Released as LADIES GAME abroad, LEGAL TENDER is a mostly routine action film.
Private detective Fix Cleary (Robert Davi) gets involved, via girlfriend Rikki Rennick (Tanya Roberts), who with her brother Bud (Charles McCaughan) runs a bar with an illegal medium-stakes poker game in the back room, in the L.A. drug trade orchestrated by Malcolm Connery (Morton Downey, Jr.),
the psychotic owner of a corrupt savings-and-loan called "The Hearth and Home."
Jag Mundhra's direction is a cut above average for this kind of fare, which is a bit more restrained than usual in its violence quotient. Barry Roberts's screenplay, while talky and illogical in spots, features some memorably flavorful dialogue, e.g. "I feel like a used pair of pantyhose at a
yard sale."
The movie is decently acted, especially by the sturdy Robert Davi, who played one of the better recent Bond villains in LICENCE TO KILL. Following recent appearances in BODY SLAM, PURGATORY, NIGHT EYES and INNER SANCTUM, Tanya Roberts seems determined to inherit Mary Woronov's Queen-of-the-Bs
crown (actually, they both have plenty of competition from Linda Blair and Karen Black), although most of her dependably ample nudity appears--surprisingly--to have been handled by a body double. Ex-TV-talk-show host Morton Downey, Jr., after warming up as a sleazy TV newscaster in PREDATOR 2,
makes a juicy villain, cheerfully killing as many of his own traitorous henchmen as his more predictable enemies. The film, copyright 1990, was released direct-to-video. (Violence, profanity, nudity.) leave a comment
