Licence to Kill

(Here be spoilers if you are yet to see the James Bond movies...)

The Mission
Felix Leiter (David Hedison) is getting married, but it ends badly after the capture of the South American druglord Sanchez (Robert Davi) goes horribly wrong. It's up to the Best Man, James Bond (Timothy Dalton), to track down the villain and feed him a cold dish of hearty revenge. M (Robert Brown) orders Bond to attend to his current assignment in Istanbul, forcing Bond to resign. Bond sets about infiltrating Sanchez's dirty empire and putting a stop to a $500 million dollar shipment of cocaine.

Jimmy Bond Yo!
Bond goes the furthest he's ever gone off the gird, with Licence to Kill being the first time he turns rogue without M's unofficial approval. This involves the revoking of his licence to kill, but Bond pays little attention to this throughout the film. He's more upset than ever by the death of Felix Leiter's wife and Felix's dismemberment by shark, a feeling that soon gives way to cold fury. Without a mission he more or less does what he likes - destroying a cocaine shipment just for the hell of it, throwing handfuls of money out of a plane with almost gleeful abandon, and recklessly blowing the cover of a Hong Kong narcotics team (leading to their deaths, something he seems unrepetent about).

Despite his high living and hi-falutin' lifestyle, he evidently places little importance on actual money - willing to physically destroy $2 million dollars in order to make a statement about his friendship with Felix. He's emphatically against and sad about the idea of getting married (reference is made by Felix to Bond's one-time wife from On Her Majesty's Secret Service). He pushes his body further than usual in order to put an end to Sanchez and half a billion dollars worth of coaine, has no problems driving an oil tanker or putting his hand into a squirming mass of live maggots, and find stime to smirk when Ms. Bouvier (Carey Lowell) strips to her underwear.

Dalton still seems rather charmless as Bond, though the darker areas into which this film pushes the character are tailor-made for his calculating portrayal of 007. The script is almost deficient in the way that it ignores Bond's reckless behaviour, refusing to acknowledge or examine it in any interesting way, so I'd feel remiss in criticising Dalton too much for things that are out of his control. However, he ultimately just isn't charismatic enough and makes very little impact with his minimalistic performance.

Villainy
Sanchez is a sadistic latino druglord who's so powerful that he controls the president of his own country (the fictional Republic of Isthmus). He also owns his own bank and casino in Isthmus City, and is famous for being able to buy his way out of capture by offering million-dollar bribes. He plans to control the Pacific drug trade by teaming up with dodgy Asian businessmen, a half-explained plan that also somehow involves stolen Stinger missiles. He has his own code of honour built on loyalty and has a pet iguana that he sometimes carries around on his shoulder. As far as megalomaiacs go, he comes across as fairly level-headed - most of his anger stems from trust issues.

Sanchez's main henchman is Dario (an incredibly young Benecio Del Toro), an eager knife-wielding hoodlum who takes pride in his work. The rest of Sanchez's crew is populated by a host of bland and faceless associates and thugs.

Also featured is Mr. Krest (Anthony Zerbe), a slimey Miami crime boss who deals in marine life and keep sdeadly Great White Sharks as pets. He works as an underboss for Sanchez.

Buddies and Babes
Felix Leiter must know Bond a lot better than his film appearances imply, as he asks James to be his Best Man at his wedding. Either that or high profile spies just don't make many friends outside their profession. Felix is evidently a workaholic, fielding calls and leads in his office even on his wedding day. He gets put thrugh the ringer by Sanchez (who is like his Moby Dick)... his wife gets murdered and he himself gets fed to a massive shark, losing a leg and an arm. Despite all this though he's surprisingly and inexplicably jolly when Bond calls him at the end of the film.

Felix's friend Sharkey (Frank McRae) doesn't seem to be CIA, but he helps Bond out in Florida nonetheless - up until his premature death at the hands of Krest's men. He's a fairly affable chap and Bond is visibly unhappy at his death.

The main Bond girl is Miss Pam Bouvier, alias Kennedy, a capable CIA agent who's smart enough to wear a bullet proof vest and keeps a gun holstered in a garter. She's an ex-army pilot and initially has a love-hate relationship with Bond, though this soon turns to romance. Bond also recieves some assistance from Sanchez's put-upon girlfriend, Lupe Lamora (Talisa Soto), though she seems to only be in the film to up the 'babe quota'.

M doesn't turn a blind eye for once when Bond wants to go off-grid, and it's the only time we ever see Robert Brown's version of the character get angry. He refuses to offer Bond any help whatosever, though it's never made clear what kind of disciplinary action is taken afterwards - especially as Bond physically fights his way out of MI6 custody after refusing to hand over his gun, and continues to kill even without his licence.

Miss Moneypenny (Caroline Bliss) worries about Bond despite M's orders, but Bliss is so forgettable in the role that it's easy to see why she only appears in the two Dalton Bond films. Q (Desmond Llewewlyn) takes leave so he can help Bond off-the-record and he poses as Bond's uncle in order to get in contact with him. He's enthusiastic about getting to work in the field for once, though Bond keeps him out of danger by mainly using him as a driver.

Locations
The first half of the film takes place in Florida Keys, represented in a rather nondescript manner by wharf warehouses and lots of boats. We do at least get to see Bond in a typically sleazy all-American redneck strip-bar though. The rest of the film's action takes place in the fictional Republic of Isthmus, a Panama stand-in achieved via location filming in Mexico. Isthmus City is stereotypically dirty and corrupt, but there are least some scenes set amonst the Aztec ruins at Temoaya.


