MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Looks’: A Wan Pseudo-Bond Wanna-Be

If looks alone could kill, then the new teen thriller “If Looks Could Kill” (citywide) might be the movie it obviously wants to be: a fast, slick, funny, drop-dead gorgeous, pseudo-James Bond, rock ‘n’ roll roller-coaster ride. But it isn’t.

The filmmakers here seem to have lavished all their energies on the physical appearance of “Looks,” none on its heart or brains. They shoot in castles, in jetliners, in vast, swanky hotels and casinos, in acres of blossoming French (actually Canadian) countryside.

They fill the screen with lissome, barely dressed lovelies and a roguish, flirty-eyed young rake and pop them in and out of satin-sheeted boudoirs. They zoom them down mountain roads in red super-Maseratis.

The whole movie--a pseudo-Hitchcockian “Wrong Man” thriller, about a wise-cracking high schooler on a French class trip, mistaken for an American agent and dropped into a James Bond parody--drenches us in haute couture and high life. Director William Dear and cinematographer Doug Milsome (“Full Metal Jacket”) keep using virtuoso, tilt-angled, deep-focus effects to make sure we see every inch of the over-decorated sets.

One can’t fault them for this. Dear, Milsome and production designer Guy J. Comtois have almost figured out a way to make junk play: to make flat lines, banal caricatures and perfunctory plot developments palatable.

The movie’s script is pure marketing hook. That’s obviously what the producers wanted, so one probably can’t blame the writer, Darren Star, for delivering it.

But one can blame him for lacking wit and ideas.

The premise is less an inspiration than a sentence that’s been passed on the movie. There’s a villainess out of “From Russia With Love” (Linda Hunt doing a Lotte Lenya imitation as “Ilse Grunt”) and a villain out of “Casino Royale” (Roger Rees, of “Nicholas Nickleby”).

Star Richard Grieco (late of TV’s “21 Jump Street” and “Booker”) is amiable enough, even sexy in an engaging, low-key way, and he stays fairly relaxed in the more preposterous cliffhangers.

But his alleged moral development--somehow all this nonsense turns him from a feckless goof-off into Superman--is more humorous than the script’s alleged jokes.

The last time I reviewed a William Dear movie, “Harry and the Hendersons,” I was probably overly rough on it. Dear has a big, bright, bumptious style. He keeps the action lucid, the scenes popping. But “If Looks Could Kill” (rated PG-13, for sex and violence) is a big, expensive cul-de-sac for him and everyone else: slick, quick, empty. It’s another trailer-movie.

And, as with all the others, once you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen the movie too.

‘IF LOOKS COULD KILL’

Richard Grieco: Michael Corben

Linda Hunt: Ilsa Grunt

Roger Rees: Augustus Steranko

Robin Bartlett: Mrs. Grober

A Warner Bros. Films presentation of a Craig Zadan production. Director William Dear. Producers Craig Zadan, Neil Meron. Executive producer Elliot Schink. Screenplay by Darren Star. Cinematographer Doug Milsome. Editor John F. Link. Costumes Mary McLeod. Music David Foster. Production design Guy F. Comtois. Art director Real Proulx. Set decorators Gilles Aird, Jean Kazemirchuk. With Geraldine James, Roger Daltrey. Running time: 1 hour, 28 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG-13 (violence, sexual situations).