LICENSED TO LOVE AND KILL (1979)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*


The script for the second adventure of superspy Charles Bind is no better than it was for the first exploit, NUMBER ONE OF THE SECRET SERVICE. However, the first film was so cheap that it resorted to having the hero attacked by an assassin wearing dimestore vampire fangs, so in terms of FX the Charles Bind series had nowhere to go but up.

This time Bind (Gareth Hunt) is assigned to find a missing British diplomat. Bind's M-light boss doesn't approve of the agent's wastrel ways, and warns Bind that if he doesn't straighten up, "Number One" (the film's 007-style nickname for Bind) may be replaced by "Ultra One," who's supposedly as good as Bind at fighting and shooting. At first it sounds like this is yet another recycling of a standard spy-comedy joke about some imitator being threatened with meeting the real thing. Instead, Bind's competitor, an American named Jensen Fury, is one of Bind's main adversaries in the film.

Fury-- played by a Brit actor doing a very bad accent, possibly based on that of Clint Eastwood-- has become the foremost henchman for an American-but-with-a-Brit-accent senator named Lucifer Orchid. Apparently Orchid's trying to replace important people with robot replicas, though his scheme barely plays any real role in the narrative. Instead, as soon as Bind shows up on Orchid's doorstep, the mastermind spends most of the picture setting up various devices or traps to slay the super-agent. Fury, for his part, resents the idea that anyone might consider Bind a rival, and repeatedly tries to show off his macho prowess by shooting and/or humiliating Bind. In comparison to the threadbare NUMBER ONE movie, writer-director Lindsay Shonteff manages to come up with a moderately impressive array of menaces. such as a swimming pool full of acid and a stripper who has razor-blades attached to her pasties and can rotate them so fast that they can shred wood. Sadly, Shonteff also repeats one of the "gags" from the first film, where a martial female turns out to be a man in drag-- which allegedly appears in the third and last film as well. Bind, for his part, gets an even greater high-tech upgrade, including a flying car, a force field able to repel bombs, and huge saws that pop out of his car to slice and dice a pursuing auto.

Very little of the script is actually funny, but it's such a catalog of absurdities that LICENSED is at least more diverting than NUMBER ONE. One online commentary asserted that the first actor to play Bind, Nicky Henson, was much better than Gareth (NEW AVENGERS) Hunt. This is quite true, but Hunt's stolid demeanor, as he plays his smarmy-handsome-guy part straight, works better for this material. In my NUMBER ONE review I noted that Shonteff didn't equal even the average Eurospy flick in terms of employing comely actresses, but LICENSED has some nice moments of feminine pulchritude-- though the woman playing the deadly stripper doesn't work out too well.