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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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072489
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07248900.061
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1990-09-17
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CINEMA, Page 53We Don't Need Another HeroidThe good guys are cyborgs in a pair of summer sequelsBy Richard Corliss
It's an oid-y world out there. Tabloids run factoids about
humanoids on steroids. In a world gone synthetic, why should movies
offer something as organic as a hero? Welcome, then, to the age of
the heroid. In the old days, a hero like Bogart had brains and guts
but also a nagging heart and the seductive scowl of obsession.
Often he failed; sometimes he died. He was real: us, with muscles.
A heroid, though, is just the muscles. He owes more to comic strips
than to romantic or detective fiction. Never really alive, a heroid
cannot die; he must be available for the next assembly-line sequel.
He is the cyborg chauffeur of mechanical movies.
You can hear the clockwork sputtering inside the brawny
breastplate of this week's heroids: Los Angeles supercop Martin
Riggs (Mel Gibson) in Lethal Weapon 2 and Her Majesty's secret
servant James Bond (Timothy Dalton) in Licence to Kill. Both men
are rogue avengers, out for bloody justice against cartels that
have killed or threatened their partners and spouses. Both
pictures, with their suavely depraved drug lords and curt disregard
for constitutional safeguards, play like extended episodes of Miami
Vice. Both scenarios choose their villains from the current list
of least favored nations: South Africa in LW2, a thinly disguised
Panama in Licence. "Remember," Bond's nemesis (Robert Davi) warns
the film's Noriega, "you're only President for Life."
The dealer-diplomats in LW2 are just your ordinary bad guys.
They keep zillions of Krugerrands on hand to finance their
chicanery. They have a getaway helicopter conveniently waiting in
downtown Los Angeles at the end of a car chase that totals dozens
of innocent drivers. Now if only this gang could shoot straight,
they might rid the world of Detectives Riggs and Murtaugh (Danny
Glover) -- and spare moviegoers further sequels to the loathable
smash hit of 1987.
That first movie raised the craft of torture to a low art.
Expect no less in LW2, directed by Richard Donner and written by
Jeffrey Boam. This installment features a surfboard decapitation,
death by carpenter's nail gun, a bomb wired to a very sensitive
seat (plot device lifted from Elmore Leonard's novel Freaky Deaky),
and reduction of the Afrikaaner diaspora by about one-half. As
Riggs tells Murtaugh, "We're back! We're bad! You're black! I'm
mad!" Mad to the max. Riggs may not know how to spell apartheid,
but he knows whom he hates. He even knows how to strike a blow for
American property values. When the Boers perforate his beachside
shack, Riggs finds appropriate recourse. He kills their house.
In Licence to Kill, the bad guys' hideaway blows up real good
too. And there are some great truck stunts. A pity nobody -- not
writers Michael G. Wilson and Richard Maibaum nor director John
Glen -- thought to give the humans anything very clever to do. The
Bond women are pallid mannequins, and so is the misused Dalton --
a moving target in a Savile Row suit. For every plausible reason,
he looks as bored in his second Bond film as Sean Connery did in
his sixth.
Licence's only innovation comes in the closing credits. To
atone for Bond's use of cigarettes, the producers print the Surgeon
General's caveat on the evils of tobacco. Another warning would
have been welcome: CAUTION: EXPOSURE TO HEROIDS MAY CAUSE
SUMMER-MOVIE BURNOUT.