TV Reviews : Clancy’s ‘Op Center’ Veers Off Course

Tom Clancy’s first TV miniseries, “Op Center,” is a dud. In fact, it’s mind-boggling boring, something out of the Middle Ages of movie making.

Part of the surprise is that Clancy on paper knows how to weave an international suspense caper, witness his “Hunt for Red October,” “Patriot Games” and “Clear and Present Danger.”

Throw in a cast featuring Wilford Brimley, Rod Steiger, Harry Hamlin (the hero), Carl Weathers, Kim Cattrall and Ken Howard as a philandering U.S. President, for openers, and you expect to curl up and enjoy a movie.

No such luck.

The apparent reason? Although Clancy’s name heralds the project, this is not an adaptation of a hot Clancy novel or even a script by Clancy. Rather it’s a script written by one of the four executive producers (Steve Sohmer), who gathered story ideas from producer colleagues Clancy and Steve Pieczenik. Clancy, it appears, didn’t feel he had to really write this movie but just sit back and throw out ideas.

No wonder this miniseries about a powerful National Crisis Management Center on the international hunt for three stolen Russian nuclear war heads looks exactly like a movie written by a committee.

The flat, stodgy style of the production, directed by Lewis Teague, belies its storied beltway connections: cooperation from the Defense Department and all the branches of the military, plus the California National Guard!

Except for a few action sequences that are almost as creaky as the rest of the four-hour movie, the visual material is largely a series of close-ups of talking heads who are continually moving from one office to the next. Many of them spy on one another and look cynical.

In case the politics don’t hold you, there are frequent fade-aways to the marital problems of our embattled cutting edge couple (Hamlin and Cattrall).

Be forewarned--Clancy and Co. are working on a sequel.

* “Op Center” airs Sunday and Monday on KNBC Channel 4, 9-11 p.m.