Timothy Dalton's Bond - In Depth Critiques
chrisno1
LondonPosts: 3,599MI6 Agent
I recently posted a critique of The Living Daylights, which was quite favorably received.
I am (of course) constantly reviewing / assessing books and films - and not only Bond - it's something I do; keeps me out of trouble
Anyway, having watched Licence to Kill on Monday night, to see how it compares to TLD, I thought I may as well offer an in depth review for discussion. I've re-posted the critique for TLD as well, just for good, measure.
I anticipate this being an occasional series, as and when I choose to watch the movies.
Feel free to comment and bite back!
Anyone interested in my reviews from 2008 can follow the link below.
http://www.ajb007.co.uk/topic/31479/two-weeks-of-bondage-reviews/
chris
I am (of course) constantly reviewing / assessing books and films - and not only Bond - it's something I do; keeps me out of trouble
Anyway, having watched Licence to Kill on Monday night, to see how it compares to TLD, I thought I may as well offer an in depth review for discussion. I've re-posted the critique for TLD as well, just for good, measure.
I anticipate this being an occasional series, as and when I choose to watch the movies.
Feel free to comment and bite back!
Anyone interested in my reviews from 2008 can follow the link below.
http://www.ajb007.co.uk/topic/31479/two-weeks-of-bondage-reviews/
chris
Comments
I watched this movie last night as I was somewhat at a loose end due to a throat infection. I was surprised how good I thought it was. The Living Daylights has never been one of my particular favourites and I still think it’s too long and too confusing – certainly on first viewing – but it has a lot of positives that are easily overlooked by the casual viewer.
The outstanding aspect of the film is Timothy Dalton, who is a new laconic James Bond for the new era of cinema hard men. His impact starts before we even reach the credits. Dalton’s gun barrel walk is possibly the best of the series so far, controlled, smooth and sharp. During the pre-title teaser, Dalton says nothing. We don’t need to be introduced to this James Bond: we know who he is by his actions and his demeanour. Dalton is so much fitter than his immediate predecessor and is able to perform more of the physical stuff, which gives an edge to these action sequences. Excellently photographed, the teaser is a parachute jump-come-truck bourn fight and we already sense Dalton’s Bond has ruthlessness and cunning in abundance. No smart off hand one liners here. Faced with a colleague’s death, he exacts revenge in the only way he knows. Not content with having dispatched the assassin, he even manages to stay an hour for some fun with a beautiful, bored playgirl. Stealing the girl’s phone he says “She’ll call you back,” before accepting a glass of champagne and introducing himself with cinema’s most famous greeting. This feels like the thunderous, exotic, luxurious, dangerous James Bond of the sixties, before gadgets and girls became two-a-penny and too easy.
Later, Bond has to assassinate Leonid Pushkin, head of the KGB, and Bond chooses to do it in a suitably nefarious manner. Infiltrating his mistress’ hotel boudoir, Bond strips her, ensuring a startled Pushkin is unprepared for his attack. He repeats the procedure to even greater effect when the security guard suspects foul play. Dalton is rough. His comments are cutting. His delivery is harsh. I like this portrait of Bond; it has some of Connery about it, but this episode is a notch far above Connery’s cool killing of Professor Dent. Bond wants answers before he kills. Quite prepared to fulfill the contract, he places Pushkin into the classic repose, on his knees, back turned, and his eyes blaze with anger, from the death of a double ‘0’, from the death of Saunders, to the manipulation of an innocent, the reopening of old wounds buried through détente. The audience actually thinks he’s going to finish the job and we’re momentarily horrified, because we know (unlike with Dent in DN, or Orlov in OP) that Pushkin is one of the good guys.
The ruse constructed around Pushkin’s death shows that this Bond is quite prepared to countermand his orders if necessary. He seems to set greater stall by Pushkin than M. This 007 is uncomfortable among his superiors, who he clearly doesn’t rate highly. The scene in M’s office where he accepts the assignment to kill Pushkin confirms this; Dalton looks disdainful and disbelieving at M’s pronouncement. It is only the Admiral’s ire-some threat to discipline him that forces Bond to take the hit.
Dalton’s Bond still has some playful banter with Desmond Llewelyn’s Q, and the scenes in Q branch are two of the better structured efforts of the franchise. Dalton’s performance here is all charm and twinkling eyes. He’s in on the joke, but you sense the regard Bond has for the Armourer; even when making quips he appears to be paying attention, something that couldn’t be said of Connery in Thunderball.
