License to Kill (1989) | Simple and Different

Before I finally watched License to Kill for the first time, I had been assured by others that it was the worst Bond film of the franchise. The fact that Dalton would bow out of the Bond role after this movie only further cemented that reputation in my mind before I saw it. I only saw the movie for the first time in 2014 and when the credits rolled, I sat in contemplation about the experience. Yes, it was quite a different movie from all other James Bond movies that had come before it. However, I couldn’t quite understand why it had such a negative reputation because I thought it was a fun time.

Pros

Premise of Bond going rogue for revenge is very different and makes the plot extremely straightforward
Some of Bond’s intuitive decisions make for good drama and suspense while also showing his brilliant ingenuity
Good action scenes and stunts with the big explosions the ‘80s were known for
Bond using Sanchez’s paranoia to get what he wants is very satisfying

Cons

Acting and accents are inconsistent
The cover story for the drug manufacturing facility is weird
Timothy Dalton’s haircut
How does a drug factory go up in flames so quickly? No sprinkler system?
Lamora falls in love with Bond after barely interacting with him in a positive manner

Plot & Thoughts

CIA agent and friend who often appears in James Bond movies, Felix Leiter (David Hedison), is getting married in Florida, and James Bond (Timothy Dalton) is his best man. Before the two can head to Leiter’s wedding, a call comes in about the notorious drug lord Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi) being in the area. They rush into a helicopter to intercept Sanchez, manage to kill a few goons, capture the villain, and get back to the wedding in time. All in a day’s work, right?

Unfortunately for both of them, Sanchez does not stay in custody for long. One of the agents in charge of transferring Sanchez to a high-security facility named Killifer (Everett McGill) succumbs to his greed and accepts Sanchez’s bribe to get him out. The next time Bond visits the newly married couple, he finds the new wife dead and Leiter crippled via shark bite to the leg. Determined to seek revenge, Bond takes it upon himself to find Sanchez and not just kill him, but completely destroy everything about him. He plans to destroy his drug manufacturing business and manipulate him into distrusting all of his allies. MI6 has no interest in pursuing this venture and tries to take Bond back to the U.K. but we all know that’s not going to stop a determined James Bond who goes rogue and undercover.

This is probably the simplest plot of all James Bond movies because there’s not much mystery or complexity to it. There’s no hunt for secret technology the Russians have acquired. There’s no league of assassins for James Bond to track down. There are no double agents seeking to make two superpowers fight each other and cause WWIII. It’s just a revenge story. It’s Death Wish meets James Bond with lots of 1980s explosions. It is, perhaps, the biggest departure from the James Bond franchise, both plot-wise and thematically. It certainly is the most violent of all of them with some pretty gruesome scenes for particular characters. It’s also a bit out of character for Bond to forsake Queen and Country for the sake of revenge, but it makes more sense for him to make this choice than some of the decisions he makes in later films—we’ll get to that, I assure you. That might be the reason it didn’t do as well at the box office and garnered such a negative reputation. And even though I normally think that Bond is above the likes of a drug dealer—as this was one of my criticisms for the villain in Live and Let Die—I still thoroughly enjoy License to Kill. Why? Because, this time, it’s personal…[Insert dramatic music]

License to Kill is very much a product of its time. While James Bond may have been one of the big action franchises of the 1980s, there were plenty of other American action movies that were successful during the decade that starred the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, which I think influenced the direction that this movie took. And even though this movie is very different from all the others in the franchise, Timothy Dalton still comes across as James Bond to me and the script allows him to demonstrate his cunning capabilities. We’ve seen James Bond outsmart his enemies and we’ve seen him track down the villains with minimal clues. We haven’t seen Bond befriend the main villain and manipulate him into distrusting his own men to the point that he starts killing them off out of genuine paranoia. If we didn’t know that Sanchez was a ruthless drug lord who was willing to feed people to sharks, James Bond could be portrayed as the real villain in this movie with his plotting and ruthlessness—he feeds people to sharks in this movie, too! It’s an aspect of the character that hasn’t been explored before, and the more I think about it, the more I want someone to cut a trailer for this movie in which he is the villain.

