The Beast

Patrick Swayze’s performance as an ungoverned F.B.I. man in The Beast, a new crime drama beginning on Thursday on A&E, is impressive for its resistance to cliche and remarkable for the mere fact of its execution.

The Beast is weighted down by a concept that was already tired when Moses was a teenager -wizened, jaded rogue cop teaches rookie the ways of the streets and blah, blah, blah. But Swayze brings to the role, as Rourke did in "The Wrestler," the kind of seriousness that only real-life suffering can impart.

Barker is written as the stereotypical rogue cop who crosses the line into illegality, but Swayze's presence is complex enough to add mystery and weight that aren't in the script....[but] take Swayze and his gravitas out of the picture, and The Beast is a mediocre series that would probably lurk on the cable TV lineup without much notice.

The action often is energetic and intriguing but is sometimes brought down by Fimmel's uneven performance. The rest of the supporting cast acquits itself well, and Swayze manages to bring the words of scribes Vincent Angell and William L. Rotko to menacing life.

We could be spending our time reading better hardboiled yarns from fresh tough-guy novelists like Charles S. Houston or Duane Swierczynski. In fact, I'd rather watch an hour of ?Swayze reading one of their tales aloud than sit through an episode of The Beast.

Clearly, the show is aiming for urban grit. But that's hard to achieve when you're constantly distracting us with a ludicrous plot.

The Beast is singularly unimaginative, a collection of set-pieces barely bound together by a narrative thread, substituting attitude for substance and coyness for coherence.