In the European nation of Orenbourg, the wealthy Augustus Steranko is in the middle of a shady deal with France's finance minister to acquire gold. When the Frenchman attempts to back out, Steranko promptly has him killed. Suddenly Britain's top secret agent Blade assaults Steranko's mansion, fighting his way through his guards, only to be felled by Steranko's diminutive right-hand woman Ilsa Grunt and her deadly whip.
With Blade dead, the bigwigs over at MI6 need a replacement agent and fast. To this end, they enlist the aid of the CIA, who agree to loan them their best agent, one Michael Corben. A traitor in MI6 informs Ilsa of Agent Corben's impending arrival, and she leaves for America.
In America, a different Michael Corben, a high school student, has a problem. Graduation has come up, but since he cut his French classes to go partying all year long, he doesn't have enough credits to pass; and at Edsel High, if you don't pass your foreign language class, you don't graduate. Fortunately, though, French teacher Mrs. Grober is going to give him one last chance. The French class is going on a field trip to France in the summer, and is Michael accompanies them, he'll be allowed to pass.
So it is that a mixup occurs at the airport. Ilsa waylays and murders Michael Corben the CIA agent, whilst the identically-named Michael Corben the high school student unwittingly takes the dead spy's place on board the plane bound for France. He gets to sit in first class, much to Mrs. Grober's annoyance. Upon arriving in France, Michael is shanghaied by a British agent named Richardson and whisked away to a top-secret lab, despite his protests that he isn't the Michael Corben the British think he is. His protests end abruptly when he's shown the cool, gadget- laden red Lotus sports car he'll get to drive, and he decides he'll play along with the spy gig for a while if it means he gets to play with gadgets and avoid his fussy teacher.
Meanwhile, Ilsa, thinking she murdered a decoy, assigns Zigesfeld, an assassin with a golden robotic hand, to follow and kill the "real" Agent Corben. Also tailing Michael is a mysterious woman with some connection to the murdered Blade. Additionally, Mrs. Grober's noisy search for her missing student has MI6 thinking she is an assassin out to kill Michael; likewise, Steranko thinks she's working for MI6. Both groups set out to have her and her class eliminated, and when they end up captured by Zigesfeld and taken to Steranko's mansion, it's up to Michael and the mysterious woman to rescue them and stop Steranko's evil plans.
Written by The Monster Squad director Fred Dekker, If Looks Could Kill is a love letter to the over-the-top action films of the 60's and 70's. Unfortunately, it's a disjointed movie, tonally. On the one hand, it's too simplistic and juvenile for adults... but at the same time it's too complicated and violent for kids. It's definitely a film that failed to find an audience. Also, despite supposedly being a spoof (it tends to get categorized as a comedy), its content is played dead serious a lot of the time, especially towards the end.
This was supposed to be Richard Grieco's big break, but, alas, the movie underperformed and he never quite made it. The really great performances, though, are the villains. Roger Rees is a bit hard to swallow as the hammy Steranko, while Linda Hunt, who projects subtle, quiet menace as Ilsa, and Canadian actor Tom Rack, who has only one line in the entire film, and acts primarily with his eyes and mannerisms, and in so doing conveys barely-suppressed homicidal mania. He's definitely one of cinema's scarier henchmen characters.
The action sequences are hit and miss. Blade's assault on Steranko's mansion at the beginning is neat, but is over too quickly and poorly edited. The car chase in France is slow-moving and kind of uninteresting despite the soundtrack trying to convince us otherwise. This leaves the climax, involving a shootout with hordes of henchmen who can't aim (of course), a fistfight with Zigesfeld, and finally an attempted escape by Steranko which ends in one of the most hilariously awful helicopter crashes ever put to film. If the first half disappoints when it comes to action, then the finale definitely delivers.