Dalton’s respect for his superiors isn’t completely absent. During Koskov’s debriefing he is noticeably silent, sitting at a distance smoking endless cigarettes, until his input is required. His dealings with Saunders of Station V, a superior but really a pen pusher, also display a brusque terseness. That Saunders is something of an ingénue in the killing game doesn’t ease their relationship. Bond accepts his role in their initial meeting with obvious reluctance. The two men have several spiky conversations that encapsulate and then reverse their roles as master and servant. Dalton is firm in his delivery during these scenes, recognizing that Saunders, played with just the right amount of conceit by Thomas Wheatley, needs a strong hand to guide him.
There is also a central love story to The Living Daylights which Dalton needs to carry off effectively, and which he does to splendid effect in the Bratislava and Vienna sequences. I like Dalton here. His manner is calm. Bond clearly feels something for Kara very early on for, despite his genuine concerns, they return to the Conservatoire for her cello. His display of annoyance at this unscheduled stop over is reminiscent of a late and irritated husband whose wife has forgotten her holiday passport. Later in Vienna, we can’t tell if Dalton is faking or really falling in love, and neither can Kara, so she submits to his sincere romantic enticements. The ménage of shots at the Prata Park don’t seem to be as daft as I remember them; they show the relationship blossom. We actually see James Bond smile and laugh. Kara Milovy responds in kind.
Much of the credit for sustaining the love story has to go to Maryam D’Abo, who is equally adept at running a full gamut of emotions: from the wild-eyed innocence of youth to the despair of betrayal, the pain of separation to the joy of new love, the fear and the relief, confusion to realization. She even succeeds in being remarkably still and unaffected when Koskov finally meets her in Tangiers, which makes this scene particularly tangible: the solid, formal welcome offered by the Russian has none of Bond’s warmth. Fidgety nervous when attempting to poison to Bond, Kara finally sees the antithesis between the two men in her life and it shocks her static.
That the love story peters out a little during the routine smash and bang stuff in Afghanistan is hardly the actors’ fault. The script is less interesting here and gives them very little to do. D’Abo especially is saddled with a series of “Oh James…” style lines which are impossible for her to negotiate without appearing to be a hopeless bimbo, which she isn’t. She shows great awareness of her circumstances and, while taken in by Bond, she comes to understand the world he – and now she – must inhabit and chooses to switch sides. The plot lets her down in the latter stages as she’s expected to ride horses, fight Russians and pilot Star-lifter aeroplanes. I prefer her when she was simply a cellist.
Here, some credit must go to the location spotters who found a series of low key, but evocative, places for Bond and Kara to inhabit. I’m quite familiar with modern Bratislava and it’s amazing to think the scenes here were actually filmed in Vienna; it genuinely looks like the real thing. While the Conservatoire building obviously isn’t the real thing, its positioning is very similar to the Slovak National Theatre on Hviezdoslavovo nam, hemmed in on two sides by municipal buildings and fronted by an elongated city square. Kara’s one room apartment is the sort of thing you find all over the old Soviet Bloc. The rattling trams, packed full, and the absence of traffic on the back streets was also very similar. The Tatra Mountains don’t actually straddle the borders of the two countries, but they are certainly very beautiful and snowy in winter time, and the Austrian Alps are a fine substitute. I like the everyday touch of Bond hitching a lift on a farmer’s wagon to get to Vienna, but once there the magic of the city overwhelms Kara, who is enchanted by the renaissance buildings, the horse carriages and the beautiful clothes. The Ferris wheel of course brings to mind The Third Man and its heritage. While the seduction scene here is a bit mawkish, it fits in with Kara’s naïve outlook, caught up as she is in the whirl of the decadent west.
And what of everyone else? Well, sadly, the bad guys in this movie are a rotten trio and serve only to propel the narrative forward. They are one dimensional character’s and there’s barely a memorable moment to share among them. Joe Don Baker’s Brad Whittaker has massive potential, but is underused, spending all his time isolated at his Moroccan fortress. Baker at least tries to make his villain palpably real. He’s indignant when confronted with his discredited military background, angry with his colleagues when their convoluted plot starts to unravel, boastful of man’s great war-heroes. “Butchers,” says Leonid Pushkin with a scowl; “Surgeons,” replies Whittaker, and Baker captures Whittaker’s essence with this single line, his expression is wonderfully flat, candid, we can almost read what’s in Whittaker’s thoughts. Sadly, this early insight is all but lost by the time James Bond confronts him playing mechanical war games. Their gun battle and his death have all the cack-handedness of the latter days of Roger Moore and should really have been re-thought.
