TV REVIEW : ‘Homeland’: Short-Sheeted Supremacist Tale

“Into the Homeland” (airing at 8 p.m. Saturday on Home Box Office cable) is about a drunken, seedy ex-cop who achieves personal redemption in setting out to redeem his daughter from white supremacists.

But the pursuit and rescue elements of the plot are so illogical and inane as to trivialize the evil tendencies of neo-Nazis and render this predictable movie dull and inert.

Through a series of script contrivances, Jackson Swallow (Powers Boothe) is able to infiltrate the American Liberation Movement and ingratiate himself to Tripp Wesley (C. Thomas Howell), heir apparent to his father Derrick Wesley (Paul LeMat) as the group’s leader.

Swallow’s ability to sabotage the group is simply boggling, especially when he breaks into the communications room and operates a complicated computer sight unseen. Although he’s the obvious culprit, he’s not even suspected. Topping even that in the fantasy department is the ultimate role that Tripp plays in Swallow’s scheme and a federal assault that will not be recalled as one of TV’s finer hours.

Writer Anna Hamilton Phelan does manage to convey a curious duality among white supremacist--they’re nice, ordinary, neighborly people when not being racist. But otherwise her script is banal and sickly and Lesli Linka Glatter’s direction paceless and hackneyed.

Phelan, who wrote the screenplay for “Mask,” and Glatter, whose short film “Tales of Meeting and Parting” was a 1984 Oscar nominee, have both seen better days.

As for the American Liberation Movement, if these clowns were the enemy, not to worry.