Two-Part ‘Sole Survivor’ Can’t Sustain the Suspense

First things first. Ubiquitous Richard Hatch does not have a cameo in “Sole Survivor,” a two-part Fox film based on the Dean Koontz bestseller about a mysterious plane crash.

In our book, that’s a plus. On the negative side, this uneven thriller opens eventfully but ultimately can’t deliver on the initially intriguing plot that unfolds in tonight’s installment.

Billy Zane plays Joe Carpenter, a Seattle reporter still emotionally fragile a year after the crash of Flight 353, a tragedy that killed everyone on board, including his wife and young daughter. While visiting their graves one night (what sort of person stops at a cemetery in the dark?), he meets Rose Tucker (Gloria Reuben), a woman who knows more about the crash than she has time to talk about at that particular moment. That’s because she’s being chased and fired upon by a vicious guy (John C. McGinley) who must now add the confounded Joe to his hit list.

Utilizing his reportorial skills, Joe embarks on a search for Rose while harboring the hope, faint though it may be, that he’ll be reunited with his loved ones. Along the way, Joe discovers that a pivotal piece of the puzzle involves DNA research. Suffice it to say that by the end of Part 1, we were anticipating a big payoff in Thursday’s disappointing denouement.

Part of the problem is that Part 2 is hobbled by protracted exposition that slows down the brisk pace established by director Mikael Salomon, who oversees the action with the benefit of an atmospheric score from composer Mark Snow (“The X-Files”). To his credit, writer Richard Christian Matheson ties up the story’s most prominent loose ends, but he and Salomon cannot fully sustain the suspense built over the course of two nights. Thankfully, most of the violence involving McGinley’s malevolent Victor Yates takes place off-screen, unlike “Intensity,” the network’s sadistic 1997 adaptation of another Koontz novel.

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Zane is sympathetic as the protagonist making life difficult for McGinley, an actor who seems to gravitate toward TV characters with psychopathic tendencies. As viewers may recall, McGinley played the perverse killer in “Intensity.” Reuben, who has the bulk of her scenes in Part 2, is adequate, though Isabella Hofmann makes a better impression in a smaller role as a helpful investigator.

Hmmm. On second thought, perhaps some cameos from castaways Richard, Rudy and Kelly wouldn’t have been such a bad thing after all.

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* “Sole Survivor” can be seen tonight and Thursday at 8 p.m. on Fox. The network has rated it TV-14-LV (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14, with advisories for coarse language and violence).