Meanwhile Andreas Wisniewski’s Necros is visually impressive, but lacks any depth. A hit man out of the Red Grant mould, he is a mimic, an assassin and, in his own [unnamed] country, a freedom fighter. The one brief reference to the arms his comrades need seems inserted purely to give him motive. It would have been far simpler to keep him as Brad Whittaker’s well trained stooge – which is effectively what he is. Necros has a few neat tricks up his sleeve a la Q-Branch, but as the movie progresses he forgoes these in favour of more routine fisticuffs. The main problem with Necros is that the writers build him up into a superhuman type figure, an asexual beast, a wicked impersonator, a ruthless killer, a destructor par excellence as he strolls majestically around the Bladen safe house tossing incendiary devices at his pursuers. But The Living Daylights doesn’t really need this kind of henchman. It’s an excuse by Messers Maibaum and Wilson to inject the fantastic into a tale that is essentially very earthy.
Jeroen Krabbe’s Koskov is equally ill-fitting. Behaving like some overgrown orangutan, hugging, kissing, chortling and overbearing in his actions, I wasn’t convinced by him at all. It’s a very hammy performance from Krabbe, whose best moment is the affore mentioned scene with D’Abo in Tangiers. It’s a tiny moment. A little more restraint would have gone a lot further. It still irks me that this buffoon of a man is allowed to survive a head on collision with an aircraft simply to provide a moment of light relief at the end of movie.
Indeed The Living Daylights is spoilt by lacings of obvious humour. The prime offence is probably the car chase which while enjoyable is full of all the worst aspects of Bond tom foolery which we’ve witnessed over the years. One of the redeeming aspects of the chase is how straight Dalton and D’Abo play it. D’Abo, particularly, shows shock and exhilaration as lorries are blown up and cars cut in half. It’s reminiscent of Tania Mallet’s spirited expressions during the Aston Martin pursuit in Goldfinger. Dalton equally plays it with just the right amount of knowing, but they are helpless to prevent the chase descending to cartoon level as they ski away in a cello case. This sort of visual humour doesn’t always work in 007 movies, and The Living Daylights has a few particularly poor examples.
For instance, there is a short scene on a hospital plane when Koskov explains to Bond how he’s going to wheedle his worm-like way out of a very tight situation. The byplay between the two actors is good and ends with Bond suggesting Koskov is full of bull, which is quite funny, but we don’t need to see Kara’s face beaming an appreciative smile. We know there’s a joke, don’t tell us. Worse, Julie T. Wallace’s security guard is employed purely to distract the chief engineer with her buxom chest. This sets a low tone. I remember laughing uneasily when I first saw it over twenty years ago; I don’t laugh now. There isn’t any need for the scene to take place; it’s a lazy misogynist joke on the part of the writers and takes all the tension out of Bond’s predicament. Similarly Necros is patted down when entering the safe house grounds. His jovial “watch it mate” is entirely unnecessary and cracks the suspense. The episodes with Kamran Shah in Afghanistan seem to be played almost entirely for laughs, which is slightly disconcerting given the seriousness of the Afghan conflict.
Odd then, that the most recognizably realistic scene comes during the Afghan sojourn, as Bond and Kara are escorted to the Mujahidin’s district headquarters. They are travelling through a devastated village and Bond notes the horrors of war, corpses by the roadside and the survivors struggling to clear their crumbling homes. The Mujahidin simply walk through the chaos as if it is an everyday occurrence. Kara, the innocent, is suitably shocked. James Bond has rarely been so genuine.
Despite this brief reality check, it’s the final third of the film which more than anything harks back to the immediate Roger Moore era, with its plethora of characters, silly situations and endless finales, resolved with a quick quip or two. The airborne finale is suitable tense and spectacular, but we’ve seen quite a lot of this recently – parachute jumps, fights on top of biplanes, fights on cable cars, rock climbing, fights on bridges or hanging off hot air balloons – so it perhaps loses some of its potential through repetition. Yet somehow the climax seems to hold together.
Some mention here must go to the director, John Glen, who seems to be getting back to basics. The film has a similar ambience to that of the earliest spy thrillers, not just James Bond, but those Hitchcockian thrillers of the forties and fifties. So 007 using a public toilet to inspect Kara’s cello case or finding a high powered rifle hidden under a single bed blanket seem well in keeping with the original character of James Bond, who of course was bred in the ‘40s and ‘50s. While the screenwriters don’t exactly utilize the full template of Ian Fleming’s short story The Living Daylights, there is some of the world weariness of that opus about the goings on here. Fleming was reflecting on the tiredness of his secret agent, the film seems to be suggesting the Cold War is running tired. They weren’t far wrong.
Glen and his cameraman Alec Mills play it fairly straight. There aren’t any visual surprises here, but they frame their shots well, and the European sequences especially look gorgeously bright, despite the dour circumstances. The stuff in England could be from a completely different film, being washed out and bleak, as if life in Blighty is even worse than that behind the Iron Curtain. It would be hard to make Tangier not look hot. There’s a particularly fine long shot of Bond escaping over the rooftops of the city which brings all those early spy movies back to mind. Morocco also provides a suitable replacement for Afghanistan.
