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TV REVIEW : SHOOT-EM-UP BOW FOR ‘CRIME STORY’

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Times Television Critic

Nearly everyone in NBC’s “Crime Story” wears black hats, suits and ties and looks like the Blues Brothers.

This is the latest from Hollywood’s biggest bazooka, producer/director Michael Mann, who this time seems as much inspired by “The Untouchables” as the unshavables on his own “Miami Vice.”

Tonight’s ultraviolent two-hour “sneak preview” at 9 p.m. on Channels 4, 36 and 39 introduces us to Lt. Mike Torello (Dennis Farina), head of a major crime-fighting police unit in Chicago during the 1960s. A semi-serial, “Crime Story” will later shift locales to Las Vegas of the 1970s.

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The premiere--to be followed by additional “sneak previews” at 10 p.m. Friday and Sept. 26 before “Crime Story” starts airing at 9 p.m. Tuesdays--is mostly long and loathsome. It’s written by Chuck Adamson and David Burke and directed by Abel Ferrara.

Torello and his unit investigate a series of robberies instigated by a hot-headed young hood whose parents are friends of Torello. Part of the time, though, it’s hard telling the cops from the crooks, and in one particularly far-out sequence, Torello and his boys wear black hoods and abduct a powerful mobster, just to terrorize him.

“Crime Story” follows the Mann pattern of being heavy on mood and rock music--and gratuitous violence and corpses. The episode’s 68 gunshots (including 14 shotgun blasts) yield 11 deaths, many coming in a wild, appalling cops-and-robbers shoot-out inside a packed department store. There are also multiple beatings and threats.

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The premiere has some positive elements, too.

In some ways, Torello is an interesting, textured, intensely human character. A captive of his emotions, he’s no angel--roughing up people, perjuring himself in court, fooling around on his wife Julie (Darlanne Fluegel). In fact, their few scenes together are especially intriguing, conveying a tense, eroding relationship whose collapse seems almost inevitable.

Moreover, Farina, a real-life former cop with a featured role in Mann’s current theatrical movie, “Manhunter,” has enormous, convincing presence as the volatile, hair-trigger Torello. His rugged face looks like a crime story.

Also persuasive is Anthony Denison as thugdom’s murderous Ray Luca, whose rise in organized crime will continue to be Torello’s obsession in coming episodes.

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Apparently sensitive about the shoot-’em-up premiere, NBC promises that “Crime Story” thereafter becomes a “people story.” A live people story, presumably.

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