homersimpson_esq
Posts: 19969
Joined: 30/9/2005
From: Springfield
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After establishing him as Bond in The Living Daylights, Licence To Kill takes Bond to a new level. He has threatened to resign before (in, as it happens, one of my other favourite Bonds, On Her Majesty's Secret Service) but here he goes through with his threat, and has his licence to kill revoked. (The original title was Licence Revoked, a change that may or may not be due to a certain mass audience's inability to know what 'revoked' meant.) The reason? Felix Leiter (David Hedison, the only person to have returned to the role other than Jeffrey Wright, having also played him in Live and Let Die) and his newly wed wife are brutally attacked by a group of drug smugglers he was tracking. His wife is left for dead while Felix just has his legs eaten off by a shark... Bond goes off-mission to find the men responsible after realising the local police would do nothing.
This is as astonishing a start as you can get, with real suspense as Leiter is captured and tortured. It gives resonance to Bond's determination to find his friend's attackers, and his friend's wife's killers. He hooks up with an informant friend of Leiter's, Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell) and goes on the trail, meeting up with Sanchez's (Robert Davi) mistress Lupe (Talisa Soto) and Q, dispatched by Moneypenny to help Bond, unofficially.
Licence To Kill trades quips for ballsy action and exciting action. The quips stop when Bond reads the note attached to Leiter, 'he disagreed with something that ate him'. From then on it's all or nothing for Bond, although he does find time to bed both beauties. In a way Licence to Kill can really be seen as an attempt, 20 years ago, to take the Bond series where they are taking it now. Two films in, and clearly the public disagreed with this attempt, leaving a 6 year gap - the longest without a Bond film since the series started in 1962. When it eventually returned it was like they took the best bits of the other Bonds - Moore's quips, Connery's culture, Dalton's no-nonsense - and rolled them into one. Of course, the series would once more return to flights of fancy unbecoming to modern audiences.
Something else occurred to me while watching this, of the fundamental difference in the way that the different Bonds play the character. James Bond must have charm for the ladies, culture for the way of life, and a steeliness for the killing. Connery played the character as if he was naturally cultured, acquired the steeliness, and affected the charm. Lazenby's Bond was naturally charming, acquired the culture and the steeliness, and affected nothing. Moore's Bond was naturally charming, and affected the culture and steeliness. Dalton's was naturally steely and charming, and acquired the culture. I'll update this with the last two when I get to them. A Bond actor needs all three facets to 'be Bond', but the way in which they come across gives us the different Bond characters.
Coming soon, Top 3s (5 was too many since there are only 22 films altogether).
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That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne.  TREK WARS |
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RE: The Bond Thread: 12 - Octopussy (1983) - 
Maybe it shouldn't be considered a guilty pleasure after all then.
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