The editing could be swifter; the film does seem to drag towards the end at exactly the point it should be picking up, but this is more a fault of the writers, whose complicated plot needs several viewings to decipher it. The costumes are sleek and simple; the set design understated; the special effects adequate. There’s not a lot really wrong with the production values, which hold up very well to scrutiny. The odd lapse with blue screen technology and day for night shooting (did anyone else notice the brief daytime shot during Bond’s assault on Whittaker’s residence?) don’t hinder the flow of the movie.
Lastly, I want to mention John Barry’s music, not because it’s one of my favorites [it isn’t] but because after a few lean years, the maestro returned for a last hurrah and bade farewell with a superb incidental score which adds much to the tale we see on screen. While he’s lumbered with a dumbed down ‘A View to a Kill’ in Aha’s main title song, Barry overcomes this with a tune of his own, ‘If There Was A Man’, which he utilizes through the film to excellent effect. This central love theme has a wistful sweep of strings that evokes Kara’s own musical prodigy. During the action, Barry is restrained, letting the violence tell its own story and only adding his accompaniment to benefit the highest points. He trusts the action to hold the audience and doesn’t allow his music to overpower what we watch. David Arnold should take note.
The films epilogue finds Kara a concert success but alone amongst friends. The writers overdo this scene, which is the sort of congratulatory group participation I expect from bad television shows not James Bond. Much better is her martini infused kiss with our new hero, who claims “I wouldn’t miss this performance.” We rather believe Timothy Dalton, and I wonder if he’s talking about himself, because ultimately, it’s his fine premier turn as 007 which brings The Living Daylights alive and hauls Ian Fleming’s cinematic hero out of his 1980s doldrums.
The film isn’t a complete success, but it comes across as more rounded and believable than some of the madcap escapades of the past. There are no lasers and space bound hi-jinks, no power crazed world dominating villains, few daft stunts and a general shunning of gadgets. These can only be plus points. The producers claim James Bond will return, although they apparently ran out of titles as early as 1987, and I can only believe Dalton’s interpretation must have seemed a very safe pair of hands to leave James Bond in back in the day. It certainly looks it now.
Licence to Kill is generally perceived as the most adult orientated film in the James Bond series due to its premise of revenge at all costs and the intense, violent moments which pepper the narrative. This may well be true. It is also worth considering the central performances by Timothy Dalton and Robert Davi, who play two uncompromising, tough, driven individuals.
What these performances lack however isn’t subtlety, but variety. Beyond the realms of their personal goals, vengeance for Bond and wealthy self-preservation for Sanchez, these two have little in the way of individuality. Dalton and, especially, Davi are fairly competent, but their similar personas skews the whole project so far towards the serious that all sense of fun and vivacity is lost amongst the numerous gory deaths and longwinded frenzied action. Licence to Kill isn’t dreadful, but it lacks the spark of irony, of knowing humour, which kept some of the more outrageous, and indeed vicious, Bond films in check.
James Bond is out for revenge against the drug lord Franz Sanchez who was responsible for the mutilation of his best friend Felix Leiter and death of Leiter’s wife Della. That these events occur on the couple’s wedding day only serves to recall Bond’s own personal tragedy. Della’s bridal gown is reminiscent of Tracy’s in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and when Bond find’s her corpse, Dalton crushes her to his chest much as Lazenby did of Rigg in that movie.
While these points will be lost to most casual observers, the seasoned Bond viewer may find it interesting as it indicates how writers Richard Maibaum and, predominantly, Michael G. Wilson have tried to look back at the Bond novels and inject something of Ian Fleming’s wretched world weariness into their hero. The feeling remains however that while it’s a grand gesture, the exercise falls flat, not because Dalton isn’t up to the task, but because the script doesn’t really allow him to say anything about his character’s emotional state. Swapping a few cursory lines with M about owing Felix his life hardly does it justice.
[As it happens I can’t remember a time when Leiter actually saves Bond’s life; gets him out of a few scrapes maybe, but he’s no life saver. Most audiences however wouldn’t know that.]
Bereft of decent lines, Dalton has to do much interpretation by expression. This frequently makes him look bemused, baffled, angry, increasingly desperate, slightly wild and, in the main, very, very serious. This Bond may be a real individual with genuine feelings of remorse and guilt and harbouring thoughts of vengeance, but Dalton ends up playing him like some crazed psychotic. There is hardly a scene where he isn’t scowling or glancing suspiciously around at his environment. He’s curt in his speech and callous in his actions, even with those who want to help him. His constant undermining of Pam Bouvier, one of two love interests, makes one wonder why she fancies him.
