ESPN continues its exploration of the "E" in its name (it stands for "Entertainment") with a new TV movie, "CodeBreakers" (9 p.m. Saturday), a decent but not outstanding film about an early 1950s football team cheating scandal at West Point.

Unlike some of ESPN's earlier efforts, criticized in some quarters for their use of profanity, "CodeBreakers" does not go to egregious extremes as it depicts a scheme concocted by football players to keep their grades up and stay in the good graces of Coach Earl "Red" Blaik (Scott Glenn).

Running back George Holbrook (Jeff Roop, a Carnegie Mellon University grad) falls behind in his studies and gets pulled into a cheating scheme with other football players. A student who's good in English will take an English test and immediately write down all the questions and answers and pass those along to other football players who have yet to take the test.

When Holbrook tells roommate and best friend Brian Nolan (Zachery Bryan, "Home Improvement") that he can get him help with his studies, Nolan feels the West Point honor code has been violated and tells the West Point commandant what he's learned.

Bryan, who played a lot of bullying meatheads after his stint as one of the sons on "Home Improvement," breaks that pattern with his role in "CodeBreakers" and proves he is capable of playing a sympathetic character.

Where "CodeBreakers" fails is in its attempt to cover too much ground. The film tries to show the pressure players are under, and it also hints at an internal political struggle between Blaik and Commandant Harkins (Jude Ciccolella, "24"), but the script by G. Ross Parker doesn't make clear why there's animosity between the two men save for one scene in which Blaik won't let Harkins and a visiting dignitary observe football practice.

"CodeBreakers" is set against the backdrop of the Korean War, but it doesn't so much loom as get mentioned every now and again, which sort of fits with the film's haphazard attempts to pull together all the pieces of what has the potential to be, but never quite is, a dramatic, involving story.

"Painkiller Jane"

Based on a mid-1990s comic book, the TV movie "Painkiller Jane" (9 p.m. Saturday, Sci Fi Channel) is what's called a "backdoor pilot," meaning it can stand on its own as a one-off movie, but it also could become a weekly series.

Though after watching the movie, I'm not sure what the point of a series would be. More on that later.

The series begins quite differently than the comic book with Jane (Emmanuelle Vaugier) as a soldier on a mission to destroy drug labs in Chechnya instead of as an undercover cop out to take down a mobster. But the idea is the same as Jane gets ambushed and exposed to something that makes her indestructible and able to heal from wounds with no medical treatment.

Her superior officer, Col. Watts (Richard Roundtree), wants to figure out what happened to her, so he enlists the aid of a biotoxicologist, Dr. Graham Knight (Tate Donovan, "The O.C."). But Jane doesn't like captivity and escapes from military custody, hooking up with a small-time thief (Eric Dane), who paints himself as more Robin Hood than run-of-the-mill hood.

Written and executive-produced by John Harrison ("Dune," "Children of Dune"), who grew up in Oakland and Oakmont, "Painkiller Jane" is an odd duck. It begins promisingly enough, then gets bogged down in setting up Jane chaffing at her military keepers before becoming more action-packed once she escapes.

Then the story twists and then twists again, revealing some major plot holes in an effort to tie things up in a bow and then untie them enough to allow for a possible ongoing series. But I'm not sure what the series would be: Jane playing cat-and-mouse with a recurring bad guy? That would get old quick.

All self-assured swagger, Vaugier tries her best to channel Angelina Jolie, who would have been perfect in this part if this had been a big-screen project, while Donovan is engaging early in the film before becoming an over-the-top caricature.