TV Reviews : ‘Rainbow Drive’ a Low-Key Cop Thriller

“Rainbow Drive” (airing tonight at 9 on Showtime cable) is a sleek, low-key police thriller starring Peter Weller as a hard-headed cop who inadvertently discovers a multiple murder in Laurel Canyon. Never mind that he’s acting head of the LAPD’s Hollywood division; downtown tells him to back off.

Adapted by Bill Phillips and Bennett Cohen from a Roderick Thorp novel, this is one of those mysteries in which corruption proves to be rampant in the highest places, trickling down to oppress and intimidate the man on the beat. The more the stubborn Weller pushes, the more the hunter becomes the hunted.

This handsome Michael Viner/John Veitch production is strictly conventional genre material, but director Bobby Roth, aided by cinematographer Tim Suhrstedt and production designer Claudio Guzman, turns it into a strikingly beautiful expression of an endlessly languid, seductive, treacherous city. The picture would look great on a theater screen.

In short, Roth has managed to bring dimension to thin, trite material visually. Indeed, the settings, including the old Herald-Examiner Building and the Mayan Theater, are more intriguing than most of the people in them. There’s decent work from Sela Ward as a police psychologist, from Bruce Weitz as Weller’s ill-fated partner and from many others, but the film belongs to Weller with his steely, relentless gaze.