“Face Down”: The Movie Channel, the less popular sibling operation to pay cable’s Showtime, serves up a fairly engaging original murder mystery with this movie (8 p.m.). Joe Mantegna is suitably desultory as an ex-cop private eye who gets caught up in the various intrigues of a beautiful woman (Kelli Maroney) with a mental imbalance. Director/writer Thomas Eberhardt (“Night of the Comet”) does a superb job sketching his characters with a few quick strokes, and the actors, also including Peter Riegert (“Local Hero”) as a cop who hates Mantegna, make good use of the material. But Eberhardt is less deft at providing an overarching plot. It doesn’t have the logical holes that most movies of this genre do, but it also is only moderately successfully at providing surprise or suspense. Thirtysomethings trying to bury the embarrassing musical enthusiasms of their youth will blush at the presence of Adam Ant as an art gallery owner. Elsewhere tonight, HBO’s biopic (7 p.m.) about the only man with taller hair than Lyle Lovett, boxing promoter Don King, is a movie that “doesn’t pull punches,” according to sports media columnist Michael Hirsley.
