TV Reviews : Nielsen, White Can’t Save Cliched ‘Lifetime’

It’s rare and always a hopeful sign to see a movie about romantic love between an older couple, so it’s too bad that Betty White and Leslie Nielsen are saddled with the unimaginative love story “Chance of a Lifetime” (at 9 tonight on NBC Channels 4, 36 and 39).

White and Nielsen, playing a widow and widower who meet and plunge into love at a resort in Mexico, cut quite a dashing image, their white heads bobbing around the dance floor. He’s so happy-go-lucky he doesn’t even wear a watch. And she’s letting her hair down after being told that she has only six months to live.

That’s the first cliche. The second is that she talks a lot to her dead husband.

Nielsen is light and charming, leaving his “Naked Gun” character totally in the dust. White is her confused “Golden Girl” who flees the gallant and rich Nielsen in humiliation when her doctor (William Windom, in a pipsqueak role that he makes respectable) calls her with the news that she’s been misdiagnosed and will live after all.

But White’s panic is inexplicable and absurd (even in a fantasy like this) and undermines the rest of the story, which is directed without a smidgen of style or flair by Jonathan Sanger. The script is by executive producer Lynn Roth.