White Ghost

• Directed by BJ Davis
• November 18, 1988 (Portugal)

An American soldier living in hiding in the jungles of Vietnam comes face-to-face with his former commanding officer who wants him dead.

Imitation they say is the sincerest form of flattery. Missing in Action featuring the great Chuck Norris spawned its far share of knock offs. Then again the 80s were a time of a subgenre where former Vietnam soldiers would go back and basically win the war or subdue some national demon of the time all with a gun and some inconsequential supporting characters.

Enter White Ghost starring William Katt as the MIA Steve Shepard who has been in the jungles of Vietnam since ’72. A myth has built up that Shepard is an entity called ‘White Ghost’ who moves about the land collecting the souls (dog tags) of fallen American soldiers. Is that name racist?

Not everybody in Southern Vietnam buys into this apparently since there is a tepid ramantic subplot where Shepard has a girlfriend named Thi Hau (Rosalind Chao) who is pregnant-though that comes and goes until it is forgotten. Seriously.

Katt looks way too young to in this movie to have been in Vietnam in ’72 but he was 21 then having been born in 1951. Guess he and Paul Rudd made the same deal with Satan. Paul Rudd clearly came out on top. They definitely needed to make him look more mature and hardened for the purposes of the character to get past his healthy lifestyle and good genetics. At the minimum give Katt some facial hair.

Long story short Major Cross (Reb Brown) hires a mercenary unit to keep things unofficial when the US learns Shepard is alive and being called ‘White Ghost.’ Little does anybody know until it is too late that the leader of the unit Walker (Wayne Crawford) has a hard on to kill Shepard because Shepard tried to have Walker brought up on charges for killing a village. You might think this would getting enough of a passing mention that people would dig deeper.

As a story, White Ghost is not too bad. Standard for the now extinct subgenre it was a part of. Where it falls apart is in its execution. The action is just kind of slow. For something on the lower budget side I’m not expecting greatness, but the action scenes feel like they are ticking off boxes and lack either style or a gritty realism. A few quick cuts or even simply speeding up the footage to make this or that look faster would’ve been warranted.

There’s the plot element I mentioned earlier where Shephard’s motivation for wanting to leave Vietnam (FINALLY!) is that he got his girlfriend pregnant. A strong motivation that comes and goes in the story to the point and I am left wondering if it was added in post-production via some additional shots. I’m not even sure if it gets mentioned in the finale or even by the movie’s villain Walker. Given Walker’s heavy level of ham it sounds like something that would get used.

Walker. He is supposed to be crazy but comes off as pretty by the book for a large chunk of White Ghost. Not even a hint of being a fry or two short of a Happy Meal with him until they must. And considering that his life wasn’t ruined and he was able to continue on pretty much unharmed his turn to crazy feels a little disconnected from the rest of the story. Rather than struggle to survive and make it to the retrieval point, they needed a cheaper conflict to film and Walker was easier.

Then there is the obligatory final confrontation between Walker and Shepard. It felt a little anticlimactic. The two characters do confront each other but Cross joins in the fun as well making it less about Walker and Shepard finally settle things after 16 years but more about Cross getting kinda tricked by a bearded douchebag and getting payback.

I am also bothered that the Vietnamese government of the late 80s was shown as willing to let an American officer land on their soil with almost no concerns about why. It was a common cliché in action movies of the time that ANY government would do such a thing but that does not mean I or others ever bought into it. Cross offers no paperwork or ANYTHING.

There’s not much build up towards much of anything. Each element is all kind of dropped it with a “Look at this new thing!” type attitude. This movie could’ve been way more entertaining but it kind of fell flat with its mildly haphazard nature. They stumbled around rather than proceeding (poorly) with an idea.

Yet it was not a complete letdown. Katt and Chao had good yet underutilized chemistry. The same can be said of Brown and Katt. If the romantic angle had been played up more between Katt and Chao as well as the soldier angle between Brown and Katt this would have worked much better.

While I have no idea if there is a physical release of this outside of Scandinavia, White Ghost is available to view on YouTube at the minimum. It’s not a total disappointment, but so much less than it could’ve been. I will give this an if you want.