At times Dalton’s movements seem almost manic. At the baccarat table he handles the cards and chips like they’re red hot coals. When tending his resignation, he isn’t disappointed, but furious [and why? As M points out, this is the American’s territory: it isn’t MI6’s problem]. Dalton looks as if he’s about to explode. He can’t even get out of bed without appearing to panic at his situation. This Bond is not a cool customer. It’s an unusual and uncomfortable portrayal. Dalton doesn’t seem to gel as easily with this script as he did in the far more subtle The Living Daylights. He even looks at odds with his tuxedo and morning dress, looking most at home when casually attired in slacks and shirts.
While the screenplay, or more likely the direction, hinders James Bond’s character development, it also lurches wildly between the mundane and the sincere. There are some genuinely effective scenes. Bond forces a meeting with Sanchez in his office and this is played very well by both Dalton and Robert Davi, who are restrained and thoughtful, allowing the delicate nuances in the script to stand alone. When Bond refers to himself as a ‘problem eliminator’ Dalton is dead pan. When he enters the office, he prowls around the room, taking in the armour plated glass, plotting his moves. You can sense through the inclination of his chin that he regards Sanchez’s henchmen, Heller and Truman Lodge, with complete disdain. Davi is equally composed, hardly shifting his position, a subtle raised eye brow, or that corner smile he offers, indicates more than a hundred words.
They repeat this confrontation twice more, both times at Sanchez’s villa complex, and you can see two great actors at work. Unfortunately their final showdown has all the subtlety of a Stinger missile, Bond screaming accusations while his feet dangle above the steel jaws of a pulveriser and Sanchez taking on a raging manifest as he realises loyalty means nothing to his cohorts. He becomes careless in his killing and having been previously very astute, the last reel finds him nothing more than an exasperated, bullying strongman.
Davi is excellent when playing the knowing gangster, for whom a bribe of two million dollars is pocket cash. He offers this booty at such leisure that you really believe he’s the power behind the President of Isthmus. He is capable of acts of terrible violence, whipping his mistress, dropping Leiter into a pool of sharks or brutally murdering an associate in a decompression chamber; each time Davi remains impassive until the moment of vindictiveness. During a series of extended scenes he woos a delegation of Oriental criminals with his elegance and infallibility. He’s a businessman, the head of a giant corporation, leader of a nation; he’s so aware of his wealth and position, he almost seems bored with it: he responds to Truman Lodge’s wizz kid number cruncher with as much indifference as Bond.
The cut out cast that surround Sanchez are numerous, yet they have very little to work with and subsequently come across as shallow and unformed. Anthony Zerbe has the biggest role as Milton Krest, owner of the Wavekrest yacht which Sanchez uses to export cocaine. This is a character created by Fleming for his short story The Hildebrand Rarity, but while the literary Krest was likened to Ernest Hemingway, a charismatic, vivid, hard drinking man’s man, lover, wife beater and entrepreneur, the cinematic one is a self centred, slimy, creepy, drunkard. You wonder why Sanchez tolerates such a lumberous letch in his organisation.
A young Benico Del Toro plays Dario, a smiling cherubic assassin, who likes to cut out men’s hearts. He crops up in a bar and menaces Bond and his contact Pam Bouvier, but while Del Toro’s effective, the writers have nothing for him to do. Being able to identify Bond, he’s written out of the story until the climax and that’s disappointing as he’s much more interesting than Heller, Truman Lodge and Krest put together. Much of the thanks for that has to go to Del Toro who gives Dario a modern swagger and style, unencumbered by the history of previous Bond henchmen.
Sanchez also has a woman, Lupe, a beauty queen played by a beauty queen, the model and actress Talisa Soto. It’s a difficult role. At times she interprets it very well, especially when called upon to register fear: witness the shock on her face when Sanchez finds her in bed with another man. Basically though, her character is window dressing.
Soto has an important scene at the casino (lifted from Fleming’s Diamonds Are Forever) where Lupe plays croupier and ensures Bond loses his night’s winnings. It starts well but descends into a verbal contretemps and Bond seems almost to lose control. The previously icy Lupe is equally perturbed by his vehement demands, but Soto isn’t a good enough actress to pull off this sort of mangy dialogue and while Dalton thunders, she merely moans. It’s all a bit over the top. Her eventual romantic liaison with 007 seems highly unlikely, which is odd given her penchant for malicious tough guys; this particular interpretation of James Bond would seem eminently suited to her.
