Licence to Kill (1989)

"Stop fiddling about with things you don't understand!"

Dear God, what a mess...

Not as catastrophic as A View to a Kill (1985), perhaps, but certainly very close. Eon's great experiment in updating Bond was increasingly beginning to look like an act of desperation and this entirely dreadful rubbish did nothing to banish that suspicion. Filmed at the Churubusco Studios in Mexico (only the second time, after Moonraker, that the series had abandoned Pinewood) and set only in Miami and South America, Licence to Kill looked and felt less like a Bond film than a particularly poor episode of Miami Vice. Efforts to toughen up the series resulted in a simple- minded action romp with barely a trace of the wit or style that had set the series apart all these years.

With Richard Maibaum temporarily out of the frame due to a Writer's Guild strike, the task of creating the script for Licence to Kill fell to co-producer Michael G. Wilson who worked from a previously written Maibaum treatment. The film borrows a character (Milton Krest) and a title from Fleming but the story itself bares no resemblance to either the original work nor indeed to the films which had preceeded it. Setting Bond off on a personal vendetta against a gang of drug dealing scumbags missed the point of the Bond films by a mile. Alan Barnes and Marcus Hearn hit the nail squarely on the head in the first edition of their book Kiss Kiss Bang! Bang!: "'Drug baron', 'raped and killed', 'bent on revenge', 'private vendetta', 'Bond resigns'; do any of these phrases have any place whatsoever in a bonkers James Bond plot? They do not."

Given that the very basis of the film is so deeply flawed, it's no surprise to find that little else in it stands up to much scrutiny either. The script is, like The Living Daylights, relentlessly downbeat and lacking in humour (only the wonderful performance of Desmond Llewelyn in an extended cameo as Q, revelling in the rare chance to do some real field work raises a smile) and the attempts to make the film grittier than its predecessors only caused it to run into censorship problems in various territories.

Timothy Dalton is poorly served by the dreadful script and struggles through as best he can with severely substandard material. Dalton, who was treated very shabbily indeed by his writers, suffers nobly for his art throughout, but his Bond has been retooled as an even more po-faced, humourless and emotionless cypher than before. Though Dalton does his best, the shoddy script makes a mockery of Bond's outrage at the treatment of his friends and not for one minute do we actually believe an of this nonsense.

And this is the film's biggest flaw. Bond at his best had always been presented as the consumate professional killer, a man whose licence to kill was not carried lightly and whose pride in his work and love for his country were what kept him in the job. Here, he's stripped of his raison d'etre and simply becomes a mindless thug, a crude, obvious assassin motivated by revenge. We are, presumably, meant to sympathise with Bond, to share his feelings of pleasure at the deaths of Sanchez and his cohorts. But we don't. Instead we feel uncomfortable, as though we were watching a close friend undergo a radical and disturbing personality change. To again quote Barnes and Hearn: "... not even Connery could have made the icy, disturbed individual presented here amount to anything more than a cruel imposter given someone else's name. Take away the number 007, it seems, and you've only half a man. This is not our hero. This is not James Bond."

There's no fire in Dalton-Bond, no passion - even his encounters with the obligatory Bond girls lack the spark of lust and romance that even Roger Moore at his worst had managed to carry off. Though given that these were the least interesting Bond girls in a long time that's hardly surprising. Carey Lowell's Pam Bouvier had the most potential but is transformed from a self-sufficient and highly effective field agent into a simpering girlie given to jealous rages when Bond even so much as looks at another woman. Talisa Soto gets to do nothing but look beautiful and wander in and out of the narrative to impart important information to Bond whenever the script needs her. Her fickle, unfaithful and apparently insatiable Lupe Lamora has at least four lovers during the course of the film - Sanchez, Bond, the unnamed man in the teaser and, at the and, the President. And poor, doomed Della's flirtations with Bond are summarily 'punished' in the most hideous way (so much for bringing Bond in line with late-80s thinking) while Moneypenny is reduced to a single throwaway scene in which she just looks a bit worried for her unrequited love.

Robert Davi, usually a fine actor, holds the dubious distinction of being the most unimpressive Bond villain ever - in the past, Bond has tackled deranged Oriental scientists with a tendency to topple space rockets (Dr No (1962)); a gold-obsessed megalomaniac willing to reduce whole economies to ruins (Goldfinger (1964)); an international conspiracy of terrorists and criminals with plans that range from global domination to the destruction of the entire world (You Only Live Twice (1967), On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)); maniacs wanting to obliterate the human race to allow their own Master Race to thrive (The Spy Who Loved Me (1977); Moonraker (1979)); and a host other, less ambitious, but equally colourful characters. This time he's up against some drugs barons, mindless thugs with no more ambition than to amass a personal fortune and live a life of luxury. Even the drug dealers of Live and Let Die (1973) were slightly more ambitious than this.

Davi does his best and turns in a suitably sinister performance, but it's one more suited to the Die Hard films (Davi had in fact appeared in the first of that series, albeit on the side of the good guys) or in the aforementioned Miami Vice than in a Bond film. Sanchez has surrounded himself with some of the blandest and least memorable associates of any film in the series and by the end, we really just don't care whether Bond catches them or not - we certainly don't share his sense of outrage at their maiming of his friend. The fact that Bond seems to get away with it too leaves a nasty aftertaste - we don't find out what M thought of his behaviour, but he's certainly got the backing of Leiter, Bouvier, the President and Q.

On a more positive note, the action is certainly spectacular if rather more brutal than we'd come to expect. Bond's escape from the Wavekrest is a real crowd-pleaser and the audacious mid-air abduction of Sanchez's plane is marvellous is incredibly silly. But the best is saved for the end when Bond and Bouvier battle Sanchez and his thugs in, on, above and even beneath a quartet of loaded gas tankers, all of which inevitably go spectacularly up in flames by the time it's all over. The stunt work is nothing short of jaw-dropping - how did they get that gas tanker up on one set of wheels? - even if some of it owes a very obvious debt to the superior tanker chase climax of Mad Max 2 (1981).

But these few nuggets aside, it was painfully clear that by this stage in the game, the Bond films had nowhere left to go with the present production team. Maibaum and Wilson had obviously lost touch with what makes the character work and Glen simply directs by the numbers, gving Licence to Kill the dull, listless sheen of a direct-to-video release. The whole thing feels terribly mechanical
and rather tired, the last gasp of a once great series of films.

The staleness of the series was reflected in Licence to Kill's poor showing at the box office. It's run in the States was particularly bad, facing competition from newer franchises (Batman, Lethal
Weapon 2 and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) which seemed rather more in touch with audience expectations than Licence to Kill. Reviews were mixed and the public voted with their feet. The magic, it seemed, had gone.

Despite the usual end credit promising that "James Bond Will Return", hopes weren't high and frankly, by this stage, no-one really cared whether he returned or not. Albert R. Broccoli was so disconsolate that he tried to sell Eon's parent company, Danjaq, and he handed control of Eon itself over to his daughter Barbara and step-son Wilson. It was the end of an era for the Bond films - Licence to Kill marked not only Dalton's swansong in the series, but also the end of the road for Caroline Bliss (who'd failed to make any impact at all as Moneypenny), long time writer Maibaum (who died in 1991) and director Glen.

After a desperate period of scouting for new blood to rejuvenate the series (among those in the frame at one time or another were Ted Kotcheff, John Landis, Gloria and Willard Huyck and John Byrum) and a difficult court battle over the TV rights to the previous films, Bond would return as promised, albeit six years late. But the series had been given the overhaul it so desperately needed and Goldeneye (1995) would prove to be an impressive return to form.
KEVIN LYONS