TV REVIEW : ‘When Love Kills’ Lurid but Persuasive

The kind of obsessive love that compels a person to murder another human being may not be the stuff of sonnets, but CBS’ “When Love Kills: The Seduction of John Hearn” weaves a certain lurid fascination (tonight and Wednesday at 9 on Channels 2 and 8).

Based on the true story of a decorated Vietnam vet who became a killer-for-hire (Gary Cole), the four-hour production boils down to a kind of contemporary “Macbeth,” with a crazed lover driven to spill ever more blood by a cunning, manipulative woman (Marg Helgenberger).

Throw in a dash of “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and “Double Indemnity” and you have your classic lust-will-out murder plot. But there’s also a disquieting social message here about a society of people eager to pay to have a spouse or business partner knocked off.

As the entitled John Hearn, Cole is persuasive as a Southern mama’s boy and floundering truck driver looking to make a stable life for his young son after the war. He hits upon a get-rich-scheme by advertising his services as a world-class enforcer/bodyguard/mercenary in Soldier of Fortune magazine. Suddenly he’s getting 50 calls a day on his answering machine from people willing to hire him for every crime conceivable.

He pays little heed to these kooks except for this one creamy, sultry voice that makes him sit up in bed. It turns out to be Satan’s helper herself, the real-life vixen Debbie Banister, whom the wild-eyed, redheaded Helgenberger plays as if there’s no tomorrow. Remarkably, Helgenberger’s over-the-top interpretation carries the movie: At one one point she uncurls a shocking animal snarl that shows just how frightening and unpredictable her character is.

Much of the time she’s taking off her clothes, better to get her lug of a lover to do her bidding. Hearn is dramatized as the classic mortal fool, genuinely in love but seduced by sex all the way to Kingdom Come. Or, to be specific, from Florida to Texas, where he commits three murders for the sake of his deadly lady love and material girl.

What finally redeems the movie, directed by Larry Elikann and scripted by Gregory Goodell (from Ben Green’s book “The Soldier of Fortune Murders”), is the depiction of the bizarre ease in which an ordinary man can slip into Purgatory.