LICENSE TO KILL: I’m James Bond! I’m Angry! A Shark Ate My Friend!

License to Kill (1989) – The 16th James Bond Film; The 2nd (of 2) Timothy Dalton Films – Directed by John Glen – Starring Timothy Dalton, Carey Lowell, Robert Davi, Talisa Soto, Anthony Zerbe, Benicio Del Torro, Wayne Newton, Robert Brown, and Desmond Llewelyn.

LICENSE TO KILL is one of the more confounding Bond movies – on the one hand, it’s basically a generic revenge flick absent of nearly anything resembling a sense of humor, but on the other it is a pretty good revenge flick, at least in the context of what it is – a 1980s action movie. The confusion doesn’t stop there in my fragile little mind, because once you get past Timothy Dalton and Robert Davi (and Desmond Llewelyn and Wayne Newton, to be fair) the acting is across-the-board atrocious, but there’s such an energetic force to Dalton’s performance that he single-handedly pushes this film forward, largely overcoming Carey Lowell’s inability to act, Talisa Soto’s inability to act, Sharky’s inability to act, anyone in the DEA’s ability to act, Benicio del Toro’s inability to act in this role, Felix Leiter’s inability to come off as a convincing spy, Felix Leiter’s wife practically sucking face with Bond right after her wedding ceremony, and locations that would fail to make the Florida Tourism Board’s brochure.

It’s not the typical Bond movie, but we’ve got 20-something typical Bond movies, so a change of pace isn’t such a bad thing now and then. LICENSE is the opposite of THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS in a lot of ways – where DAYLIGHTS started strong and petered out to a generic blandness, LICENSE starts out rather awful and then turns engaging, and it does so almost solely because of Dalton.

Dalton’s Bond in LICENSE does not display much of the thinking, adaptable Bond that I so enjoyed in the first half of DAYLIGHTS, trading in the think-on-your feet, instinctual approach for a single-minded determinedness that sees him operating as a rogue agent in order to enact his own personal justice for the murder of Felix Leiter’s wife and the feeding-to-the-sharks of Felix himself. Where Dalton’s Bond rings false this time around is in his softer moments; given that Bond is so driven for revenge that he goes AWOL from MI6 (who, admittedly, look about as hard for Bond as I’m looking for someone to come punch me in the face), the moments where he’s smiling like a school boy at a pretty girl feel off.

There’s a lot of silliness here that keeps LICENSE from being a truly great Bond movie but there was surprisingly more to like than I’d remembered. This is a good movie. It’s not the first Bond movie you’d want to give to a novice, but then “Blink” isn’t the first episode of Doctor Who you’d want to give someone, either. (Not that LICENSE is equal to “Blink.” Far from it.) The inescapable reality that always confronts you is how bad the acting is, and I’m truly not playing to hyperbole when I say it is awful. While Bond films are rarely dotted with acting giants, the acting in LICENSE would look bad if it had come in an episode of Knight Rider. Hell, it would even look bad if it had come in Knight Rider: The Really Crappy New Version, too.

Carey Lowell (who went on to be a perfectly fine actress on Law & Order) and Talisa Soto (who went on the be a perfectly acceptable actress in Mortal Kombat) are certainly in the lower levels of Bond women. When we meet Lowell, Pam Bouvier is an allegedly bad-ass contact of Leiter’s, feeding him info on Sanchez’s (Davi’s) operation. We know she’s a bad-ass because she’s sitting in a dive bar, she’s wearing kevlar, and she’s holding a shotgun in her lap, but we never buy her bad-ass-ness. It’s not because she’s gorgeous because plenty of gorgeous women have played bad-asses, but because there’s a softness to Lowell’s features and her actions that make you think she’s playing dress-up instead of inhabiting her everyday world. Even her tomboyish haircut doesn’t work, seeming to enhance rather than hide her supermodel appearance and unconvincing actions.

After Bouvier convinces Bond to allow her to tag along, Bond starts referring to her as his executive assistant, and then dumps some money on her to go buy some clothes so she can look the part. When she reappears she’s cut her hair and traded in her pilot clothes for sharp business suits and tight evening gowns. When Bond does a double-take at seeing the new look, you believe it. Unfortunately, the change in appearance doesn’t come with a similar change in attitude. Other than being ridiculously pleasing arm candy, I rarely buy Lowell in LICENSE TO KILL. She does have one great scene where she plays dumb to get Wayne Newton’s keys but for the most part if she’s not nearly tumbling out of her dress or being comforted by Q, she doesn’t bring anything to the movie.

