If you're planning to ride around the Spanish countryside in rusty armor on a quest for wrongs to right, here's a tip. Take Bob Hoskins along. Mr. Hoskins's turn as Sancho Panza, all delightful mugging, is the strongest asset of "Don Quixote," the film that TNT is offering tomorrow night.

With a goofy grin and a cockney accent, he romps through this otherwise subdued drama. While the other actors keep things cool, classy and oh so dignified, Mr. Hoskins has some lowdown fun.

"He's stolen: my dear donkey, my best friend," he howls at one point. "My 'eart's broken. That's all." He often seems to be the only character on view who has an 'eart. That's all.

John Lithgow plays the title role in this visually lush adaptation of Cervantes's early-17th-century tale of the addled country gentleman of La Mancha who lives within his dreams of the golden time "when the true knights roamed the world and did good deeds for no reward," as the script has him say. With Sancho, the original sidekick, the deluded don rides off to seek adventure, unaware of how ridiculous he is.

This enduring story has inspired painters, composers and choreographers. It has been filmed at least 15 times, starting in the days of silent movies, and was turned into a beloved stage musical that also became a film. So the creators of this latest effort can be forgiven if they don't find anything new in the material.

The writer here is the redoubtable John Mortimer, a gleefully insightful student of the human condition whose bushel of novels and scripts includes the "Rumpole of the Bailey" series and the television version of "Brideshead Revisited." But beyond their Sancho, Mr. Mortimer and the director, Peter Yates, treat their source with subdued reverence, carefully compressing Cervantes in the manner of a Classics Illustrated comic book.

There's little here in the way of involving drama, although Don Quixote gets some flowery speeches. Recruiting Sancho as his squire, he says: "There is a world outside La Mancha. There is a great elsewhere, my neighbor. And there we may both find fame and fortune." Sancho isn't persuaded. When Don Quixote offers honor, Sancho asks: "Honor? How much does honor pay by the hour?" Still, he goes along, motivated more by a mixture of curiosity and respect than by the prospect of the promised riches he'll never see.

You may feel the same way about this journey. The people at Hallmark Entertainment live up to their reputation for memorable images. The views of the Spanish countryside are more inviting than nearly anything you'll see on television this month.

But the production company should have given its busy special effects team a breather. The film is diminished by its attempts to visualize Don Quixote's delusions. When he rides against the windmills, they turn into menacing giants before your eyes. Had the filmmakers left the windmills as windmills and trusted the viewer to see the giants in the hero's yearning eyes, they would have enriched their project.

Mr. Lithgow, with an appropriately woeful countenance, looks as brittle and gaunt as an El Greco figure. But his Don Quixote is more nuts than noble. You can never quite believe in his vision, so when he must ultimately relinquish his dream, there seems to be little pain, for him or for you.

The rest of the cast is crisply professional. In roles that are little more than cameos, Vanessa Williams is the peasant whom Don Quixote imagines to be his lady fair, and Isabella Rossellini is a bored duchess whose sadistic treatment helps to smother his dream of knighthood.

It's left to the versatile Mr. Hoskins (just last week he was strutting across the screen as General Noriega) to breathe life into these proceedings. That glint in his eye seems to say, "Let's 'ave some fun 'ere." Happily, he does.