Regardless of whether or not Bond is the hero in this movie, it’s still a very fun adventure. James Bond doesn’t do as much globetrotting as he usually does and tends to stay around the region of Florida as he makes his way towards Sanchez. The fact that he’s gone rogue to complete his goals means that he has to worry about MI6 chasing him down in addition to men who work for Sanchez who might blow his cover. There are also external forces that want Sanchez alive for their own drug-busting operations, which adds even more tension to the situation and creates an unseen ticking clock for the movie to suggest that Bond is running out of time to make his move and strike at Sanchez. He’s not completely on his own, however. He gets a little help from some allies along the way, which I won’t spoil for those who haven’t seen it because it’s a nice surprise when one particular character shows up.

License to Kill is far from perfect, however, as there are plenty of instances in which the characters and the actors don’t quite measure up. Timothy Dalton holds the movie together while several members of the rest of the cast struggle to sell their characters. Robert Davi can work as a villain and has been fine in other movies. However, he struggles to keep his Colombian/Cuban/Venezuelan/??? accent consistent throughout the film. If he didn’t look so much younger than Davi, they should have had Benicio Del Toro swap places with him as the main villain. Del Toro could have been able to keep the accent more consistent at the very least.

There’s also the character of Lupe Lamora (Talisa Soto). She’s introduced early on in the film as Sanchez’s trophy girl and she has multiple antagonistic interactions with Bond throughout the first half of the movie. Then, she suddenly does an about-face and falls in love with him due to reasons we have to assume happened off-screen. At least when Pussy Galore betrayed Goldfinger, she wasn’t romantically involved with him and she got r@ped convinced by Bond’s charm to change her mind. Lamora doesn’t play much of a part in the movie either. She just gives Bond a few tips of information that help him on his way to achieving his goal, but she could be removed from the plot and not much would have changed.

There are plenty of other minor nitpicks I could go into—like the weird front Sanchez’s drug operation has with the evangelical church minister thing on TV that doesn’t really make sense to me, or how an advanced cocaine manufacturing plant has no sprinkler system in place to prevent it from dramatically exploding after a small fire in a lab—but they’re all pretty minor in comparison to the overall experience. License to Kill still has some great action scenes and stunts to make up for its faults. The final chase in the semi-trucks down the mountain is exciting and filled with cool moments. The sequences in which Bond has to escape MI6 or Sanchez’s men are thrilling and fun. James Bond is simply a badass in this movie in the classic 1980s style where you don’t have to take it too seriously and you can enjoy how wild everything gets.

TL;DR

License to Kill is probably the most 1980s film of the James Bond franchise. It’s a big departure in terms of tone, theme, action, and plot. It’s a simple revenge story that goes in some dark and gruesome directions that you wouldn’t expect. If you’re a James Bond purist, I can see why you might dislike it. I, however, enjoy the break from the norm because it still manages to be fun in the way James Bond movies are, and Timothy Dalton still nails the role just as well as he did in The Living Daylights. There’s some good action and drama to make up for the minor flaws of this over-the-top ‘80s action movie.

Hair of the Dog Drinking Game Rule

Perhaps the darkest in tone and the bloodiest of the Bond films up until the Daniel Craig era, License to Kill does not go easy on the deaths and occasional gore. Plenty of villains, henchmen, and allies met their ends in terrible ways in the previous films, but it was most often implied, rather than shown. I certainly don’t recall there being an instance in which the film showed a shark amputation until License to Kill. So, while this movie is not as gory as other action movies of the era like Predator, it is still on a level that is unfamiliar to James Bond and that sets it apart from the rest.

Alternatively, you could just celebrate the fact that since the villain is supposed to be a Spanish-speaking drug dealer from south of the border, Spanish words are spoken more often in License to Kill than in other Bond films and you could just drink whenever someone says something in Spanish. It’s especially funny when Robert Davi does it because his accent is no bueno.