Movie Reviews : ‘Dakota’ a Sticky Sweet Star Turn for Phillips

Meet “Dakota” (citywide): His eyes are wild; his smile is sweet; his hair waves in the sun. He’s played by saucy, smokey Lou Diamond Phillips.

There are dark secrets in Dakota’s past; some guilty family nightmare that sends him tearing out along the sun-baked Texas highways, running from the past. But somewhere, he’ll find a home: a place with horses and blue-jeaned, blue-eyed, corn-silk blondes; with kind, fatherly, weather-beaten ranchers and courageous little 12-year-old bone-cancer amputees.

A place for us, somewhere a place for us. . . . A place where there are antique cars to fix and horses to ride and hands to shake and long boyish thoughts to think while wandering through the tall, waving grass. A place with nasty villainous teen-aged rats who burn down the local granary and then knock their heads on the equipment and have to be rescued. A place of innocent, sexless gambols in the sun. A place where, one day, the 12-year-old (Jordan Burton), prosthesis and all, will climb every mountain--or at least one--raise his fists to the sky and shout like Rocky in the triumphant sunlight.

“Dakota” is a pretty sticky little movie. But you have to consider its genesis. Star-associate producer Phillips made it, before “La Bamba,” for a regional Texas group--the Kuntz Brothers and director Fred Holmes--who specialize in church and family films, the kind that are screened for local congregations, seeking relief from the L.A.-N.Y. media axis, dirty words and car-crashes.

Movies like this take their major inspiration from the Lord and from pre-Vietnam era American cinema and television, worthy sources both. Sincerity is their strong point; irony and realism are usually low on their priority list. Director Holmes, a church-youth movie veteran, has an amiable, easy-going style. But there’s nothing very exceptional or good about this movie, other than the presence of Phillips.

Phillips’ Dakota is a blatant star turn, the old Paul Newman-Ben Quick kind of role in “The Long Hot Summer”: a smoldering hired hand who treats his bosses with easy insolence. And, though he doesn’t totally avoid the narcissistic traps--the cute glares and the insouciant swagger--he has presence and style. He also has a fine, if still unknown co-star: DeeDee Norton, sprouting angular, raw-boned straightforward charm.

Parents may be assured that nothing in “Dakota” (MPAA-rated PG) will lead their youngsters astray, unless they get the wrong message from Phillips’ smokey glances. It’s the usual mix of kittenish humor and Christian fable-moral structure. And, even if it’s not a good movie, those Texas landscapes look mighty healthy, mighty sunny. After a while, you almost expect Spin and Marty to come popping ‘round the bend to lead us all off to Triple R heaven.