Movie Spotlight

Not one to waste any time, director John Woo, just about flattens viewers with his opening sequence of his 1996 Broken Arrow (ABC Sunday at 9 p.m.), a volume-enhanced boxing match between John Travolta’s Air Force Maj. Vic Deakins and Christian Slater’s Capt. Riley Hale. Deakins is invariably the winner in their ongoing sporting competitions, and this kind of intense masculine rivalry, traditionally the motor that drives Woo’s pictures, heats up considerably in Graham Yost’s script when the two men, co-pilots on the supersecret B-3 Stealth bomber, go out one night on a supposedly routine training mission. Deakins, however, is involved in a plot to steal the plane’s pair of nuclear warheads and use them to extort millions from a presumably terrified American government.

Simultaneously heroic and nihilistic, Clint Eastwood’s masterly 1992 Unforgiven (ABC Thursday at 8 p.m.) is a Western for those who cherish the form. The story of a reformed killer who confronts his past, “Unforgiven” is definitely as elegant in its own way as “The Wild Bunch” and “Ride the High Country.” It’s also a neat piece of revisionism, a violent film that is determined to demythologize killing. As William Munny, destitute Kansas farmer and recent widower with two young children, Eastwood reluctantly accepts an offer from a frontier town prostitute (Frances Fisher) to kill a pair of cowboys who cut one of her colleagues. With Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, Richard Harris and Saul Rubinek.

The 1990 film Edward Scissorhands (KTLA Friday at 8 p.m.) stars Johnny Depp as an ordinary youth except for one thing: springing from his wrists are 10-inch-long razor-sharp metal blades that slice, zip and whoosh through the air with hedge-trimming deftness and Ninja ferocity. As filmmaker Tim Burton dreams him and Depp plays him, he’s a most original fantasy creation, an icon of tenderness and artistic alienation in a modern fairy-tale about a bewildered young manufactured boy, complete except for makeshift hands, pulled from Gothic horror-house into the screamingly pastel candyland of suburbia.

It is a measure of the surprising resilience of First Knight (ABC Saturday at 8 p.m.) that its casting of Richard Gere as a cocky street tough who becomes Sir Lancelot does not decimate director Jerry Zucker’s version of the King Arthur legend. But Gere is such a completely contemporary actor, so at sea in a suit of armor, that seeing him saunter through medieval halls as if he were a vice cop strolling Sunset Boulevard is shock enough to take us out of the story whenever he appears. Aside from Gere, the 1995 film acquits itself honorably enough.