Licence To Kill has an interesting creative opening involving James Bond and his CIA friend Felix Leiter. They’re both dressed up ready to attend Felix’s wedding, but they get called to a mission at the last minute, so they give chase a drug cartel boss, who escapes in a plane, so James & Felix get back into their large coast guard helicopter and pluck the plane out of its flight path, leaving it hanging mid-air by its tail. Then they parachute back to their wedding procession which is already underway. It’s a fairly creative opening but it’s no 00 vs SAS training exercise like we had at the start of the last Bond movie, The Living Daylights (1987) which I think was far more on-genre as well as more concise and generally more on-point too.
James Bond is played very well by Timothy Dalton here, in his second of only two ever Bond movies that he starred in. His career as Bond was cut short due to the producers being busy with a lawsuit over distribution prices that lasted 5 years (1989-1994), by which time Dalton had lost interest in being James Bond. Dalton was already signed up to do another Bond movie in 1991 but the delays due to the lawsuit essentially ended his contract in 1990 and Dalton had completely lost interest in being Bond by the time the producers were ready to begin his next movie, so they got Pierce Brosnan instead, and so began the Brosnan era.
Felix Leiter is played adequately by David Hedison here, who played the same role in one other Bond movie, 16 years prior – that being Live And Let Die (1973), which was Roger Moore’s first outing as James Bond.
The theme tune to Licence To Kill is quite funky, and quite R&B compared to usual. Sung by Gladys Knight, it’s not a bad tune, but it still doesn’t quite have the same kick as the best theme tunes like the theme tune for A View To A Kill which feels much more Bondy and impactful, while the Licence To Kill theme tune, as good as it is, is relatively demure.
Not 20 minutes in and we’re already very well acquainted with the main antagonist in this movie, Franz Sanchez, played very convincingly by Robert Davi, having seen him evade capture then get caught in the opening scenes, then we see him get sprung free by a cop who took a two million dollar bribe. The crooked cop, called Ed Killifer, is played quite well by a young Everett McGill (quite memorable as the main antagonist, on the brawn side, in Under Siege 2, some 6 years after Licence To Kill, by which time he’d developed a grey-haired Clint Eastwood vibe, but in Licence To Kill he has dark curly hair, possibly dyed to cover some greys).
With the murder of Felix and his newly wedded wife, after the escape of Sanchez, then with James finding their bodies and there being an atmosphere of mixed sorrow and anger, this movie appears to be attempting to set up narratives and pull at heartstrings, perhaps to make up for a colder-hearted vibe in The Living Daylights, but in doing so, Licence To Kill is missing out on the concise action that people like me came for. It’s a step in the wrong direction, for my taste, even though it appears they’re trying to make an improvement, and undoubtedly drama lovers will like the new style, but I much prefer the previous style personally. The subsequent infiltration of the shark place is also terribly slow and suspenseful. The odd attempt at humour is also a bit awkward here.
Early in the second quarter, as Bond sneaks aboard a ship owned Sanchez’s business partner, Milton Krest (played quite well by Anthony Zerbe), we become better acquainted with one of the main Bond girls in this movie – Sanchez’s girlfriend, Lupe Lamora, played quite well by the beautiful ethnically Puerto Rican actress Talisa Soto, who we initially met in the opening scenes. Soto is Japanese for outside or outsider, so she may have some distant Japanese heritage, but it’s also Spanish for grove, thicket or small wooded area, which is an equally viable surname (think of George Groves). Either way, I’d say she’s one of the best Bond girls of all time – a nice continuation from the beautiful Maryam d’Abo in the last movie, The Living Daylights. Timothy Dalton is truly blessed with the best standard of Bond girl in his movies, while Connery and Moore suffered a terribly unpredictable variety of co-star calibres.
The diving scene around 45 mins in is pretty concise and continuously creative. Quite impressive there.
Around 50 minutes in, we meet the other main woman in this movie: Carey Lowell playing Ms Pam Bouvier – a former US Army pilot working with the CIA. She’s no stunner but she’s quite tidy (in her late 20s here) and is a pretty good actor too. She makes a fun character in this movie, but James clearly made the wrong decision rejecting Lupe to choose Pam in the end.
