It is perhaps appropriate that this film was recently shown on British television during the same weekend that saw the return of "Dr Who" to our screens, as it seems to me that that series and the Bond films have a lot in common. Both first saw the light of day in the early sixties, and both enjoyed considerable success throughout the sixties and seventies and into the early eighties. In both cases, the series was kept going by the device of having a succession of actors play the main character. Both depended upon a subtle balance between genuinely exciting plots and tongue-in-cheek humour. And both series seemed to go into a decline in the late eighties and appeared to have come to an end in the same year, 1989. (An attempt was made to revive both formulae in the mid-nineties, with greater success in the case of Bond than of the Doctor).
In both cases the cause of the decline lay in an upsetting of the balance. "Dr Who" became too camp and self-mocking during the Sylvester McCoy era, with the result that the programme contained too much comedy and too little excitement. In the case of the Bond films, Roger Moore also came close to falling into this trap on occasions and in his last, sub-standard film "A View to a Kill" fell headlong into it. The producers of the series seem to have recognised this danger, because Timothy Dalton, with his very different approach to the role, was clearly hired to redress the balance. In his first outing, "The Living Daylights" (a better film than its immediate predecessor) this approach was reasonably successful. In "Licence to Kill" however, he went too far in the opposite direction and made the character too dark and brooding.
The plot is rather different from that of the standard Bond film. In the normal pre-credits action sequence, Bond and his American colleague Felix Leiter arrest a notorious drug dealer named Franz Sanchez and still manage to get to the church in time for Leiter's wedding (at which Bond is best man). Sanchez, however, manages to escape from custody and takes his revenge by a sadistic attack on Leiter and his wife, leaving her dead and him crippled. Bond resolves to seek revenge on Sanchez, but the American authorities seem uninterested, and Bond is ordered not to pursue the matter by his superior, M. Bond resigns from the British Secret Service in order to go after Sanchez, leading M to revoke his licence to kill.
It might have been interesting if Bond, deprived of his licence to kill, had decided that homicide is not the answer to every problem and used methods other than lethal force to overcome his enemies. Such a film would have been less violent than the normal Bond movie but could have been just as thrilling. Unfortunately, the filmmakers chose not to pursue this option. "Licence to Kill" is actually more, rather than less, violent than the average Bond. Moreover, the film subverts the ethos of the series in a way which the filmmakers may not have noticed. Although the Bond films are escapist entertainment, they are nevertheless underpinned by a code of morality which is essentially that of the war film. Bond is not a hired assassin but a soldier fighting for his country in a just war against evil men, a war which is undeclared but no less real. "Licence to Kill" dispenses with the just war theory, however, and makes Bond a free agent, fighting not for his country but to satisfy his own desire for personal revenge. This was, to say the least, a development that made me uneasy.
Timothy Dalton was perhaps not the most successful Bond, but he was in some ways unlucky. In neither of his films did he have a memorable heroine to support him or a memorable villain to fight against. In "The Living Daylights" he had the simpering Maryam d'Abo and Jeroen Krabbe's weak General Koskov; here, he has Carey Lowell, one of the more colourless Bond girls, who plays American drug enforcement officer Pam Bouvier, and Robert Davi's Sanchez, little more than a crude thug, although he has a nice line in cynical remarks ("he disagreed with something that ate him"). Like "The Living Daylights", which criticised the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, but unlike most of the earlier Bond films, "Licence to Kill" dabbles in current affairs. Sanchez, who takes refuge in a corrupt Latin American dictatorship named "Isthmus", is based upon the Panamanian strongman General Noriega, much in the news in 1989 because of his alleged involvement with the international drugs trade.
The main problem with the film, however, is its heavy, humourless style. An attempt to lighten the mood is made by having the eccentric scientist Q track Bond down in Isthmus in order to pass on to him his latest inventions. This development seemed highly improbable, but Desmond Llewellyn's character was evidently too popular to omit entirely. This incident aside, however, there is little in the way of humorous relief. Together with Timothy Dalton's brooding manner and the transformation of Bond from a fighter in a just cause to a ruthless avenger, this makes for a less enjoyable film than most in this series. No doubt a good, if violent, thriller could have been made about a rogue secret agent out to avenge a friend, but it was a mistake to try to shoehorn such a plot into the Bond formula. 5/10