Soto is even worse. She’s Sanchez’s girlfriend Lupe, one in a long line of beauties that have filled this role, and she sends conflicting signals at the viewer. When we meet her she’s in the arms of another man (who literally gets his heart cut out by Sanchez for this act) but it’s not like she’s actively trying to escape Sanchez’s life. She seems to enjoy the luxuries that come with being a kept woman, she’s just not necessarily super-happy about being this guy’s kept woman. I started to feel some sympathy for her when she gets whipped for her insolence and again when she helps Bond, but when she pronounces her love for him it just comes across as something a pretty girl would say to get an older man to do things for her. There’s no feeling behind it.

Even worse, Lupe’s “love” for James sends Bouvier into fits of jealous poutiness and it actually becomes hard to imagine that Bond would want anything to do with either one of them once the mission is over. Even with all their beauty you’d think Bond wouldn’t want to put up with the lovesick little girl-ness of either of them.

Robert Davi plays the villain Sanchez and he’s pretty good considering this Bond movie wants a villain that looks and acts like he just wandered off the set of Miami Vice. When he feeds Felix Leiter’s leg to his pet shark, it comes across as ruthless and disgusting; this isn’t a guy who puts frickin’ laser beams on the heads of sharks for fun.

Perhaps knowing the film was a bit too grim in the opening half, Q gets an expanded role this go-round, providing some much needed levity and, more importantly, warmth. It’s great to see him in action, posing as Bond’s chauffeur (similar to Patrick Macnee’s role in A VIEW TO A KILL), but Q’s real contribution to the movie is the way he comforts Bouvier – usually with a look of knowing exasperation that says, “I want to tell you that you’re just number 832 but that would be mean, so here’s my shoulder to cry on and some carefully worded advice.”

LICENSE TO KILL isn’t a fantastic movie, and its certainly riddled with horrible acting, but the back-half of the movie really rescues the film. If I could take the opening half of THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS and combine it with the back-half of LICENSE TO KILL, I think we’d have a heck of a movie.

Oh, the title song is pretty mediocre. I love me some Gladys Knight, and she tries her damndest, but this is mid-80s pop ballad schlockfest makes me think of mom jeans.

THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS: Duty Has No Sweethearts

The Living Daylights (1987) – The 15th James Bond Film; The 1st (of 2) Timothy Dalton Films – Directed by John Glen – Starring Timothy Dalton, Maryam d’Abo, John Rhys-Davies, Joe Don Baker, Jeroen Krabbe, Art Malik, Robert Brown, and Desmond Llewelyn.

I always have a soft spot for THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS because it was one of the only movies my dad ever took me and my brother to the theater to watch. We just weren’t much of a movie going family but we made an exception for the Dalton Bond movies and Star Trek 4 and probably 5. A soft spot doesn’t mean I love it, however.

There are two basic problems with THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS, which is the cinematic equivalent of a bologna sandwich on white bread with no condiments: neither terrible nor desirable, it’s an inoffensive, unmemorable way to put food in your stomach. I can understand people digging it. I can understand people dismissing it. For me, soft spot aside, it’s just a rather average film.

Problem #1: Timothy Dalton is certainly a decent enough actor to play this part, but whatever skills he has as an actor are hurt by the fact that he’s lacking the kind of screen presence required to carry a franchise – he simply does not have that star quality that makes you want to look at him. Say what you want for Roger Moore and Sean Connery, but there was never any question that they were at the center of what happened. Dalton has a much more passive presence, and it often feels like he’s trying to fit in the movie rather than demanding the movie fit in around him.

If, instead of pushing the movie franchise forward in the mid-80s they’d launched a James Bond TV series, I’d have embraced Dalton fully. In baseball, there’s a term for a player who’s too good for the minor leagues but not good enough for the majors: a AAAA (or 4A) player – too good for AAA, not good enough for MLB, and they often spend their career bouncing between the two divisions. To me, that’s what Dalton personifies. At best he’s a great supporting actor on the big screen (see Flash Gordon) because he’s not a big enough presence to demand our attention through force of will, and he just doesn’t demand my attention.