There is a brief moment aboard the Wavekrest where Bond learns she is a masochist. This hardly registers, forgotten among all the death and torture, but it is the crutch her character is built on for as the film evolves, Lupe has no reason to return to Sanchez’s side. In the PTS she is once more free, this time by Bond’s and the DEA’s intervention, but for some reason she decides to bide her time with the devils, preferring to take her chances and her money in Isthmus. Her eventual decision to help Bond comes from a sexual attraction which isn’t immediately obvious, when it should really come from her knowledge that eliminating Sanchez would help her financially, socially and politically. A similar ruse was used to develop Nick Nack’s odd behaviour in The Man with the Golden Gun, but here, as there, the writers miss an opportunity to have an insider actively assisting Bond. Instead they embark on an improbable romantic thread.
The true romance, if that’s the right word for such a prickly relationship, is between Bond and the a-fore mentioned Pam Bouvier, a transport pilot and CIA operative. Forced into an uneasy pact with Pam, Dalton’s Bond is at his most charmless, treating her much how Roger Moore treated Brit Ekland’s Mary Goodnight. Pam’s a feisty girl however and she isn’t adverse to giving Bond some lip. This is by far the tetchiest of 007’s relationships. Pam’s attitude sits ill when the audience already knows she’s made love to Bond: they share a ridiculous moment of passion minutes after escaping from Dario and his hoods. We don’t believe it and obviously the mismatched lovers don’t either, as they act as for the rest of the movie as if it never happened. That speedboat scene should really have hit the cutting room floor.
Carey Lowell is a beautiful actress and certainly capable, yet other than the spiky banter, her role is underwritten. Dressed up as Bond’s secretary she’s sophisticated and sexy; dressed up for a night at the Barrelhead Bar she’s rough, tough and ready; we know she’s a qualified pilot; we watch as she wheedles her way cleverly into the Olimpatec Meditation Centre; she’s much more than a dumb bimbo. But at the same time she pines after James Bond like an overgrown teenager and has hissy fits every time he offers his condescending verdict on her skills. Strange too that she never mentions the subplot involving the illegal sale of Stinger missiles; an oversight which has consequences both for her and Bond. Lowell does okay, but her character is not a success.
More pleasing is another comedic interlude from Desmond Llewellyn’s Q and an irascible turn from Robert Brown as M, surrounded by cats at Hemingway’s Key West home as if he’s Blofeld’s alter-ego. These short cameos don’t lift Licence to Kill out of the ordinary, but they do mask over some of the more stereotypical performances from the likes of David Hedison, Wayne Newton, Frank McRae and Rafer Johnson.
Hedison in particular simply doesn’t look like or sound like a CIA operative. During the pre-title sequence he doesn’t convince as a man of authority or as a prospective husband. Indeed he can’t even run without appearing to lose breath. Later, confronted by Sanchez’s goons, he’s like a rabbit caught in headlights, his eyes wide with fear. Far from making us empathise with his character, all Hedison’s growling and shouting does is make us notice what a poor job he’s doing. His best scene is where he bids farewell to Bond and remarks to his wife that ‘He was married once’; Priscilla Barnes, as Della, is out acting him even here, displaying just the right amount of breezy toothsomeness that a blushing bride should.
Robert Davi aside, the acting isn’t generally of the highest order. This hasn’t harmed Bond movies in the past because the action normally propels the narrative and the performances tend to take second place to the stunts and fights. Unfortunately Licence to Kill also struggles in this regard and the whole concoction borders on the tedious.
From the outset we are presented with longwinded and uninvolving set pieces. The teaser sequence resembles a mini-movie of its own and features more air bound hijinks the like of which we’ve seen in every Bond film since The Spy Who Loved Me. It isn’t helped by the audience expecting to believe the DEA would only send one helicopter, two agents plus an off duty officer to tackle uber-villain Franz Sanchez. The resulting melee hardly raises the temperature. It looks what it is: a cheap gun battle before the airplane-raising stunt. The wedding scenario which surrounds it simply beggars belief. Indeed the wedding scenes aren’t really necessary to the story at all, included only for those cryptic hints at 007’s past. Bond and Leiter could just as well have been fishing with Sharkey around Key West.
Choosing to utilize Fleming’s writings Wilson has selected a few unused moments from The Hildebrand Rarity and Diamonds Are Forever, but his best achievement is Bond’s infiltration of the Ocean Exotica warehouse. Lifted directly from Live And Let Die, this is a tense, intriguing scene, but director John Glen lets the team down with a below par gun battle, which is too swift and not nearly dangerous enough. Fleming’s fire fight was a cacophony of gunshots and breaking glass. There’s hardly a shot fired here and Bond’s predicament when facing the irritating Killifer is resolved in a manner you might expect from a children’s television show.
