Locklear glides through 'Angels'

Heather Locklear is awesome. Her expressive range is as minimal as the mobility in her upper lip, and her voice has all the passion of a Verizon operator-bot. You could magically transform her into a life-size plastic body cast with an incandescent wig on top, and still she would be Heather Locklear, and still she would be awesome.

Locklear is the main attraction of Lifetime's "Nora Roberts' Angels Fall," the first of four Roberts adaptations Lifetime will run in the next four weeks. It's perversely interesting to watch her glide through the romance thriller, tonight at 9, with all the airs -- if not the talent -- of a brand-name star. With the help of her Aaron Spelling pedigree, she moves like a living version of an airbrushed romance-paperback cover, a female Fabio. As the traumatized heroine, Reece , she never sacrifices her stiff glamour -- or the fabulousness of her coif -- to the rigors of torment.

When we meet Reece, she's on a road trip to escape her demons. In a twist typical of the movie's slavery to formula, Reece's car breaks down in a Wyoming town, and it will take days for the needed engine parts to arrive. Reece pouts -- or at least it looks like Locklear is trying to evoke pouting -- but soon she finds a cooking job at the local diner. She also finds the town's hunk, Brody (Johnathon Schaech ), who is a mystery writer driven to learn all about Reece and her past.

It doesn't take long for Brody, and the whole town, to find out that Reece is the only survivor of a Boston spree killing in which 14 people died. Despite a stay at McLean Hospital, she's still a mess, which we know because Locklear behaves as though she has had a very long day at the shopping mall. Also, a waitress helps us out by telling Reece, "You've got heartbreak written all over you." At one point, a truck backfires and Reece has a post-traumatic freak-out, which Locklear indicates with a knee-plunge her trainer would be awfully proud of.

In Lifetime movies, the men are usually either knights in shining armor or psychos. It's the channel's male take on the madonna-whore complex. In "Angels Fall," Brody is on the sacred side of the coin, and he stands by Reece no matter what. And she needs his loyalty after she witnesses a murder in the woods, and the town thinks she's imagining it. The murder situation heats up, the suspects multiply despite the fact that most viewers will have identified the killer after the first half-hour, Schaech gets one of Lifetime's convenient opportunities to show his six-pack abs, and Locklear proves, once again, that she is, without a doubt, awesome.

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