Gadgets and Tricks of the Trade
Bond is full of tricks in Licence to Kill, he poses as an exporter in Miami and later makes use of his official 'rogue' status to ingratiate himself into Sanchez's inner cirlce as an advisor to the kingpin. Amusingly, he first gets Sanchez's attention by making a big splash at the Isthmus City casino - with money stolen from Sanchez.

Bond catches Sanchez's plane in the prologue by shimmying down a cable from a helicopter and tying said cable around the plane's tail. He later evades detection from Krest by disguising himself as a manta ray while scuba diving, uses portable abseiling equipment to scale the outside of Sanchez's building, and remotely detonates an explosive disguised as a cigarette packet. He also has a 'signature' gun, perhaps an idea he got off Scaramanga back in The Man With the Golden Gun.

Licence to Kill
Quite a few kills! He knocks a guy out and then callously leaves his body in a drawer full of hungry maggots and throws another guy into a tank full of electric eels. He also throws a suitcase with $2 million in it at Felix's traitor - causing him to fall into water with the same Great White Shark that got Felix. He harpoons the thug that gloatingly killed Sharkey, frames Krest so that Sanchez kills him, sends Dario gorily toppling into a threshing machine, blows up a tanker and it's driver by ramraiding it, and 'poetically' sets Sanchez on fire with Felix Leiter's lighter.

Shag-Rate
Bond most likely gets to 'know' Pam Bouvier on her escape boat after their bar room brawl in Florida. He also gets jiggy with Lupe while infiltrating the Sanchez's empire. He later rejects Lupe's further advances once the mission is over though, and continues his dalliances with Pam instead.

Quotes
BOND: I'll do anything for a woman with a knife.

M: We're not a country club 007!

BOND: Why don't wait till you get asked?
PAM BOUVIER: Why don't you ask me?

BOND (on having to share a room with Q after getting the cold shoulder from Pam): Hope you don't snore Q!

BOND: I help people with their problems.
SANCHEZ: Problem solver.
BOND: More of a problem eliminator.

Q: Remember, if it hadn't been for Q branch you would've been dead years ago.

BOND (on seeing Heller impaled on a forklift): Looks like he came to a dead end.

Q (on Bond's womanising): Don't judge him too harshly my dear. Field operators most often use every means at their disposal to achieve their objective.
PAM BOUVIER: Bullshit!

How Does It Rate?
You can kind of see what they're going for with Licence to Kill, it starts out more realistically than most Bond films and the idea of James as Leiter's Best Man is a nice unexpected touch of continuity. There's this idea of Dalton's no-nonsense Bond flying really close to the wire as he embarks on a mission of pure vengeance, but somewhere along the line the creative team forgot to give it any kind of depth and instead it just feels like a Bond film without the humour or colourful characters that usually make these films so memorable. It wants to be hardass, but instead it's just hard to like.

This is very much a conscious attempt to try and bring the Bond franchise more in-line with modern action films. Licence to Kill was made in 1989, a year that was pretty much the height of the action filmmaking boom that came off the popularity of new muscle-bound action heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Jean Claude Van Damme. As a result this film is a lot more gruesome than most Bond films - featuring characters getting eaten alive by sharks, a guy exploding inside a depressurisation tank, impalement by forklift and Del Toro's character getting shredded to pieces. On the plus side (wait... that wasn't the plus side?) there is some really great stuntwork and practical action sequences, especially during the oil tanker chase at the film's climax. It's also fun to see Bond transposed into a stereotypically classless bar room brawl, which is probably the sort of thing the film should've done more of if it was interested in being a work of entertainment.

Another interesting sidenote is that this film is the first time Bond has had to choose between two of his 'Bond girls'. Usually events conspire to see one of the girls killed before the end of the film, but here they get to meet each other and actually learn about his womanising. It isn't really developed beyond some rudimentary jealousy on Pam Bouvier's part though, so as far as breaking new ground goes it's most likely unintentional.

The poor performance of Licence to Kill at the box office pretty much killed the Bond franchise for six years (the longest gap between films in its history so far). A lot of hardcore Bond fans have since embraced it as highly underrated, but I think it's a fairly vapid film despite its aims and action sequences. By the late 1980s the Cold War was just about over and the James Bond series was struggling to be relevant. Dalton's casting as Bond could've been a reinvigoration along Daniel Craig-esque lines, but unfortunately the creative team was still very much stuck in the past and didn't really seem to know what to do in order to modernise the series. It's no coincidence that the two Dalton films seem largely pre-occupied with the illegal drugs trade; it's a very 1980s concern. It's also a pretty poor substitute for Cold War intrigue.

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DIRECTOR: John Glen
WRITER/SOURCE: Michael G. Wilson and Richard Maibaum, based on characters created by Ian Fleming.
KEY ACTORS: Timothy Dalton, Carey Lowell, Robert Davi, Benecio Del Toro, Talisa Soto, Anthony Zerbe, Desmond Llewelyn, Robert Brown, Caroline Bliss, David Hedison, Wayne Newton.

RELATED TEXTS:
- This was Richard Maibaum's 9th and final James Bond film as screenwriter... the ones he didn't have a hand in writing between 1969 and 1989 were the more fanciful Live and Let Die and Moonraker.
- Timothy Dalton's only other Bond film is The Living Daylights.
- Other Bond films set in South America: Moonraker and Quatum of Solace