The pace picks up when Bond boards the Wavekrest. Ramon Bravo is the underwater photographer and he does sterling camerawork, enough to rival Thunderball. The stunt team has fun here with some entertaining waterskiing acrobatics. This is probably the sharpest rumpus in the movie. Free of his severe, saturnine shackles at last, even Timothy Dalton is enjoying himself.
The less said about the bar room brawl the better. This was clearly designed, and played, for laughs, but it isn’t remotely funny. Worse, it doesn’t feel like James Bond. He’s supposed to have more class than this. The rendezvous location doesn’t make any sense either. Why would Pam agree to meet Felix in exactly the sort of establishment where Dario and his hoods would be right at home?
When we reach the imaginary Isthmus city, the film straightens itself out a bit and feels much more like a traditional espionage thriller. Bond impersonates himself and, having failed to assassinate Sanchez, manages to make the drug lord believe there is an internal coup against him. This series of scenes is by far the best in the film, developing Bond and Sanchez’s personas and creating the shell of an intriguing subplot that co-exists alongside the revenge angle. [You have to gloss over the fact Sanchez would probably recognize Bond from the PTS. It’s one of those plot holes which most Bond films have; if you concentrate too hard, you’ll spoil it for yourself forever!]
The introduction of the Stinger missile purchase merely clouds the issue though. The film doesn’t really need this; it feels introduced as if to justify Pam’s role and Heller’s existence. I also have grave doubts over Sanchez’s method to legitimise his cocaine sales through a charity foundation. While a novel idea, the film as we see it makes no attempt to explain what relevance Wayne Newton’s Professor Joe has to the story. John Gardner’s movie adaptation elaborated his role much more clearly. And it is a tremendously elaborate front which needs some explaining.
The Meditation Centre itself ought to deliver a grand stand finale to the film, but sadly that isn’t the case. I understand the ‘set’ is a genuine real-life ceremonial site, but – and here I have to point the accusing finger at John Glen and his cameraman Alec Mills – it appears suspiciously fake, almost like a balsa model; I rather think some of it might be. The writers, producers and film makers should have more imagination that this.
The film ends with a long chase involving several oil tankers, missiles, cars and a biplane. It outstays its welcome. James Bond is more roughed up than he’s ever been by the end of it all. I’ve not seen him look so damaged since Dr No’s ‘Tunnel of Death.’ This may be a nod to realism, but overall the chase features some of the more preposterous stunt work and isn’t helped by a sense of distinct déjà vu; we seem to have witnessed a lot of this before. The effects team works overtime to create some spectacular fireworks but there are too many explosions going on and the repetitions drag. Some judicious editing might have helped this chaotic firestorm and chase, but I doubt it.
It’s all accompanied by incidental music from Michael Kamen that wants to compete with the bangs and crashes just to see who can make the most noise. Overall Kamen’s score is a disappointment, having none of the subtlety of John Barry’s best efforts. The two central themes, the strong title track and a modest ballad ‘If You Asked Me To,’ are hardly used and Kamen’s own interpretation of the James Bond Theme is quite synthesizer orientated. I was reminded of Miami Vice.
Indeed the costumes, sets and general plot and locations (Florida and the Keys) do seem to hint at a Bond impersonation of Crockett and Tubbs. But while Miami Vice inhabited the climes of the drug world, it was always quite a bright and, due to the playing of its central cast, amusing show. Licence to Kill has a dark tone, more akin to Pacino’s Scarface, and while there is humour, it’s forced and incidental, matching neither the content nor the actors. The heavy tone is simply unrelenting and too often it tips the film from entertaining to exhausting.
Another attempt at humour rears its ugly head during the epilogue, where there’s something of a hangover from The Living Daylights as all the remaining characters manage to meet up for an extravagant party at Sanchez’s, now Lupe’s, villa. We don’t believe Bond really wants Pam and we don’t believe Lupe would want President Lopez, but there you have it. A bit of quick matchmaking by Messer’s Maibaum and Wilson.
Licence to Kill has a lopsided ending, played for laughs, as if this James Bond has been too tough and we need to have a little chuckle at his expense. We don’t. A few more genuinely ironic moments during the film would have been better placed to deliver the tongue firmly into the cheek.
Problem with TLD for me is that it's just too confusing and I feel a bit thick watching it. I think it needed a better director and more comfortable star to put it across. It took me many viewings over many years to figure out that Dalton's Bond is spinning Kara a yarn about Yogi (what, Yogi bear?) and so is he really falling in love or pretending too? That awful romantic accompaniment is toe curling and I only got to like Barry's If There Was A Man in another context, far away from this Bond film. I guess it's the same with We Have All The Time... I only like it away from OHMSS.
All that stuff about the pig in Bratislava, wtf? I never really understood it or how it works. I get what the film is trying to do a lot of the time, but I never found Glen a very clever director, it's all sign-posted emotionally. Really it doesn't move on from FYEO in terms of competence.
