MOVIE REVIEW : ‘THE KILLING TIME’--FAILED <i> FILM NOIR</i>

Even if the season of recycled film noir is hot upon us, the genre’s old virtues--narrative tension and social observation--aren’t necessarily having an equal heyday. Take “The Killing Time” (selected theaters).

This latter day thriller about a hotbed of infidelity and murder in a small California coast town, Santa Alba, has a terrific premise that goes sour fast. The characters, despite an excellent cast, are flat; the plot twists are as sullen and sluggish as a tired old snake who’s been too long in the desert sun.

The beginning suggests something darker, richer. Into outwardly sleepy, inwardly scandalous Santa Alba comes hawk-eyed, cockily ingratiating young Brian Mars (Kiefer Sutherland), the new city deputy. This “Mars,” however, is a fraud: a nameless hitchhiker who has executed the real Brian Mars in the desert, and then assumed his identity. His motives are a mystery, but they seem obviously vicious.

This ice-cold, anonymous villain, a hellion from nowhere, is a perfect noir protagonist. But the script then puzzlingly shifts its focus away from him to his patsies--deputy sheriff Sam Wayburn (Beau Bridges) and mistress Laura Winslow (Camelia Kath)--and their ill-advised scheme to murder Laura’s husband, ruthless local developer Jake (Wayne Rogers).

There’s something soft about this switch. These nice, adulterous lovers are a good-hearted couple pushed to the brink; it’s as if, in “Double Indemnity,” Fred MacMurray were plotting the murder with another Fred MacMurray. The duo strikes at Jake because he’s a scurrilous wife-beater who’s tried to kill Laura--but their decision to murder him seems impetuous. There are other options--like, say, having Sam arrest him.

Director Rick King, who’s done documentaries and one good socially conscious thriller (“Hard Choices”), is probably suggesting the corruptions of money and small-town society, but it’s a point that doesn’t quite register. And, since Kiefer Sutherland--with his usual repertoire of cold stares and lip-curling sneers--gives the movie’s best performance, it seems a mistake to shove him to the sidelines.

The setting and vein remind you of crime-writer Jim Thompson, whose paperback originals have been filmed by directors like Sam Peckinpah and Bertrand Tavernier. But Thompson was a great pulpsmith; his eye was cooler and his voice harsher and cleaner.

King, whose style tends toward low-key naturalism, doesn’t get much black humor or voluptuous mood here. The characters tend to speak the same flat, expository lines you hear in many modern screenplays: Moviespeak, or, more precisely, Dealspeak. There’s none of the rough-and-tumble angularity or crazy, offbeat jigs and jags of an actual conversation and little of the hard-boiled free verse--those monosyllables laced with threat--of an old noir script.

This seems crippling in a story about dark foulups and people on the edge. But it’s par for the course in a movie like “The Killing Time” (MPAA-rated: R), where the best-written and acted scene is probably the one in which Joe Don Baker, Santa Alba’s retiring sheriff, cleans and prepares a fish for dinner.