It’s good to see Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa – the legendary actor from Mortal Kombat (1995) with Christopher Lambert – taking on a minor role here as Mr Kwang. He’s always an entertaining character in an action movie – his simple deadly gaze alone is enough to garner intrigue. Speaking of ‘garner’, he was also in Elektra (2005) with Jennifer Garner.
Great to see Q visiting Bond, with a bag full of gadgets, while Bond’s gone AWOL on a mission to kill Sanchez. Played very well by Desmond Llewelyn – his role is quite extended here for a change, as he does more than just deliver gadgets.
There’s an interesting series of plot twists around 1 hour and 20 minutes in, as Bond gets jumped by some Japanese ninjas led by Kwang who turns out to be a deep cover agent from the Hong Kong Police narcotics squad (a cringeworthy example of cultural misappropriation). Then when Sanchez takes him out and finds Bond tied up as a prisoner (due to be sent back to the UK, but Bond tells Sanchez things were about to get nasty), Sanchez suddenly trusts & values Bond very dearly. This turns into another clever plot development as James makes Sanchez think Krest is a traitor without actually naming him (based on info James was told discretely by Lupe just seconds earlier), then Sanchez finds the stolen money planted by James on Krest’s boat.
Sanchez’s right hand man, Dario, who points out James as an informant, is played quite well by Benicio Del Toro – he delivers a convincing performance, as a younger brother or son figure to Sanchez.
Wayne Newton makes a convincing and occasionally funny character too, as a televangelist personality called Professor Joe Butcher who’s merely covering for Sanchez’s large cocaine transactions.
The ending is one that’s memorable and longwinded enough to mean that I don’t look forward to it when it comes to rewatching this movie. Having said that, when actually watching the ending, it’s fairly well made – there’s no particularly dull patches and the action stays quite creative and well made, although the overall plot doesn’t change much from the time when Bond gets rumbled in the factory until the end of the truck chase – it’s all quite memorable plotwise during this time, which makes the ending a bit of a downer for rewatchers, although this is a common theme in action movies, but there are some exceptions where the ending is as buzzing & creative as the start.
Overall, I have to rate this movie about equal to the average Bond movie from the Connery or Moore era. That’s one level down from the best movies of those eras (such as Goldfinger, Live And Let Die, and The Spy Who Loved Me), and it’s a couple levels down from the previous Timothy Dalton movie, The Living Daylights, which I personally rate as the best Bond movie of all time, not because Dalton is any more convincing than an early Connery from Dr No for example, but because The Living Daylights had a much higher budget and is much more action packed – it’s a true modern action movie. Licence To Kill, by contrast, is a bit more one-dimensional and lacks a great chemistry like Timothy Dalton had with Maryam d’Abo both on and off screen. Taliso Soto is no less beautiful but their chemistry never really caught fire – I guess she’s more of a model than an actress, and she even intended to act like she couldn’t care less about switching from Sanchez to Bond and then again from Bond to President Hector Lopez (played lifelessly but I guess adequately by Pedro Armendáriz Jr) at the very end when Bond decided to reject her in favour of Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell) for some unrealistic reason. This odd choice of woman is reminiscent of the cringe factor when Connery and Moore were overly romantic with an aging Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell) before that actress was finally replaced at the start of the Dalton era. It seems much of the smart decisionmaking that came with The Living Daylights was already absent by the time Licence To Kill came about, even though they were both officially directed by John Glen, who also did Moore’s last three Bond movies (neither of his two best ones) so the injection of good thinking in The Living Daylights may have come from someone less under the spotlight. The budget for Licence To Kill ($36M) was also slightly lower than The Living Daylights ($40M). Maybe they were distracted by looming lawsuits in 1989. They came back with massively higher and constantly increasing budgets in the Pierce Brosnan era, which kicked off with GoldenEye in 1995 on a budget of $60M then went on to Tomorrow Never Dies in 1997 with a budget of $110M and the budgets kept going up throughout the Brosnan and Craig eras (with just the odd hiccup), although I don’t personally include the emotional Daniel Craig in my list of classic Bond movies – I think he’s absolutely ruined the Bond saga for the last 20 years – I can’t personally watch a single Bond movie he’s made. He’s worse than George Lazenby who did On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969). But I’m a massive fan of Connery, Moore and Dalton as Bond, and I think Brosnan makes a bland but still quite watchable Bond. Those four eras form the complete list of Bond classics, as far as I’m concerned.