This might have been the first Bond film without a book title, but on watching it, it actually did turn out to be based on some books. Like a lot of the 1980s Bond films did, it went back and mined bits from earlier Bond books that had never been used on screen: specifically, this film takes the maiming of Bond's CIA counterpart Felix Leiter via shark from Live and Let Die and the character of Milton Krest, a supposed biological researcher up to no good on his yacht the Wavekrest, from the short story "The Hildebrand Rarity." What it does with them, though, is pretty original.
The movie has a great pre-titles sequence. Bond is best man at Felix's wedding in the Florida Keys, but the wedding is interrupted by some DEA agents showing up to tell Felix they have the opportunity to take out Sanchez, a Central American drug lord who's come to the United States to chase a fleeing girlfriend. Felix goes to help—and of course, so does Bond. There are some good hijinks like Bond jumping from the DEA helicopter to Sanchez's plane and tying a cable around it, and then Bond and Felix parachute right in front of the church to make the wedding. Good stuff.
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| If you want to make it up to your bride for being late, arrive via parachute. |
Only, Sanchez escapes custody and then goes out for revenge; on Felix's wedding night, he kills his wife, and (as I said before) maims Felix via shark. So the movie follows Bond as he goes rogue in pursuit of revenge, deciding to bring down Sanchez's drug empire single-handedly when M revokes his licence to kill. The movie is one of the grimmer and darker Bond films, a lot more in line with a Daniel Craig story than anything the Bond films had done up until that point; Timothy Dalton's only other outing as Bond, had been a bit lighter, and films' previous attempt at an off-the-books Bond, For Your Eyes Only, wasn't quite this brutal. There are a lot of shocking cold deaths by both Bond and villains.
Overall, I liked it. The plot is complicated enough to be interesting, but not so complicated as to be confusing (as has been the case with a few recent Bonds, e.g., Octopussy, Quantum of Solace). The film might be a bit grim, but it still has some good moments of Bondian levity. We particularly enjoyed the sham religious leader who works for Sanchez, who shouts "bless your heart!" every time he gets outwitted, and much of the climactic battle is sublimely ridiculous, such as when Bond pops a wheelie in a gasoline tanker truck.
There are only two "Bond girls" here, and Bond doesn't seem very interested in one of them. There's Lupe Lamora, Sanchez's girlfriend. She sees Bond as a way out of her situation, and helps him so he can help her. She melodramatically and unconvincingly declares she loves him; she's not a very good actress.
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| This sets up a pretty great moment where Bouvier downs Bond's "shaken, not stirred" martini herself and makes a face. |
The main Bond girl is Pam Bouvier, a former U.S. Army pilot, who ended up running drugs for Sanchez, but then decided to go straight by turning informant. Bond goes to her for information, but then hires her to fly him to Isthmus (the thinly veiled Panama analogue where Sanchez is based); she pretends to be his "executive secretary" while he infiltrates Sanchez's organization, and ends up helping in a variety of ways up to and including the climax. Bond and Bouvier are given a bit of a mutual-animosity-turns-to-passion thing: they make love on a boat in the middle of the ocean when it runs out of gas. Bouvier is in the line of Melina in For Your Eyes Only: she's not a secret agent, but she has her own competencies, and the film doesn't undermine them, presenting her as closer to an equal than most Bond women.
In The Living Daylights, Dalton was a bit more emotionally sensitive than your average James Bond; here, on the other hand, he's out for revenge. This actually plays quite a bit on Bond's history: as happened to Bond himself, Felix's wife is killed on their wedding day. The film alludes to this very indirectly, and it actually took me a while to remember how close the parallels were, as they are never explicitly named. It seems a bit off, if I am honest, for your protagonist's emotional arc to depend on something that happened ten films prior, twenty years ago, and three actors before! I wish it had been discussed more directly.
It was interesting watching this in close proximity to Quantum of Solace, which is a very similar film: it pursuit of revenge, Bond defies M and has to flee his own people. Both movies focus on Central/South America, and in both, one of the Bond women is even a villain's girlfriend who gets abused! Quantum is all about whether or not Bond has gone too far; his emotional arc centers on this question. In Licence to Kill, neither Bond nor the film itself really engages in any introspection about Bond's choices. He just does it. M revokes Bond's licence to kill... but the end of the film doesn't even mention this! No one chews Bond out or welcomes him back into the service or anything. In Living Daylights, Dalton was effective at alternating between hardened killer and sensitive soul; here, he's all hardened killer, and I wish we'd seen more introspection, because I know he could have done it based on Living Daylights. I don't know that it needed to go all angst as the Craig films often do, but there was room for more emotion than we got.
When I wrote up Living Daylights, I said, "People say License to Kill is Dalton's good one, so I look forward to getting to see it," but I would pretty much place them on par with one another. Still, what a hit rate! If you only make two Bond films, I guess odds are neither of them will be clunkers.
- David Hedison was only actor to play Felix Leiter more than once prior to Geoffrey Wright showing up in Quantum of Solace. I gather that since the film depended on Bond's relationship with Felix for its emotional core, they wanted an actor that had actually been seen on screen with Bond before. It's a bit odd, though, in that it's a different Felix to the one from the immediately previous film (John Terry); in fact, Hedison had previously appeared sixteen years prior, opposite Roger Moore! Still, he's pretty likable, though I found the ending scene where he's goofing with Bond about getting his golf swing back pretty odd. I wonder if the producers didn't kill him off in case they wanted to use him again, but the Pierce Brosnan films would go on to introduce a different American counterpart for Bond.
- I felt this was one of Desmond Llewellyn's better turns as Q, who sneaks off from MI6 to help Bond. On the other hand, Caroline Bliss puts in a pretty fleeting appearance as Moneypenny, her last.
- Bond infiltrating the villains and taking them down from within by sowing distrust was pretty nicely done, and felt more in line with the early Fleming Bond than what we often see on screen.
- I spent the movie suffering from a sense of vague recognition for both villains, Sanchez and his subordinate Krest. Upon looking it up later, it turned out that Robert Davi (Sanchez) played a recurring villain in Stargate Atlantis and Anthony Zerbe (Krest) was one of the principal villains in Star Trek: Insurrection.
- There's a scene at Hemingway House, complete with all the cats. This lets Bond make a real groaner of a literary pun about A Farewell to Arms.
Film Rankings (So Far):
- Casino Royale
- Dr. No
- From Russia with Love
- For Your Eyes Only
- On Her Majesty's Secret Service
- Thunderball
- The Living Daylights
- Licence to Kill
- Spectre
- You Only Live Twice
- Goldfinger
- Quantum of Solace
- The Spy Who Loved Me
- Moonraker
- The Man with the Golden Gun
- Octopussy
- Never Say Never Again
- A View to a Kill
- Live and Let Die
- Diamonds Are Forever
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