TV REVIEWS : ‘Trapped’ Crafts Its Thrills on NBC

Just the ticket for quake watchers, “Trouble Shooters: Trapped Beneath the Earth” (at 9 p.m. Sunday on NBC, Channels 4, 36 and 39) is a well-crafted, largely subterranean action-thriller about the effort to rescue tenants whose apartment building has been swallowed by a great fissure in the earth.

It follows in the tradition of recent TV disaster movies inspired by the San Francisco freeway quake and the Oakland fire--except this, mercifully, is fiction.

The common flaw in most of these movies is that the physical action snuffs out characterization so that you’re left with a special-effects movie and a wrenching sound track of crackling flames and tumbling concrete. Happily, that’s not entirely the case in the “Trouble Shooters,” with Kris Kristofferson and David Newsom contributing some emotional dimension as an embattled father-son rescue team.

The real star of this production, working from a scenario by Michael Pavone and Dave Alan Johnson (from a story by Wesley Strick), is veteran director Bradford May (“Bobby and Marilyn”). He takes what very well might have been visually confusing underground action scenes and heightens the mayhem by deftly orchestrating into a clanging harmony the computer graphics, the miniatures and the matte work under production designer James Allen.