Bond-arama: No. 0021 Licence to Kill (1989)

We continue our ranking of the Bond films with Licence to Kill. This film stinks. It’s a Miami Vice episode without the drama, the tension, or the style. It also lacks any sense of grandeur and offers nothing that would please a traditional Bond fan. That’s why it ranks No. 0021 of 0023 on our countdown.

Plot Quality: The film opens with Felix Leiter and our Mr. Bond arresting a drug lord named Sanchez (Robert Davi) whom the DEA has been after. Why the CIA is involved isn’t really explained. To add drama, they interrupt Felix’s wedding to make the arrest. Shortly thereafter, Felix gets maimed when the drug lord escapes and feeds Felix to a shark. Bond wants revenge, so he resigns and flees to Latin America against orders to kill Sanchez. Once there, he tricks Sanchez into taking him in like a lost puppy, then he kills Sanchez in a moderate-speed tanker truck chase.

That’s it.

The details don’t add much either. Bond is being chased by the Secret Service for resigning and escaping their grasp, so he teams up with a woman (Carey Lowell) who is a CIA informant and pretends to be an out-of-work assassin. Of course, the Secret Service captures him right away. . . and then Sanchez helps him escape because that makes the plot work. Bond then discovers that Sanchez has hidden his operation as a meditation retreat run by televangelist Professor Joe Butcher (Wayne Fricken Newton). This ultimately has nothing to do with the plot, what there is of it. Once Bond finds Sanchez they play a silly cat and mouse game and then end the film in a gas tanker truck chase which is packed with “uh. . . why didn’t he just ___” moments. That’s always a horrible sign.

All in all, the plot is beyond stale and little of it makes sense. The film billed itself as being “torn from the headlines” for its drug-revenge plot, but that idea had already been done two years before in similar ways by films like Lethal Weapon, RoboCop and Beverly Hills Cop II. Moreover, a lot of the characters’ actions aren’t things people would do in the real world. Bond is out-of-character throughout. There is no drama as there’s no sense that anything unexpected will happen. The bad guy and his scheme are uninteresting, and it’s impossible to care about Bond’s desire for revenge. Not to mention, there are no iconic moments and not a single memorable quote.

Bond Quality: This is the second and last Timothy Dalton Bond film and, honestly, two was too many. James Bond is a special character because he perfectly mixes sophistication, style and conscience-less brute force. Dalton was too huffy and curt to have style, too average and too self-conscious to be sophisticated, and this film proved he couldn’t do brute force either.

In fact, this film was a deliberate attempt to make Bond more “real” by making the violence shocking to audiences. Yet, the violence presented is no more realistic nor more brutal than we were seeing on average cop shows already. And, in making it more “real,” they stripped away the grandeur which Bond needs. He was no longer the suave superspy doing amazing feats of daring, he was just a whiny cop who sometimes shot people in self-defense. And when you compare the supposedly brutal Dalton Bond of this film with something like Craig’s Bond in Quantum of Solace, the claim that this film involves a brutal James Bond is laughable.

Further, to create the supposed brutality, they gave Bond this motive about Felix Leiter being maimed by the bad guy, but even putting aside the fact that James Bond isn’t supposed to lose his cool even when he seeks revenge, Dalton played this all wrong. He didn’t summon an inner-rage so much as an inner-pissiness, and he comes across more like someone upset at a waiter than someone upset about their friend being killed. Not to mention the ending scene is horrible where Felix laughs off his own maiming. If Felix doesn’t care, why should we?

The Bond Girls: Bond is pretty asexual in this, so it’s fitting that he got a totally forgettable Bond Girl – Carey Lowell as Pam Bouvier. She’s a pilot and a CIA informant with short hair and a total lack of mystery. There is no chemistry between them either. There’s also Talisa Soto as Sanchez’s girlfriend Lupe. There’s not really much to say about her.

Villain Quality: Finally, we come to the villain: Franz Sanchez. Even the name is pathetic. Sanchez is supposedly modeled on Kananga from Live and Let Die, but they must be from different mothers because I don’t see the resemblance. Unlike Kananga, he has no cool double-life, no cool sidekicks, no cool base of operations, and he doesn’t know Jane Seymour. There’s also nothing unique about him. Sanchez is blandly described as a powerful Latin American drug lord the DEA has been after for years. Yawn. The Miami Vice boys round those fellows up every week. And he is meant to suggest Manuel Noriega, who defines the term “petty tyrant.”

Sanchez is played by Robert Davi, whose acting career never rose above bit parts. He does ok here as a standard drug dealer, but there’s nothing to make you see him as anything special. His base of operations, for some reasons, involves using Wayne Newton as an evangelist as a front, but it’s never clear why this matters. His henchmen are just thugs, including Benicio del Toro who is not the least bit intimidating.

Even worse, Sanchez’s scheme is stunningly weak. He’s just trying to find a way to smuggle cocaine to other countries by dissolving it in gasoline. Big deal. If he succeeds, nothing changes in the world. Nor is this very interesting, it amounts to little more than one of a million unoriginal smuggling methods. This does not a Bond villain make. Moreover, to give you a sense of how lost the writers were on this one, there is a scene where Sanchez’s financial advisor spits out the scheme to a group of visiting Japanese tourists Asian drug kingpins, and the scheme is mindboggling in its ability to use an incredible amount of buzzwords without producing any actual meaning, like when he hands these drug kingpins a “demographic report, breaking down each of your territories by age and socioeconomic group” to prove to them that there is indeed a market for illegal narcotics in Asia. Who knew? Seriously, this is pitiful.

Conclusion

This film had a plot that would have been rejected by Miami Vice for being too bland, an out-of-character Bond played by an actor who lacked all the required elements to be a quality Bond, a villain without a plan other than competing with FedEx, no real Bond girl, and nothing else to commend it. There isn’t even a memorable quote. Hence, it sits at No. 0021 on our list. Not coincidentally, it is also the lowest grossing Bond film.