Licence to Kill (1989)
In the opening minutes of Roger Moore’s final Bond movie, A View to a Kill, 007 rides a snowboard while the Beach Boys song ‘California Girls’ booms over the soundtrack. It’s a goofy, awkward moment in a goofy, awkward film. Roger Moore was a wonderfully charismatic and lovable actor, but it was under his reign that Bond lost its way. Fleming’s original vision of cavalier brutality and self-destructive recklessness vanished in a stew of raised eyebrows and ill-judged slapstick. Moonraker and A View to a Kill are all enjoyable films, but they’re not the best of Bond. It’s bizarre to consider that Moore’s cringeworthy shenanigans exist in a franchise that also includes testicular torture and the heart-breaking murder of the protagonist’s wife. After a View to a Kill, the Bond production team (EON) aimed to bring the franchise and the character back down to Earth. They looked back to Fleming, and they hired a dashingly handsome thespian named Timothy Dalton.
Dalton’s first film in the role, The Living Daylights, established a more sombre tone, cutting out the groanworthy gags and restoring James Bond’s crumpled personality. It was a return to form that was eclipsed by its follow-up. Licence to Kill is the only James Bond movie to have ever received a 15 certificate from the BBFC. This movie features multiple bloody shark attacks, a head exploding from the effects of explosive decompression, suicide via cyanide pill, a security guard being thrown into a locked draw full of flesh-eating maggots, domestic abuse and a henchman’s body being ground into red mist. This is the single edgiest and most extreme James Bond film: a major attempt to revitalise the series by matching the increasing violence of American action cinema. Licence to Kill has more in common with Scarface and Die Hard than Goldfinger. This gamble paid off.
James Bond (Timothy Dalton) becomes a rogue agent following a savage attack on his CIA buddy Felix Leiter (David Hedison), and Leiter’s new bride: Della (Priscilla Barnes). Leiter loses a leg from a shark bite and Della is murdered in cold blood. The perpetrator is Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi): a brutal South American drug baron who kills for business and pleasure. Teaming up with a beautiful DEA informant named Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell), Bond travels to Latin America to track Sanchez down and kill him. This is an unsanctioned revenge mission. M has forbidden Bond from taking action and sent MI6 agents into the field to stop him at any cost. The stakes are high and the violence is frequent. There’s no cat-stroking supervillain, silly gadgets or laid-back sightseeing. This new James Bond is bitter, unforgiving and ruthless, matching his rival’s methods and taking satisfaction in every drop of blood that he sheds.
Dalton is beyond superb, building on his work in The Living Daylights by increasing Bond’s brutality and unpredictability. He isn’t close to snapping: he has snapped. Listen to the venom that Dalton injects into his remarks before each murder. There’s no hint of levity to his one-liners: they’re calculated insults intended to make his methods of execution sting all the more for his unfortunate victims. All the suaveness and control of the Bond character is still detectable in Dalton’s body language, but his eyes burn with a fierce rage. This is the only time that James Bond has truly looked intimidating, focusing on henchmen and grand villains with an ice-cold death stare worthy of Clint Eastwood or Robert De Niro. In interviews concerning his take on the character, Dalton describes Bond as ‘a hero that murdered in cold blood’. He gets this across better than any other actor who has ever taken on the role. Dalton is Bond, more so than anyone else. He understands the character’s killer instinct, his unsavoury relishing of the right to take lives.
The note-perfect lead performance is supported by a profusion of brilliantly-detailed supporting roles. Robert Davi is a superlative villain, alternating between a silky-smooth imitation of gentlemanly behaviour and bursts of ballistic fury. Sanchez likes to think of himself as a dignified businessman, impressing fellow criminals with carefully planned speeches and fostering loyalty through displays of brotherly affection. He’s a celebrity gangster, an unhinged sociopath who loves the limelight almost as much as he loves hacking traitors apart with a machete. Carey Lowell is a strong kick-ass companion with a lovely haircut and Talisa Soto is eye-meltingly attractive as Lupe, the villain’s unfortunate girlfriend. My favourite supporting actor is David Lynch regular Everett McGill, a brilliantly engaging performer who excels as a vile DEA traitor. Listen to his smarmy southern-fried accent: it screams villainy.
