TV REVIEWS : ‘Marked for Murder’ Doesn’t Stay in the Groove of Gritty Drama

Any movie that blends a comically corrupt police precinct with a gruesome baseball-bat bludgeoning--complete with flashes of the victim’s pulpy head-- and a steamy love scene between a reformed thug and a blonde who’s his justice department supervisor can’t be all bad. Just irritating.

If “Marked for Murder” (at 9 p.m. Sunday on NBC, Channels 4,36 and 39) ever settled permanently into a dark and narrow groove, this production could be the genesis of a gritty series. Its premise--a rock-hard criminal who’s released from prison in an innovative program to help an inept Philadelphia police precinct fight crime with one of crime’s own--echoes that old late-’60s series with cat burglar Robert Wagner, “It Takes a Thief.”

Except here the hard-timer, played with steely resolve by Powers Boothe, is neither stylish nor a glamour puss. He’s so hardened that part of the fun is watching his adjustment to life’s squalor on the outside, under the nervous eye of Billy Dee Williams as his police captain and Laura Johnson as his program administrator-turned-paramour.

It’s the cynical romantic subplot and the caricatured Keystone Kop/Gashouse Gang precinct that contradicts the heavy stuff and veers the movie all over the map, as if every audience constituency out there had to be served.

Meanwhile, enlivening the shadows of Dennis Hackin’s script is a cackling, seething villain played by Michael Ironside (who reminds you of James Hoffa impersonating Jack Nicholson).

It’s Ironside who, in director Mimi Leder’s veritable takeoff of Robert De Niro’s famous Capone baseball bat number in Brian DePalma’s “The Untouchables,” bloodies the dreadlocks of a poor Jamaican drug dealer (Stogie Kenyatta).