Which one is this? The revenge movie that no one likes (except Matthew Price).
Who’s who in this one? Dalton (Bond); Brown (M); Llewellyn (Q); Bliss (Moneypenny); Hedison (Leiter).
Where did you first encounter this one? I don’t think I saw it in theatres because of the rating – but I would have caught up with it fairly immediately on VHS or pay TV.
Who’s the bad guy, and what does he want? Zitty Robert Davi as equally zitty drug kingpin Franz Sanchez, who wants to get the money, then get the power, then get the women.
Who are the Bond girls? Carey Lowell as prudish American pilot Pam Bouvier, and Talisa Soto as Sanchez’s moll – who, in a refreshing turn for the Bond franchise, does not end up as death-bait.
Opening number? Gladys Knight belting out a huge adult contemporary ballad against nude ladies dancing through sniper sights, casino tables, and lenses, in an unmotivated “camera” theme.
What’s memorable about this one? Lots of people being fed to sharks. Bond getting his license revoked. Benicio Del Toro. A fairly kickass final action sequence involving tanker trailers on a mountain. The end of Timothy Dalton’s mission, far too soon.
What did you rate it out of ten, from memory? 6, more for ambition than achievement. Jesus, Wayne Newton’s in the damn thing!
What do you rate it now, having seen it again? Well, I’m not ready to go all the way to “Price is right,” but it’s better than I recalled, while still being noticeably lumpy – perhaps a 7.5 overall.
I’ve jumped from the franchise’s purported all-time high with 1965’s Goldfinger, to the ostensible end of the original Bond regime: 1989’s License to Kill. It’s the great sucking chest wound of transition for the franchise; the last proper Cubby Broccoli film, the last (of two) Timothy Dalton films, the last John Glen film, the last Maurice Binder title sequence, and the last instalment for Robert Brown’s M. Perhaps more significantly, it’s the last film before the Wall came down, while also being the first James Bond movie not to use an Ian Fleming title or much of his source material. (The film’s original, and better, title – License Revoked, from a Fleming short story – was changed by American marketing wags.) The times, they are a’ changing, and the Bond series in 1989 faced a very real scarcity of its own natural resources. The movies needed to strike out into areas of their own invention or fold themselves up with the last of the Fleming source novels – and in a bracing bit of in-franchise experimentation that went over like a wet fart at the time, License to Kill is a darker, realistic Bond movie, with nary a volcano lair or space laser in sight.
We can assign some of the retrofit to leading man Dalton, of whom I am a huge booster. He is not, certainly, my pick for the best James Bond, but he might yet be my favourite; he was the first “new Bond” ushered into the franchise in my lifetime, and I collected all the magazines and trading cards back in 1987. (He is also the only Bond actor to snub me in real life, which is a longer story.) I can see where all the Dalton detractors get their ammunition, though: Dalton is categorically unable to carry at least two of the secret agent’s key attributes, playing instead a sad, serious Bond. He can’t do the jokes and he can’t convince us that he wants, or even needs, sex. As Bond, Dalton is – oddly – all heart. Whatever messiness might be required by his job, Dalton’s Bond has an inherent nobility that can never sell any intonations of Bond-as-bastard. In his way, Dalton is the most heroic of the Bonds, full of righteous indignation and moral certitude, which seems to fit the times and the series’ transition towards action spectacle. It’s best to think of him as dark – a Bond painfully aware of the world, and all the evils within it, which is what gives License to Kill its fire. For good or ill, Kill is a Bond movie that would have been impossible for at least the previous 25 years in the franchise. Cripes, Bond’s even smoking again – and this was at the tail end of the Surgeon General’s decade!
Of all the death-bait in the whole franchise, it’s Felix Leiter’s new bride Della – killed by Sanchez in retribution for Leiter’s highwire drug bust in the cold open – that stings me the most. Bond’s anguished “…Della!” at finding her lifeless body suggests a memory of Tracy, which carries forward into Bond’s mission of vengeance against those who killed his best friend’s wife. The cold open, incidentally, is one of the best in the series – sharp, confident, and single-mindedly dark. It anticipates The Dark Knight Rises’ plane heist by 23 years, having Bond “fish” for Sanchez’ plane in flight by attaching a tow cable from another aircraft above. Leiter is here played by David Hedison – who has played the role before, but not in the previous film, where Leiter was played by someone else against Timothy Dalton, making Leiter the endlessly confusing character who has been played by more actors than James Bond himself. Leiter and James go happily galavanting off on Leiter’s wedding day to play cops and robbers, but Felix gets fed to the sharks for his trouble. License to Kill is the only Bond movie that could accurately be called “gruesome,” all shark tanks and rotary crushers and bodies being pulped and eaten.
The first act of License to Kill has an unfussy focus that anticipates future franchise retrofits like Casino Royale brilliantly. This tract of the film is capped off by a great heist of Krest’s boat by Bond, who has quit the British Secret Service and befuddles his enemies through traps and turnarounds before escaping (by barefoot waterskiiing!) behind a departing sea plane. Unfortunately, from this point forward, License to Kill becomes needlessly bilious as it attempts to tap the requisite bases of a Bond epic, in a manner unnecessary to the current story. Suddenly there’s a Q scene, and a larger world domination scheme for the drug lord, and even a ninja attack. And Wayne Newton.
But probably the worst of all is simply the dead-duck love interest for Bond. Given the story points, License to Kill would have been a perfectly good episode in which to have Bond forego the usual sexual pleasantries, but the film isn’t that far ahead of its time. It doesn’t help that Carey Lowell is abjectly terrible as Pam Bouvier – terribly written, but hardly pulling out a screen dynamic that can match her leading man, either. Talisa Soto as the second-tier Bond girl is marginally better, and it’s fun to watch her feed Bond bits of information from Sanchez’s crime organization without formally declaring herself to be on his side. In fact, you could eliminate the second act of License to Kill altogether – where the picture seems to be moving in fifteen directions at once – and end up with a sharper picture, as Bond Yojimbos the drug lords into killing each other. Given that the film was shot in Mexico explicitly to save money, the headlong rush towards needless scope in what is otherwise a tighter, more focused story is frustrating.
Dalton never looks more like he’s about to murder someone than when his role requires him to laugh, which the back half of License to Kill frequently does, as Bond worms his way into Sanchez’ operation. Q gets to become a field agent in a lovely group of scenes as Bond’s unofficial support in South America, and Dalton fires off one of his most telling lines – “Let’s make this a proper family reunion – give me a gun” – as he, Pam and Q work to subvert, apparently, the entire political and industrial system of a fictional tin-pot dictatorship called Isthmus. License to Kill doesn’t entirely accomplish its intentions, but its effort remains brave, even today; and the ending – where a beaten, senseless Bond emerges from the tanker trailer wreckage to wreak final fiery vengeance on Sanchez – is a sensational grace note on Dalton’s short, weird career as 007.
From A to Bond counts down the Bond movies, in alphabetical order, every day of the week leading up to the release of Skyfall. If you live in Toronto, License to Kill is playing at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on November 20 and January 3. If not, the entire series is available on blu-ray.