William Dear has a gift for quaint humor. In "Harry and the Hendersons" he shaped the scenes as if he were seeing them through a convex lens. He seemed to be delighting in the glimmers of absurdity he brought out in the characters. Of course, with the considerable talents of leads John Lithgow and Melinda Dillon at his disposal, it was hard not to pull off the capricious meeting of Bigfoot and friends.
With "If Looks Could Kill," he faces the problem of matching this lightness of touch and tone (the mark of something mature and adult) with the sentiments of teen rock-loving audiences. These kind of fans take no prisoners. It's either all or nothing with them, like a religion, even if their ideals don't seem much different from garden-variety churchgoers. The humor that is likely to come out of this is more often darkly self-deprecating, unremittingly desperate, and garishly self-immolating or self-pitying. Hardly fertile ground for lighthearted laughs.
Plus the point of this movie is as part encouragement and part reprimand for highschoolers who have not taken study (in this case, French class) seriously enough. Dear and crew succeed at poking fun at the mindatory tone of the script embodied by the outraged father (Gerry Mendecino) but fail with the vigilant French teacher (Robin Bartlett's Mrs. Grober comes across like fingernails on a blackboard.) The hero (Richard Grieco) runs bemused (He's mistaken for a renowned secret agent.) through unexpected adventures, only one of which has anything to do with speaking French, which only reinforces the incorrigible's assertion that learning a foreign language is a waste of time.
The movie is a little long on espionage gadgetry, and short on erudition. It might as well be saying "Be a spy; have fun. Be bilingual; so what?" As the antagonists Augustus Steranko and Ilsa Grunt, Roger Rees and Linda Hunt deliver their lines with enough skill and style that the moral of the movie should be "Forget French; amuse yourself with English!" Unfortunately, they are overwhelmed by the violence the script requires of them. We are forced to look back on its cheap sentiment for its mock hero and cherub-faced heroine (Gabrielle Anwar). But again the girl speaks English, so who needs French?
If this movie is a failure at what it sets out to accomplish, what's left of it--the plans of a power-hungry madman to rule a unified Europe uncovered and foiled--zips past us without too much pain, and the casting of Richard Grieco as the dupe who learns his lesson just in time feels right. His pointed eyebrows add just the right touch of perversity to a movie that revels in its rebel pose. With Michael Sidberry, Geraldine James, and as Anwar's father, a nod to real rock heroes, Roger Daltrey.
