- Title: If Looks Could Kill (1991)
- IMDb: link
Released six years before Mike Myers would bring Austin Powers to life in a spy parody about a man literally out of time, Richard Grieco stars as a high school student thrust into the spy world in the most unlikely way possible. Flashback Friday looks back at 1991’s If Looks Could Kill.
The movie has a little bit of everything for Bond fans including Linda Hunt in the role of an evil henchwoman playing homage to Lotte Lenya‘s Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love. We also get Roger Rees as the typical evil businessman seeking world domination, plenty of spy gadgets, beautiful women including Gabrielle Anwar and Geraldine James, fast cars, and a tongue-in-cheek plot where the villain is literally crushed to death by his own greed.
The film opens with the high school graduation of Michael Corben (Grieco) who learns he hasn’t earned his diploma by his failure to pass French. To his father’s bewilderment, the only way his son can make up the credit is to travel to France for the summer with the French Club. And so we learn that Michael is one of those people who somehow always lands on his feet.
It just so happens that an American spy, also named Michael Corben, is heading for France on the same plane. While the villains kill the spy, the sudden appearance of another Michael Corben makes them (and the Government agents who Michael meets overseas for the first time) believe the real spy is still alive. As so Michael finds himself skipping out of his French Club tour in favor of fast sports cars, fancy gadgets, and an assignment which will lead him further and further into danger. Speaking of danger, both the spies and the evil-doers mistake the French Teacher (Robin Bartlett) and the rest of the students as assassins working their own angle in the case. And so the wackiness ensues.
Largely forgotten, If Looks Could Kill is far from a perfect film, but it is smart enough to highlight its strengths and the North by Northwest mistaken identity gimmick while not forcing Grieco to shoulder too much of the film on his own by offering some strong villains, enjoyable running gags (such as the French Club’s revolving door of bus drivers), and several fun supporting characters (including Roger Daltrey as a super-spy) thrown in along the way as well. Michael Corben gets far more out of his trip to France than he expected, and, for the right audience, so do we.