Licence to Kill (1989)

Where I thought The Living Daylights was a welcome return to form for James Bond if a little unmemorable, I have much nicer things to say about Timothy Dalton’s second outing as the British superspy.  Although Licence to Kill isn’t a perfect Bond film, it does make me wonder what a third Dalton entry might have looked like.

After his old pal Felix Leiter is attacked on his wedding night, James Bond (Dalton) springs into revenge mode against the man responsible, drug lord Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi).  Cut off from official British support and on the run from his own friends as well as Sanchez’s, Bond teams up with Sanchez’s pilot Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell) to bring the kingpin’s empire down around him.

If The Living Daylights was a throwback to the Sean Connery era, Licence to Kill is definitely a precursor to the current Daniel Craig incarnation.  Dalton’s Bond is dead serious here, more so than in his debut film.  In fact, Bond only starts cracking one-liners at the very end.  It’s entirely consistent with the tone of the film, which is really quite grim, though it does seem a little less like James Bond and more like a generic action hero.  Either way, Dalton is an infinitely compelling lead; his determination and moral outrage is very well played, and it’s great fun to watch him scheme against Sanchez.

That level of intellectual sophistication is another very welcome tonal shift in Licence to Kill.  Where some Bond films have been content to let Bond blunder into the plot (or, more frequently, have the plot assigned to him), Dalton’s Bond takes charge almost immediately, shooting out when necessary but also – and this is something I’d love to see Bond do more often – setting up dominoes and tricking Sanchez into knocking them over.  It’s nearly impossible for me to reconcile the fact that this film is directed by John Glen, who previously inflicted Octopussy upon us.  It’s probably Glen’s best directorial outing; he keeps the pace moving for the entire runtime with no real dead spots.

In a weird way, Davi fills the humor void left by Bond with a litany of droll puns; for example, after feeding a man to a shark, he notes wryly, “He disagreed with something that ate him” (a line from Fleming’s Live and Let Die novel).  Elsewhere, he carves out a romantic rival’s heart and calls it “my little valentine.”  Davi and/or the screenplay is obviously trying to set Sanchez up as Bond’s true opposite number, though the comparison doesn’t quite work with such a humorless Bond.  It does make Sanchez a memorable villain, a nice change of pace from the world-domineering evildoers who’ve preceded him in this franchise.  (Keep your eyes peeled for a very young Benicio del Toro as Sanchez’s creepy crony Dario.)

Licence to Kill is a very gritty Bond, and for me that’s really not a bad thing.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say that this film is actually quite underrated in the Bond canon.  True, it’s not an honest-to-goodness Bond film without the punchlines, but it melds enough of the Bond trappings – including a much-enhanced role for Desmond Llewellyn’s gadget-happy Q – with classic late-80s action flair to create an entertaining and enjoyable Bond film.

Licence to Kill is rated PG-13 for “for action violence and drug content.”  This is definitely the bloodiest Bond to date (and maybe still is to this day):  men are fed to sharks, exploded in compression chambers, ground up in a shredder, shot, impaled, exploded, and lit on fire – all in unflinchingly graphic detail.  (I cringed twice, and I’m made of relatively stern stuff.)  Drugs are mentioned, sold, and processed on screen, though none are used.  As far as sexual content goes, this is probably Bond’s least libidinous outing.

James Bond and The Cinema King will return in a review of Goldeneye (1995) on June 7, 2014!