Swayze looks as good as Chicago in A&E's 'The Beast

Mickey Rourke in "The Wrestler," allow me to present Patrick Swayze in "The Beast."

That's my way of suggesting that Swayze's current comeback is almost as noteworthy as Rourke's. Of course, since Swayze was never much of a star in the first place and was never much more than a studmuffin, whether in "Dirty Dancing" or "Roadhouse," his comeback is a little less prestigious. "The Beast" debuts not as a feature film, but as a TV series at 9 p.m. today on A&E.

Yet "The Beast" instantly reminds a viewer that Swayze did indeed have some chops back in the day, as he once proved in Kathryn Bigelow's "Point Break," and he might be better now than ever, even as he battles pancreatic cancer. His illness has given him a mean, lean look, and he brings it to bear as Chicago undercover FBI agent Charles Barker. In fact, he looks as rough and tumble, as dark and dirty as the city itself, and yes I mean that as a compliment to both town and man.

Understand, I'm not suggesting "The Beast" is great television. It opens with a bunch of guys pointing guns at each other, a cliché it usually takes your run-of-the-mill action movie about 90 minutes to arrive at. And it plays fast and loose with any sort of law-enforcement believability. (At one point Barker matter-of-factly blows up a car in the street with a missile launcher, just to prove to the bad guys that it works.) Yet Swayze and Chicago turn out to be enough to make this engaging television.

After all, it never hurts for a Chicago show to take a break in a blues bar, something "The Beast's" time-slot competitor "ER" on NBC has never managed in all its years shooting 30-second snippets downtown, while the real acting gets done back in Hollywood.

None of that for "The Beast." Not only does one of its big undercover deals go down in front of the Merchandise Mart at the site David Letterman once called "the Pez-dispenser Hall of Fame," but it delights in the pitched staircases and heavy wooden doors of our city's apartment buildings. Michael Dinner directs with a sense of style, using wide-angle lenses to fill the frame in town, then crane shots to capture the wide-open expanses of the surrounding countryside. This Chicago is authentic, even if the crime-fighting is not.

In a predictable bit of cop-show formula, Swayze's Barker is a rogue cop mentoring Travis Fimmel's Ellis Dove, still wet behind the ears as an undercover agent. When Barker threatens to shoot an arms dealer to get information out of him, Dove later says it's "not exactly bureau protocol."

"Screw bureau protocol," Barker barks back.

Despite some hard lessons, as when Barker throttles Dove for drawing his badge in a jam, shouting, "Never present in the real world," Dove develops a grudging respect for him.

"He looks at you and sees himself 20 years ago," a fellow FBI colleague tells Dove. "Does that scare you? Because it should."

Yet it gets really scary when Dove is suddenly recruited by FBI Internal Affairs to act as a double agent in an investigation of Barker and his more questionable dealings, of which there seem to be plenty. If he's no Vic Mackey of "The Shield," neither is he an upright Dennis Farina of "Crime Story."

That almost-forgotten series was one of the better Chicago-based forays into the TV cop drama, but it didn't last long here and was soon resettled in Las Vegas. Yet our city is enjoying a real vogue now, between "The Dark Knight" and TNT's "Leverage," and "The Beast" has the look of something determined to stick around. Here's hoping Swayze is able to do the same long enough to fully enjoy his late-career resurgence.

• Ted Cox writes Tuesday and Thursday in L&E and Friday in Sports and Time out!