Nobody Reviews It Better: Licence to Kill (1989)

Much like Chicken Man in his appraisal of The Living Daylights, here Thrasher finds Timothy Dalton's final turn as Bond in Licence to Kill to be a refreshing thing indeed. Unfortunately, legal disputes put the series on a significant hiatus after this solid action film, so we never got to see where else Dalton-Bond could go. Fortunately, though, he steered Bond away from the absurd comedy Roger Moore's adventures had devolved into, towards our preferred incarnation, that being Brosnan-Bond, and also towards a fantastic video game adaptation.

Last time I looked into the series, Roger Moore was still waddling around after young girls and tussling with Christopher Walken in a blimp. For me, A View to a Kill exemplified the excessive stupidity and bloated boredom of the Moore years. But things certainly changed for the better when Timothy Dalton came aboard, and his brooding Bond in The Living Daylights was so pleasantly different from Moore's cheeky, upper-crusty version. Dalton's seriousness is embellished still further in Licence to Kill, when a highly personal revenge motive drives Bond instead of the usual cold-blooded assignment carried out for Queen and Country. In our traditional pre-credits sequence, Bond accompanies his old CIA pal Felix (in the middle of his wedding in Miami, no less) on an emergency mission to catch Franz Sanchez, a notorious, and immensely wealthy, drug lord. They succeed in a thrilling aerial chase, a sequence not only exciting for its own sake (as is the implicit purpose of these pre-credits stunts), but also one of the rare instances when the pre-credits sequence is directly related to the rest of the film, a la The World is Not Enough. Following his capture, Sanchez is freed and he immediately returns to kill Felix. Though he is unsuccessful in killing Felix via sharks, Sanchez shoots his wife and retreats to a banana republic. Bond swears revenge and is subsequently suspended by MI6 after he refuses to drop his vendetta.

For the first hour or so, Licence to Kill doesn't really feel like a Bond film, except for the hyperbolic stunts. Bond's suspension from MI6 means very few of the familiar narrative tropes remind us that we are watching 007. Thankfully, however, and unlike the similar Quantum of Solace, about midway through Q turns up to issue Bond his trademark gadgetry, even though he seems to forget to bring along Bond's equally trademark wit. It's not a totally dreary affair, but Licence to Kill is indeed fairly austere. I'm reminded of early Bonds, like the earliest, Dr. No; Dalton does make a few quips here and there, but the tone is realistic, or grasping at it, and Dalton has the sensibilities to pull this off. It's welcome after a decade-plus of Moore's lecherous innuendos. He's matched by a strong villain in Sanchez, as well as his surprisingly adept (and very young!) henchman, Benicio Del Toro. Licence to Kill also has some of the finest stunt work in any Bond film, especially the wonderful tanker chase/fight to close things. Still, it's tempting to simply look at Dalton's tenure as a stop-gap en route to Pierce Brosnan, especially with only two films to his name, but closer inspection reveals a fine, multilayered interpretation of the character that fits in nicely with the canon.