Licence to Kill’s gruesome story was inspired by topical events. Sanchez is clearly modelled on Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar: a real-life supervillain who amassed billions of dollars, practiced political corruption on a grand scale and established his own private army. He’s a new villain for a new age. Bond graduates from cold war spy craft, taking part in the war on drugs instead. I appreciate the fact that scriptwriters Richard Maibaum and Michael G Wilson make Sanchez’s right-hand man, Dario (Benicio del Toro), a former Contra.
The Contras were a horrendous far-right paramilitary in Nicaragua, a group secretly and illegally sponsored by the CIA. The Contras trafficked cocaine to raise funds, exporting tonnes of illegal narcotics from Central America into the USA. The addition of Contra politics adds brilliantly to the film’s cynicism and nastiness, sneakily implicating the United States government in Sanchez’s cocaine outfit. Adding to this undertone is the villain’s eager accountant, an earnest Wall Street whiz-kid who believes in a truly free market. The film’s digs at Reagan-era politics are sub-textual, but they matter to me. No one is clean, and Bond is up against an all-pervasive system of globalised corruption.
Despite the film’s violence and grit, Licence to Kill is surprisingly funny. Las Vegas performer Wayne Newton appears in an extended cameo as a blithe cult leader, using his new age religious centre as a tool to launder money for Sanchez’s coke deals. Newton has multiple laugh-out-loud lines, undercutting the gore with a series of hapless grins. Desmond Llewelyn, the Original Q, has his largest ever role in Licence to Kill, meeting Bond in Latin America and tagging along to assist him in the field. He’s an effective comic relief, rolling his eyes at Bond’s escapades and donning pantomime disguises to fool Sanchez’s goons. The humour is brief but necessary, preventing the film from drowning in blood. Coupled with the excellent Michael Kamen soundtrack and the ecstatic Gladys Knight theme, Licence to Kill’s lighter side helps to maintain the series’ continuity, keeping the traditions and escapism of the franchise alive in its darkest outing.
Every action sequence is spectacular. The film opens with a glorious aerial stunt before one-upping itself half an hour later. Bond jet-skis without any skis, climbs onto a rising seaplane and jettisons the pilot into the Atlantic ocean. The ultimate climax is the legendary tanker chase sequence. For a solid twenty minutes of screen time, Bond chases down a convoy of cocaine-smuggling oil tankers, hijacking the trucks, running across them, driving through walls of flame, dodging rockets and receiving aerial assistance from Pam, piloting a stolen two-seater plane. Trucks explode, tumble down cliffs and crumple into scrap metal. Dalton performed several of his own stunts in this sequence, adding greatly to the exhilaration and toughness of every image. As Dalton hacks away at a tanker’s brake lines and dodges machete blows from an enraged Sanchez while the vehicle keeps moving at high speed, Licence to Kill achieves a kind of nirvana. This is the best action sequence in the history of the series. The ending to the tanker chase is the perfect Bond villain death: a brutal piece of payback that cleverly reintroduces an earlier prop.
Licence to Kill is James Bond in the age of Schwarzenegger and Stallone. It’s a muscular, full-blooded action movie sauced up with blood splatter, cocaine and shark attacks. It’s the film that made Casino Royale possible, making the danger and torture of Bond’s world a vivid and obvious threat. Though it maintains the style and traditions of the Bond franchise, this instalment takes worthy dramatic risks, achieving a greatness that eludes so many of the other, more formulaic films in the franchise. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is the best early Bond film: the most stylish and emotional instalment in the series. Casino Royale is the best 21st century Bond film: a perfect mix of grunginess and luxury that gave life back to the 007 name. Licence to Kill is the best realisation of Fleming’s Bond. Its action has never been surpassed, Dalton’s portrayal is the best in the series and the tone is note perfect. This isn’t a typical Bond movie: it’s a high point.