Although in some ways as capable as...

Although in some ways as capable as its ex-Marine, ex-CIA hero (Harrison Ford), Patriot Games (ABC Sunday at 9 p.m.) could use more of the gentleman’s movie. The second of technomaster Tom Clancy’s novels to be filmed, it’s a perfectly adequate 1992 action thriller-that neither disappoints nor exhilarates. Now a Naval Academy instructor, Ford’s John Patrick Ryan, in London to give a speech and enjoy a family vacation, almost literally stumbles on an attempt by Irish terrorists to assassinate a cousin (James Fox) of the queen.

A 1990 revisionist western, with Australian aborigines replacing Native Americans, Quigley Down Under (KTLA Thursday at 8 p.m.) has the panoramic scope of a big-screen epic but the soul of a TV movie. It has an interesting premise: A sharpshooter from Wyoming (Tom Selleck) hires himself out to a slimy cattle baron (reliable scene-stealer Alan Rickman) in Western Australia only to discover his job entails picking off aborigines.

The 1981 George Lucas-Steven Spielberg action extravaganza Raiders of the Lost Ark (KTLA Friday at 8 p.m.), revolving around comic-pulp superhero Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), has a spoof’s light, glancing tone but few jokes. The pace is whiplash and the staging often extraordinary in this cliffhanger--parade about a battle between adventurers and Nazis to find the Ark of the Covenant.

The first half of Lethal Weapon (KCOP Saturday at 6 p.m.)--when Mel Gibson and Danny Glover are sketching in their characters--the 1987 buddy-buddy cop thriller works very well. It’s Gibson’s first big, juicy mythic-hero part since Mad Max--suicidal, crazy, magnetic--and he’s terrific. (So is Glover as his straight man.) After that, it’s as if some anonymous, all-purpose kung fu-L.A. street action unit rolled in and took over the picture, flinging logic to the wind and crashing cars and credibility with wild abandon.

The popular 1992 English film Enchanted April, based on a 70-year-old novel by Elizabeth Von Arnim, (KCET Saturday at 9 p.m.) slides us back to a summery, British past of literary epigrams and romantic yearning. It’s a movie about a vacation--a perfect dream holiday--where all discontent is finally banished in a Portofino villa shimmering with erotic energy and floral splendor. The villa’s four women vacationers initially seem a mismatch--a desperately optimistic type (Josie Lawrence) and her new straight-arrow acquaintance (Miranda Richardson) and their companions, an elderly literary snob (Joan Plowright) and an idle rich beauty (Polly Walker)--are ably guided by director Mike Newell.