For some reason when watching the attack on the mansion and faked kidnap, I was wondering where Bond is even though he's shown leaving in the Aston. But somehow it's a film where my mind is elsewhere a lot, it doesn't engage me so I don't pay attention when I need to.
Dalton's inability with one-liner makes me wish Gibson had done this film just the once, but of course his Lethal Weapon franchise was up and running that year. The jokes ChrisNo1 refers to, such as Julie T Wallace and the supposed cockney milkman, well, that's to lighten the mood because Dalton certainly can't. That includes the only funny line in the pts: "'Ere, 'old on, you're supposed to be dead!" by the Gibraltar soldier, while Dalton's boringly corny "Better make that two" (a line he actually fluffs would you believe) would need comedy genius to raise a chuckle (though I guess it wouldn't be impossible, you just need to have funny bones which Dalton doesn't have).
That said, there are times when I can enjoy this enough, and going back to AVTAK after really makes Moore's last movie look shallow and pointless. The cinematography has a warm feel.
I agree mainly with LTK although it has fewer jarringly silly moments and the narrative is easier to follow, on the other hand it does the thing Bond movies would do from then on, that is rectifying the previous film's flaws while retaining none of its virtues (decent cinematography, memorable action scenes, decent gadgets, John Barry, Dalton looking good).
Roger Moore 1927-2017
#1.TLD/LTK 2.TND 3.GF 4.GE 5.DN 6.FYEO 7.FRWL 8.TMWTGG 9.TWINE 10.YOLT/QOS
didn't have the best scripts to work with and basic direction. I always though J Glen
was a fairly boring director, Competent but unimaginative.
I only recently learnt that Dalton and Glen argued on the set of LTK, supposedly leading
to Dalton refusing to work with Glen again. (This is from wikipedia so I don't know how
much truth there is to it ).
#1.TLD/LTK 2.TND 3.GF 4.GE 5.DN 6.FYEO 7.FRWL 8.TMWTGG 9.TWINE 10.YOLT/QOS
I remember hearing that years ago. I believe their was a writers strike and Dalton wanted Bond to have his usual wit and one liners but Glen was set on playing it close to Fleming and keeping it dark. I believe when Dalton was making the TV movie Scarlet I recall him saying something along those lines in an interview.
Nice to know there is always something new to learn.
There are some weaknesses. The direction is too old fashined and safe. The colours are flat and there is barely any shadow. This reminds me more about TV shows from the decade, such as Dynasty. The cutting, camera moves and angles are also boring and uninventive. John Glen is competent and workmanlike, but lacks flair. They should have hired a more edgy director. The same goes with the music. It is bland and unremarkable. A more distinctive score with a good use of brass and drums would have been right for both Bond and the Latin American locations and avoided the standard action film score. A different title song (I actually like "If you asked me to") would have lifted the movie. U2 was in their "Joshua Tree" period then. Their more masculine, dark and energetic sound would have fitted LTK. Perhaps something along the lines of "With or without you"?
LTK has a good plot and many good set-pieces. I agree the bar brawl is the weakest. Probably a scene set at night in Hong Kong or Indochina would have worked better. It would make sense in the plot and the movie have been more in the globetrotting tradition of Bond. Since it would be set at night there is no reason it would cost more to film than the origional bar scene. The scene should be at least as tense as the start of the scene in the movie, but without the failed attempts at humor. Instead there should be more humour in other parts of the movie, but too much and too broad. That would have not fitted the plot or Dalton. I also think they should have played up Bond as British. Perhaps contrasting his Britishness to the Americans (North- and Latin Americans) would have been a good way to introduce more humor into the movie.
I also agree the two Bond girls could have been better. I imagine putting Salma Hayek in the Lupe role. She probably coudn`t speak English at the time, but her spirit and sex appeal would have made Lupe more interesting. I hope she could have handled the darker side of Lupe too. A warmer tone in the scenes between Bond and Pam would have made their relationship more believable. Perhaps helping Bond (and Dalton!) to see the warmer and less tense/angry sides of life would have worked? Still, LTK is a good move that showed the complex and dark world of Fleming`s 007.
#1.TLD/LTK 2.TND 3.GF 4.GE 5.DN 6.FYEO 7.FRWL 8.TMWTGG 9.TWINE 10.YOLT/QOS
Roger Moore 1927-2017
8. TMwtGG 9. AVtaK 10. TSWLM 11. SF 12. LtK 13. TND 14. YOLT
15. NTtD 16. MR 17. LaLD 18. GF 19. SP 20. DN 21. TB
22. TWiNE 23. DAD 24. QoS 25. DaF