All the ingredients for good, formulaic fun

A splendid cast of character actors puts bite into “Bad Apple,” a flashy little TV movie about cops-and-mobster high jinks in the land of the Sopranos, premiering tonight on TNT.

Based on one of a series of books by Anthony Bruno, it is a hair off being anything special, and perhaps a little too deep in debt stylistically and conceptually to “Get Shorty” and “Out of Sight,” but it’s well-crafted and colorful and will do you no lasting harm.

The credits come on like the beginning of some high-powered ‘70s cop show, giving what follows the air of a pilot, and indeed it is bruited there may be more of these to come.

Chris Noth, whom you have loved on “Law & Order” and “Sex and the City,” is Mike Tozzi, a big lunk of an FBI agent who goes undercover to get close to loan shark Elliott Gould. Colm Meaney -- of “Star Trek’s” “Deep Space Nine” and “The Next Generation,” working without his Irish accent for a change -- is Cuthbert Gibbons, Tozzi’s short-tempered partner. He has a toothache and is married to a quarrelsome professor of medieval history played by Mercedes Ruehl, who has won an Oscar.

There is nothing new here, but it would be almost surprising if there were. It may not even be possible at this point to make a buddy-cop movie or mob film that seems completely new: It’s been 117 years since Arthur Conan Doyle threw together Holmes and Watson, and the subsequent variations on that odd couple have been only slight.

And the mob has been looked at now from every which way -- the operatic mob, the just-business mob, the sad-sack mob, the vicious mob, the funny mob, and every combination thereof. “Bad Apple” is the just-business, funny, a little bit vicious mob. The mayhem is mostly comic -- there are a couple of rough scenes that feel fairly unpleasant in context -- but no one with more than two lines of dialogue has to die.

Taken as the cartoon it fundamentally is, where nothing goes very deep, the characters are essentially just bright shapes moving around the screen and the plot just an excuse to set them spinning, “Bad Apple” is quite appealing.

Directed by Adam Bernstein, who has worked on a lot of good TV shows including “Scrubs,” “Oz” and “Homicide: Life on the Street” -- though we may praise him most highly for directing the video for the B-52’s tune “Love Shack” -- the picture is well designed and dressed and photographed, and comes in a wide-screen format, like a real movie. New York locations, supplementing scenes shot in Montreal, add veracity and make a world of difference. Canada will only get you so far.

Perhaps because he’s tall and good looking, Noth -- a natural, likeable actor, who is also an executive producer here -- has not been cast much as a goof, and he’s rather good at playing one. Dagmara Dominczyk is his love interest, and if the filmmakers were not trying to exactly replicate the Clooney-Jennifer Lopez dynamic of “Out of Sight,” they have in any case made it seem as if they were.

Robert Patrick (“The X-Files”) here adds another to his long list of creepy bad guys, but he has yellow hair this time.

Comedian Jim Gaffigan is delightfully deadpan as a surveillance man, and Gould has taken another job that lets him smoke a big cigar; he’s hardly working -- he barely has to stand up for this part -- but he’s Elliott Gould and it is ever a pleasure to hear him speak.

*

‘Bad Apple’

Where: TNT

When: Premieres 9 tonight

Rating: The network has rated the movie TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under age 17)

Chris Noth...Mike Tozzi

Colm Meaney...Cuthbert Gibbons

Elliott Gould...”Buddha” Stanzione

Mercedes Ruehl...Lorraine Gibbons

Robert Patrick...Tommy Bellavita

Dagmara Dominczyk...Gina Defresco

James Villemaire...Franky “Freshy” Defresco

Director, Adam Bernstein. Writer, Howard Korder.