White Nights

After the romance of An Officer and a Gentleman and the frequent excitement of Against All Odds, one would never have guessed that Taylor Hackford would prove just plain boring. Indeed, the premise of White Nights is good: the plane on which a Russian ballet dancer (Baryshnikov) is travelling makes a forced landing in Russia, the land from which he defected to the US ten years previously. But the grinding ins and outs of just what the KGB will use him for are constantly held up for long sequences in which he dances in partnership with Gregory Hines, a black American tap dancer who went to Moscow in protest over Vietnam; nor are these sequences filmed with the formal rigour that dance requires. The virulence of the film's anti-Russian stance makes Rambo looks distinctly spineless; and the happy ending is risible. Sole point of interest: Skolimowski as a KGB officer with a smile like liquid nitrogen. CPea.