Word of Honor

Condensing a complex novel into 90 or so minutes of actual movie is always tricky, but the narrative seams are particularly apparent in “Word of Honor” — an otherwise well-made military drama worth seeing principally for Don Johnson’s flinty performance. Hardly groundbreaking, this TNT pic is interesting if only by virtue of its timing, focusing on a military atrocity that parallels recent Vietnam-era revelations, even as sister channel CNN carries its own harrowing images from a different far-flung portion of the globe.

Piecing together its mystery through extensive, sometimes conflicting flashbacks, the film also features Johnson’s son, Jesse, as the star’s younger self, sporting a resemblance so striking that Disney’s animatronic unit couldn’t have constructed a more convincing replica.

Based on a novel by Nelson DeMille, whose previous adaptations include “The General’s Daughter,” “Honor” centers on a successful businessman, Benjamin Tyson (Johnson), suddenly accused of having presided over a mass murder in a Vietnamese hospital three decades earlier.

Unwilling to speak about those wartime events, Tyson finds himself on trial and his family thrust into the midst of a tabloid hurricane, down to allegations about his wife (Sharon Lawrence) and her past sexual peccadilloes.

On paper, the producers have assembled a top-notch cast, with Jeanne Tripplehorn as the JAG officer investigating the case, Arliss Howard as Tyson’s country lawyer and John Heard as the whistle-blower, driven by pangs of conscience as he faces his mortality due to cancer.

Put together, though, the movie adds up to considerably less than the sum of its parts, as a team of writers and director Robert Markowitz have little time to develop characters or set up plot twists. Utterly unconvincing, for example, is the only way to describe a survivor who conveniently provides the key to unlocking what really happened, prompting trite “oohs” and “aahs” from the courtroom gallery.

Although offscreen antics have occasionally overshadowed his career, Johnson remains a somewhat underrated actor — not for “Nash Bridges” and “Miami Vice,” necessarily, but for film roles such as “Guilty as Sin” or even “A Boy and His Dog.” Here, he’s a tightly coiled man with a tortured past, hiding a murky relationship with the platoon he hopes to protect through his silence.

No one else fares especially well, with Tripplehorn (her billing notwithstanding) proving hard to read and underdeveloped in limited screen time. When she talks in the production notes about the nuanced roles and attraction between her character and Tyson, you have to wonder whether she has seen the finished product.

In spite of its shortcomings, the film delivers reasonably powerful and timely messages by sheer force of its subject matter — weighing the difficulty in judging morality in time of war, as well as the dubious morality of media swarms in the modern age.

They are both points worth making. Alas, you just wish “Word of Honor” had honored those ideals better by making them a bit more artfully.