This isn’t to say Dalton is a horrible Bond. He’s perfectly fine, and often quite good. My appreciation for him has certainly grown through the years, and he’s at his best when delivering an angry, dickish retort, such as his response when they escape capture and Kara Milvoy (Maryam d’Abo) tells him, “You were fantastic. We’re free.”

Bond chides back, reminding her of the situation they’re in: “Kara, we’re inside a Russian airbase in the middle of Afghanistan.”

Or when General Georgi Koskov (Jeroen Krabbé) apologizes for his betrayal by offering, “I’m sorry, James. For you I have great affection, but we have an old saying: duty has no sweethearts.”

Bond’s retort is an aggressive, “We have an old saying too, Georgi. And you’re full of it.”

Dalton is very good in these moments, and I’m not going to disparage his performance by saying, “He’s no Roger Moore” or “He’s no Sean Connery.” Of course he isn’t. What I will say is that this particular conception of James Bond doesn’t work as well for me as either Connery or Moore’s iteration, and the tone of this film, well, that leads me to …

Problem #2: Despite the “back to basics” approach at play here, DAYLIGHTS could very easily be titled GENERIC 1980s ACTION PICTURE. Previously, Moore and the producers were smart enough to take away some of the Bond Accessories in order to help him make the character his own: cigarettes were replaced with cigars, Aston Martin was replaced with Lotus, AMC, and Ford, vodka martinis were replaced with bourbon. These are subtle, but important ways to enforce the idea of a “new” main character. Unfortunately, instead of allowing Dalton the same courtesy, they bring all of those Connery accessories back, and because the producers and Dalton are inviting us to think of James Bond as either the Fleming or Connery version of the character, they’re putting Dalton in competition with them and the result is that, much like Moore in A VIEW TO A KILL, it feels like Dalton is playing dress up for the bulk of the movie.

To be clear, Timothy Dalton is not a horrible Bond and THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS is not a horrible movie but I don’t get the sense that Dalton and the producers gave any real thought to how to bring what he does best as an actor to the character of James Bond. It’s like they decided, “Here’s what Bond should be,” grafted it into a generic 1980s action film, and then had Dalton play that. The result is a film with a lead actor looking like he’s never settled in a movie that could star almost anyone and be about almost anyone. I don’t know – as much as the producers had wanted to hire Dalton as far back as Roger Moore’s first film – that the film makers ever had a lot of confidence in Dalton. The marketing department certainly didn’t; check out the film’s poster where the central image isn’t Bond, but some blond woman’s butt and legs.

For all the shaken-not-stirred martinis and Aston Martins and cigarettes and tuxedos, this movie isn’t fun or compelling or unique. DAYLIGHTS is a grinding, episodic film that largely keeps your attention without demanding it. Much like Dalton, the movie seems to think it just needs to have the right accessories to be a James Bond movie. Maybe technically that’s true, but there’s no core to this movie. And that’s the crime – not that this is or isn’t an authentic James Bond but that there’s little authentic here at all. It’s Dalton playing dress up in a movie that seems aimed for both teenage boys (with the things-blow-up action) and their moms (with the Lifetime-esque romance).

Dalton’s Bond needs an identity beyond angry comebacks, and the nugget of that identity is here and it would have been the perfect identity to build a movie around. Dalton’s Bond is incredibly adaptive and intelligent – just look how he takes over Saunders’ mission to smuggle Russian General Koskov out of Bratislava. Saunders (Thomas Wheatley) comes off as a career administrator, making a point to remind Bond that it’s his mission and he wants the credit. Bond, of course, doesn’t care about such trivial matters. He’s more than willing to let Saunders have all the credit, but when he senses something is amiss at the sight of Koskov’s would-be assassin being a cutesy cellist (d’Abo), he refuses to kill her and grabs Koskov from Saunders, telling him he’ll get Koskov out of the country.

Bond takes Koskov to an industrial plant where they stick him inside a gas pipeline and blast him across the border, which highlights the film’s struggle with being realistic and yet still offering wild gadgets. It’s neat but it’s not necessary. What works about it is that it shows Bond’s ability to make quick, hard decisions and then use the resources at his disposal to make plans on the go.

