TV REVIEW : Confusion Cools Thriller

“Curacao” (premiering on Showtime Sunday at 9 p.m.) is, to put it generously, a suspense thriller.

Its watchable co-stars, George C. Scott and William Petersen, play a pair of wretched exiles wrenchingly drawn to their dark pasts. And the movie’s Caribbean atmosphere colorfully underscores the exotic shooting location: the quaint island of Curacao, off the coast of Venezuela in the Netherlands Antilles.

So with two sturdy stars, a Carnival beat and an intriguing setting, what can go wrong? You got it--the script. Writer James David Buchanan knew his material well. He had, after all, written the novel (“The Prince of Malta”) on which the movie is based. But too often his characters peel off crucial expository information about the CIA, South African spies and Chinese chicanery in such a confusing tangle of international hocus-pocus that the movie becomes a struggle to follow. Director Carl Schultz seems powerless to clarify the maddeningly convoluted and thorny maze of a narrative.

The advantage goes to viewers with VCRs because at least they can press the reverse button and play back the several confusing plot points.

Scott, speaking in a scratchy rasp under a head of stringy, white hair, is a boisterous, suicidal ex-sea captain tormented by guilt over the horrific sinking of his oil tanker (which is vividly dramatized in the opening scenes, the strongest in the movie). Petersen, a former Secret Service operative demoted to a lowly security guard, befriends the sea captain and gets dragged into an arabesque of corruption.