited cast of twenty-three.

The film was released on April 24, 1992, with a runtime of 101 minutes. Made for a budget of 22 million dollars, it returned about 9 million worldwide. On IMDb it holds a 5.1 out of 10 from 16 reviews, and on TMDB a 5.9 out of 10 from 183 votes, so audiences there rate it somewhat above the critics' figure.