If the filmmakers had built this movie around Bond’s ability to adapt and think in the middle of a crisis, we could have had a fantastic action movie where our protagonist was put in troublesome spot after troublesome spot and watched him think his way out of jams as much as he punches his way out of jams. (You know, like the Bourne movies tend to do.) That could have been a powerful movie and Dalton could have done that wonderfully because he’s doing it wonderfully in DAYLIGHTS – we just don’t get enough of it.

Unfortunately, the longer the movie goes the more it grinds us down into a movie that anyone from Chuck Norris to Stallone to Ahnold could have appeared in. The inventiveness of Bond and Kara Milovy sledding down a mountain in her cello case is replaced with Bond putting on a turban to pretend he’s a Mujahideen to sneak on a plane. The first bit (silly as it is) at least signals this film as updating the old Moore ski chase, but the second scene comes right out of the generic action film playbook.

There’s no charm to Dalton’s Bond, and little sense he enjoys life outside of his job. In the opening sequence, a fellow 00-agent gets killed and Bond ends up parachuting down onto a luxury yacht. A woman in a bikini is there but he’s all, “I need to use your phone and call in my problem.” It’s only when she makes a point of offering herself does he decide, “Yeah, I guess I will have sex on a luxury yacht with some rich woman while I wait. And, what the heck, I might as well enjoy it.”

Dalton’s Bond is almost disinterested in sex. He connects with Milovy and is almost instantly smitten with her, but it’s in a chaste manner, and not a wolfish one. There’s a bit of him lying to her to get her to give him information, but instead of bedding her in some fancy hotel room he’s playing kissy face with her at an amusement park. The love story between Bond and Milovy unfolds like some Lifetime romance – Milovy’s boyfriend is Koskov, but he turns out to be a cheating heel. She travels with the super secret agent who ends up falling for her and appreciating her for who she is – a really talented cellist.

The film gets some points for putting Bond back in an Aston Martin, but I’ve never been a fan of a car that sprouts skis unless it appears on Wacky Races. After the awesomeness of the Lotus turning into a submersible back in THE SPY WHO LOVED ME, it’s probably better to just keep the cars full of missiles and laser beams. Watching the Aston cut a hole in the ice so a chasing car sinks comes off as kinda lame. It’s the kind of scene that would work if this were a kid’s movie, but it’s not.

The villains could also come from any espionage film – a Russian general and an American arms dealer. Even the film’s “oddball” villain is just a tall guy with white-blonde hair who kills people with his walkman headphones. Yup, I just wrote that.

DAYLIGHTS does get one big, after the fact, Stunt Casting That Wasn’t point when Felix Leiter shows up and it’s played by Jack’s dad from LOST. Unless we want to give DAYLIGHTS credit for casting HAWK THE SLAYER!!!!!! Yeah, didn’t think so.

The film takes its sweet time getting anywhere, content to almost walk us from set piece to set piece where an action scene breaks out. While not dragging me forward it’s not exactly compelling me forward, either. At some point I realized that THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS is just some dude you end up hanging out with at a baseball game. You’re not gonna become pals but he’s not annoying you, either. He’s got this great story about his Aston Martin but he’s a bit boring when he starts talking politics.

The opening titles are sorta blah but not horrific, but a-ha’s title song is as dreadful as these opening songs get – it’s just so weak and tinny it makes Sheena Easton’s “For Your Eyes Only” seem bad-*ss. Just awful pop hollowness. It’s not catchy, not inspiring, not earnest. It’s just manufactured, calculated awfulness.

A VIEW TO A KILL: Cover Up Your Embarrassing Incompetence

A View To a Kill (1983) – The 14th James Bond Film; The 7th (of 7) Roger Moore Films – Directed by John Glen – Starring Roger Moore, Christopher Walken, Patrick Macnee, Grace Jones, Tanya Roberts, Robert Brown, and Desmond Llewelyn.

There is but one moment of anything resembling brilliance in A VIEW TO A KILL. It occurs right around the mid-point when Bond’s infiltration of the Zorin estate has been discovered and Bond tells Zorin, “My department knows I’m here. When I don’t report, they’ll retaliate.” Zorin, sensing the pathetic nature of Bond’s threat, replies, “If you’re the best they’ve got, they’re more likely to try and cover up your embarrassing incompetence.”

