License To Kill
Many times in a long-running movie franchise, when great care to taken to make a sequel that is different from the others, it causes said film to stand out, and also be one of the best in the series. Thus is the case with the 16th film in the James Bond Series, the only one where Bond completely goes “rogue”, and the action and especially the gruesome violence is stepped up enormously, so much so that it briefly derailed the Bond Franchise for a time (and suffered at the box office in a blockbuster-packed summer of 1989), but after debuting with one of the worst Bonds in Living Daylights, it allowed Timothy Dalton to end his brief tenure in the role no doubt with a blaze of glory. The plot concerns an attack on Bond’s long time best friend Felix Leiter (David Hedison), who is tortured by having his leg chewed off by a shark and his wife raped and murdered. Bond swears revenge, but after being told by M that his licence to kill is revoked, beats the crap out of M’s bodyguards and sets off for South America to take pure vengeance on the drug lord responsible. And what a glorious, complete vengeance it is! The drug lord as played by Robert Davi is also a smooth-operating entrepreneur, expanding his portfolio into banks, casinos, and even a fake televangelist played by Wayne Newton(!). Davi plays him smooth as well, as a guy who never loses his cool even when committing the most heinous of acts, all the while Bond burns his operations to the ground. The screenplay deserves respect for not contriving Bond’s revenge plot, having him first try the direct approach to taking out Davi and, when that fails, improvising by forming an uneasy alliance with the fiend and playing on his paranoia by convincing him that his allies are working against him. As stated, the death scenes are the most gruesome and unnerving of the whole series as Bond takes out various henchmen by such means as spear gun, shark-feeding, tossing a guy into a compartment full of maggots, having another shoved into a pressure chamber and being decompressed until he explodes, and sending yet another into a cocaine grinder where he gets ground up into little pieces, all of which needed some heavy editing prior to release so as not to be the first Bond movie to get an R rating. As for the rest of the cast, Carey Lowell as the female informant Bond teams up with shares good chemistry with Dalton; Talisa Soto as Davi’s air-headed woman who falls for Sir James is pretty sexy; Anthony Zerbe as Davi’s drunken right hand man manages to elicit a bit of sympathy; and future Oscar winner Benicio Del Toro as a switchblade wielding accomplice is one of the nastier henchmen in the series (and suffers one of the grisliest deaths). The only minor problem is the final showdown between Bond and Davi: Something that has been built up the whole movie strikes this viewer as being somewhat abrupt and anticlimactic. Nonetheless, this remains Dalton’s triumph as easily one of the best Bond films in the series, not to mention one of the greatest revenge action movies of all time…
9/10