A true tale of decadence, greed, and murder

In a Lifetime movie, John Stamos plays one of two brothers who wind up murdered. (BROOKE PALMER/LIFETIME TELEVISION)

There is cocaine. There is a lot of cash. And there is the doctoring of financial books. Before the murders are explained in Lifetime's "The Two Mr. Kissels," tonight at 9, there is mucho decadence, set in glitzy mansions that are as bright and gilded as Nancy Grace's hair.

But I can't say the movie, based on a true crime story, is mucho fun. This is the typical tale of how Wall Street money - and greed, and the high life, and materialism, and bankruptcy - changes everything for the worse. We've seen it on shows like "Law & Order" and a host of other Lifetime movies, and it's done this time around with almost no distinction. Rich people think they're immune to the law, they misbehave, and they get caught. The story opens with a murder, and pretty much ends in jail. Fill in the middle.

The only time when "The Two Mr. Kissels" really grabbed me was an hour or so in, when Robin Tunney's tightly wound Nancy Kissel drugs her husband, Rob (Anson Mount), bludgeons him, wraps him in a rug, and sends him to a storage facility. She does all of this without a hint of remorse, in between getting massages, taking care of the kids, and hooking up with her cable-guy lover. Her callousness and cluelessness has a spoof-like quality, and Tunney - now a regular on "The Mentalist" - works the comedy for all it's worth. It's the moment when the movie, directed by Edward Bianchi and written by Maria Nation, takes on the tone and swagger it had so sorely been lacking.

John Stamos plays the other Kissel brother, Andrew, who is murdered a few years after Rob. He's a con man who pursues a honest family life with a market analyst and TV host named Hayley (Gretchen Egolf), but then can't seem to stay on the straight and narrow.

Stamos tries to play dissolute convincingly, but he never quite succeeds. Right from the start, when a waitress at his brother's wedding asks him, "Who are you?" and he responds, "Who would you like me to be?," you can tell he's not going to bring on enough tragic excess and tawdriness to keep things interesting.

If "The Two Mr. Kissels" had been more stylized and consistently humorous, it might have been a wry good time. As it stands, though, the movie is little more than an unimaginatively fictionalized account of pathology and murder. It has nothing on "The E! True Hollywood Story."

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. For more on TV, visit boston.com/ae/tv/blog/.