Television Reviews : ‘Town Bully’ Leaves Viewers Unprotected

Right from the start of “Town Bully,” this week’s “ABC Sunday Night Movie” (9 p.m. on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42), we can tell Raymond West is not a nice person, even if we’d somehow missed the title.

Raymond bumps into people and doesn’t say “excuse me.” He grits his teeth and snarls a lot and never shaves. And he doesn’t take off his trucker’s cap in church, either.

As played one-dimensionally by David Graf and written half-dimensionally by someone for whom the Writer’s Guild strike did not come early enough, Raymond isn’t just mean bad. He’s silly bad. And so is this goofy, gosh-awful excuse for a TV movie.

Its apparent premise is that there’s nothing our system can do about criminals like Raymond. Even the good sheriff shrugs his shoulders--”He’s not breaking any law.” Meanwhile, Raymond stands on his “rights”: “Hasn’t anybody here heard of the First Amendment?” he chortles. Suddenly, the same town folk who’ve been too lily-livered even to tell Raymond to take off his hat in church decide to shoot the guy. There have been, no doubt, real incidents like this, but “Town Bully” is so relentlessly un real that it’s unintentionally funny.

The movie goes from ridiculous to muddled, handing the protagonist’s role to a lawyer (Bruce Boxleitner) who was as ineffectual as anyone in dealing with Raymond when alive but is suddenly gung-ho in prosecuting everyone who might have had a hand in his death. “I’m trying to uphold the rule of law,” he explains to his wife (Isabella Hofmann), who remains puzzled. She’s not alone.