TV REVIEW : ‘Cop’s Vengeance’ Bites With Relevance on NBC

“Shoot First: A Cop’s Vengeance” (airing at 9 p.m. Sunday on Channels 4, 36 and 39) is about a good cop whose ideals are eroded by a corrupt police department.

Without belaboring the obvious, this movie for television conveys a stinging relevance that couldn’t come along at a better or worse time, depending on your point of view. The beatings dramatized here seem comparatively tame beside the Los Angeles Police Department one videotaped recently; on the other hand, the climate that creates a brutalizing police officer in this show is all too real.

The teleplay (by Garry Michael White and Joseph Gunn) and the production values are flat, wooden, altogether ordinary achievements, and the acting is also undistinguished. But that doesn’t lessen the impact of a topic that in this case is based on a true-life story.

The target of this macho nightstick yarn is the San Antonio Police Department, where beatings were routine and where, between 1982 and 1986, a vigilante cop ran wild until stopped by his best buddy on the force in a shootout in the killer/officer’s car (director Mel Damski’s best-staged, concluding moment in the drama).

Actors Alex McArthur and Dale Midkiff portray the real-life San Antonio officers, Stephen Smith and Farrell Tucker, ultimately locked in a life-and-death struggle. Tucker’s clean-cut, bespectacled Smith character is the classic case study of the idealist who expected too much and flipped quietly over the edge. His best (only) buddy, Midkiff’s rock-ribbed Tucker, a family man from a long line of police officers, is the loyal friend who can’t comprehend his buddy’s craziness.

The whiskey-voiced G. D. Spradlin is the beleaguered police chief, whose sentiments to his men about humanity ring hilariously hollow. This chief lost his job in real-life San Antonio, and officer Tucker (in a subsequent murder trial not dramatized here) was acquitted of his partner’s death. Tucker is still on the San Antonio force today.