On the Run After Murders, Dodging a Few Bureaucrats
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Published: February 18, 2005, Friday


Can you see the relation?

Paul Michael Glaser, television's Starsky, and weasel-faced Kett Turton play a marvelously sinister father-and-son crime team in ''Ladies Night,'' a thriller that has its premiere tomorrow night on USA. Art Kirkland (Mr. Glaser) seduces lonely women who can sign checks for big companies; he gets them to embezzle for love, then kills them. Zach (Mr. Turton), Art's motherless son, is his father's browbeaten accomplice: he facilitates the seductions, murders and money transfers.

Set in Portland, Ore., and evidently based on a true story, ''Ladies Night'' is billed as the story of two insurance investigators looking to recover money for a client. Fortunately, it's better than that. Susan Vercillino (Claudette Mink) and Jesse Grant (Colin Ferguson), the insurance-company good guys, are easily upstaged by the villains, as the dark Glaser-Turton chemistry is something to behold. The pair brings to mind John A. Muhammad and Lee Malvo, the age-discrepant accomplices in the 2002 sniper killings. (Art and Zach seem at first like boyfriends; the fact that they are related is only gradually revealed here.)

With such formidable enemies, the bureaucrats Susan and Jesse can come across only as inadequate, especially as the movie emphasizes that insurance-company sleuths differ meaningfully from Hollywood detectives because no sense of noble purpose drives them. Instead, they are losers: Susan is overly grateful to have moved up in the insurance company, and Jesse is boozy and impotent with the realization that his career has come to this.

Further eroding their authority as heroes is their bewilderment by the case that the viewer has already solved, as we are privy to the heavies' every move. The movie proceeds as if it were unraveling a mystery, when in fact it's largely catching up to what we viewers know from virtually the first scene.

Why risk this redundancy, then, in showing scenes and then having other characters piece together those same scenes? Because small details surface in the reassembly of the scenes, and the movie's biggest question -- what is the real relationship between Art and Zach? -- can be addressed only when their interactions are read by outside observers.

The movie is marred by some fanciful editing, and it's also irritatingly car-happy, with far too many conversations about Beemers and Lamborghinis. But it looks cool, with patient attention to the details of the lonesome women's lives that Art and Zach invade.

An executive producer of ''Ladies Night'' is Stanley M. Brooks, who was also behind ABC's clever ''Dynasty: The Making of a Guilty Pleasure.'' ''Ladies Night'' is no masterpiece, but it's a welcome surprise: an honest, original thriller on television.