Last Plane Out

Produced by Dallas newspaperman Jack Cox in a bid to shoulder his way into that elite corps of journalists whose names have outlasted the Big Story that made them - in Cox's case, Nicaragua. We first see him (Vincent) on assignment in 1978, the palmy days before the storm when his friendship with General Somoza eases his way in a difficult country. Months later he returns to the same country now frenziedly at war with itself, to discover that the same friendship makes him a target for Sandinista guerillas. Although purportedly based on Cox's story, what we get is largely the usual mundane journalistic fantasy of fast living and slow sex in foreign climes while the realities of the situation go hang. Somoza is shown as an avuncular nice guy pining for a plebiscite; the Sandinistas as bloodthirsty curs. Heady days for Cox, perhaps, but for us the tension hardly mounts.