TV REVIEWS : Little Mystery, No Suspense in ‘Crash’

Every year there’s at least one new TV movie about a doomed jet liner with baggage falling on the heads of crazed passengers, heroic pilots, a rudder malfunctioning or a No. 2 engine flaming out as a cool head in the control tower tries to talk the plane in. It’s a retreaded genre that storytellers and apparently audiences can’t resist.

Well, unbuckle your seat belts or bring back “The High and the Mighty.” “Crash: The Mystery of Flight 1501” (9-11 p.m. Sunday on Channels 4, 36 and 39) is uninvolving, so technical that only a science major will be gripped by the ending, and pedestrian in its turgid subplot of a rocky marriage between the airliner pilot and his wife (Greg Halstead and Cheryl Ladd).

Only a TV star could have possibly got this script produced. Ladd (seen to immeasurably better advantage early in the year in the-made-for-TV “Jekyll and Hyde”) plays a steely, determined housewife fighting to exonerate her husband of blame for the crash. The tepid mystery (forget suspense) is why the craft blew apart, which the producers waste no time in depicting (about 12 minutes into the show).

The demise of 1501 and its 129 passengers (two survivors, one nicely played by Ray Blunk) and the frantic rescue effort are well staged by director Philip Saville. But the rest of the story (script by E. Arthur Kean), complete with blustery federal investigators and dastardly lawyers, veers on the soporific.

The graphically computerized recreation of the plane’s last moments are nominally watchable if you’re still around at this point and ever studied chemistry. The most wretched cliche is the characterization of a cynical, abrasive TV newsman (Jim Metzler) who tells his staff to get cracking: “Look, this is hardball.”