And that about sums up the movie, a tired, bland, dull movie in which James Bond (Roger Moore) is too old and slow to stay active in what has become a younger man’s game. Unlike OCTOPUSSY, which managed to make Bond’s age anachronistic and tragic to the world around him, A VIEW TO A KILL seems determined to put up a front that says, “Everything is normal. No sags under the eyes to see here.”

But, of course, there are.

Make-up and lighting do a decent job covering the lines of Moore’s distinctive face, and the hair has been given a trim to keep it neat, but effects can’t cover the athletic stiffness or natural sagging of the body. No disrespect to Moore, who has been a fantastic Bond in largely mediocre (but rarely offensively bad) films rarely ascend to his performance, but even he has admitted he was too old to be running around with the license to kill this time around.

Sadly, and for the first time in his 7-film tenure, Roger Moore is playing James Bond instead of embodying his alter-ego. The confidence, swagger, and general bad-assery are in the past. In VIEW, Moore is just a dude at a costume party trying out worn lines on women too young to know who he’s supposed to be. Where OCTOPUSSY found a way to work Moore’s anachronistic image and identity to deliver a tragic image of Bond, VIEW’s insistence that everything is fine takes on a pathetic quality. Local baseball announcers have become glorified homers/cheerleaders, with teams wanting them to be the club’s first line of PR instead of neutral observers, reporters, and analysts. Knowing this, ex-Red Sox play-by-play man Sean McDonough once said that what he tried to do was to be aware of this fact, but not say anything that would outright insult the viewer at home; if they saw something obvious, he shouldn’t try and pretend there something obvious hadn’t happened. The worlds of baseball and James Bond are separated by more than an ocean, but McDonough’s comment applies to the Bond franchise here – when we can see that Moore is too old to play the part he’s been given, the film shouldn’t try to pretend that he’s not.

Yet, it does.

There’s some humor between Bond and Patrick Macnee, and VIEW gains a spark when Christopher Walken is on screen but there’s no reason to sit through VIEW to see it because most of the time Walken is just cartoonishly ridiculous. Yeah, I know, it’s Chris Walken and we’re all just supposed to say how awesome he is, but he’s only awesome a few times in VIEW. And Grace Jones … good lord, they do the same thing with her character they did with Jaws when they turn the bad ass soft.

The opening half-hour has a lame plot involving horses and steroids but at least the sets are nice. We spend our time hanging out in luxurious submersibles, racetracks, and a French estate. Score one for set designs and location shooting. Unfortunately the action that accompanies these sets is forced and derivative of things we’ve seen before. The whole “Bond skis away from 629 enemy agents” scene has been done before and better in THE SPY WHO LOVED ME. (And even there it wasn’t so hot. Moore rarely looks comfortable in front of a green screen.)

Bond recovers a microchip, which leads to a plot about horse steroids, which leads to Zorin wanting to destroy Silicon Valley. Of course it does.

Tanya Roberts starts hanging out when the action shifts to the States and, I don’t know, VIEW had barely been hanging on when it was set at the French estate, but seeing Bond adventure around San Francisco in a stolen firetruck represents some kind of bottoming out. It’s a lame scene that’s horribly shot and edited. It’s easy to lay the blame at the feet of Moore because he’s the star but the whole production feels tired. I mean, explain this scene: There’s a fire at City Hall, some cop who looks like he’s walked off the set of Man vs. Food is all, “Is this your gun?” and then Bond steals a firetruck to lead the cops on a chase through the streets of San Francisco, endangering the lives of everyone he comes across.

For what?

There’s no immediate rush to get somewhere. He does it because he doesn’t want to be bothered to prove who he is and the movie makes us side with him because the rest of the cops are fresh out of the Police Academy films and will do anything silly and stupid that’s ever been done in a car chase involving cops in a movie ever.

A VIEW TO A KILL is boring, tedious, tired, and I don’t want to talk about it anymore.

Well, okay, one last thing. The title song is pretty darn good (especially in the context of the mediocre elevator music that’s come before it, it’s nice to hear a song with some tempo), but the titles just might be the worst in the series, which is fitting since this film just might be the worst in the series, too. A sad, pathetic end to the much maligned and severely under-appreciated Roger Moore era.