A sloppy tale of murder, justice, and weird hair

April 08, 2006|Matthew Gilbert, Globe Staff

His snowy hair is styled like a lazy Shih Tzu atop his head. His carefully mowed goatee clings to his chin like a milk stain. And his eyebrows wriggle amid all this whiteness like a pair of furry brown caterpillars. He is Sam Elliott, actor, laconic tough guy, eighth wonder of the hair world.

He is also the star of TNT's ''Avenger," a movie that offers more coiffure intrigue than suspense. ''Avenger," which premieres tomorrow night at 8, is a sloppy tale of international vengeance that inspires a big old-fashioned ''Huh?" The plotting is so nonsensical you'll have to work to keep yourself from thinking -- if you don't change the channel, of course. Characters magically appear in different locales, Elliott's Cal Dexter miraculously figures out everything 25 steps ahead of the bad guys, and relationships are never quite explained. It's all just so many pieces of a puzzle tossed onto a table with no possibility of interlocking.

The story, based on a Frederick Forsyth novel, revolves around Dexter, a Vietnam War hero whose daughter was murdered in Panama. After killing her killer, he embarks on a life of global vigilante justice, tracking down other murderers who've escaped the law. When we meet him, the professional avenger is about to travel to Bosnia to find a wealthy man's missing son. That leads to a pursuit of Serbian war criminal Zoran Zilic (David Hayman), and that pursuit forces him to start dodging two CIA operatives who are trying to kill him, or not kill him, or something.

All this running and chasing takes on the air of unintentional farce, despite Elliott's low-key cowboy charm. As the CIA men, James Cromwell and Timothy Hutton are particularly silly, and you know it takes a pretty awful script to make the formidable Cromwell inadvertently humorous. The pair work so hard to be nefarious that they end up looking parodic. When Cromwell mutters to Hutton, ''Make him disappear permanently," he might as well be in a ''Saturday Night Live" sendup of ''24," or playing Boris Badenov in a live-action version of ''The Bullwinkle Show."

Dexter is a sympathetic hero in some ways. He appears to be fighting to make the world safe, and he's operating out of acute personal grief. And Elliott makes him appealingly laconic and loyal -- like Jack Bauer of ''24," but with a sense of irony. If you look closely, though, Dexter is also a little perverse in the way he takes on other people's battles to work out his own unresolved remorse about his daughter's death. Let's just say he has boundary issues, not to mention a strange level of comfort when it comes to killing people.

But then, you'd be crazy to look too closely at anything about ''Avenger." Despite Elliott's efforts, it's not worth the trouble.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com.