![]() Here's some detail as to how gruesome the movie can get.įelix Leiter gets brutally mauled by a great white shark and his wife gets raped and murdered.īond while investigating the attack finds the traitor officer Killinger and kills him by making him fall into the same great white shark tank and they watch him get mauled to death by the shark but when watching License to Kill, I had to wonder how this movie got a PG-13 rating. Most bad guys in James Bond films get shot, fall down great lengths, get blown up, etc. The problems are mostly that by that time, people wanted a Bond that was way more like Roger Moore (many still do) and making a pitch perfect escalation of Miami Vice would have really landed so much better if it weren't 5 years too late to the party.īut going back to it NOW, in the 2020s - that it was off by 5 years doesn't matter almost 40 years later, and now that we've gotten an even MEANER Bond in the meantime - all the negatives have been smoothed out by time, and what's left is a pretty solid down & dirty crime movie with James Bond at the center.James Bond movies have their share of violence, but I think License to Kill takes the death and violence to a whole other level compared to other films in the series. ![]() And you have a big-budget scaling-up of the kind of thing that made Miami Vice such a phenomenon. So you have a Bond that feels more old-school BOND than anything since. ![]() maybe not as dodgy as Moonraker/Star Wars, but hey) but does it so well.īecause honestly, a super-low key/low-stakes mean-spirited face-off between Bond and some repugnant low-level crime-lord is pretty accurate to a few of Fleming's novels and short stories - AND the movie they made was a really, really good riff on Miami Vice, which was very obviously the thing they were trying to emulate. I love that Licence to Kill is not just another Bond that is sort of leaching out the zeitgeist and trying to rewrite it as a 007 movie (best example I can think of is Live and Let Die doing this with Blaxploitation, to really fucking dodgy results. Still, despite this being his last entry into the series, he definitely goes out with a massive bang (to a Diane Warren penned/Patti LaBelle sung track, probably my favorite fist pumping ending to a Bond movie). Still, with all it's action it doesn't come together without Timothy Dalton, who just had the misfortune of playing this closer to Fleming novel version, during a time when MGM/UA was both in the middle of financial trouble and when series patriarch was ailing. Bouvier, probably goes down as among the most underrated of Bond girls setting the stage for the many that are among the better in the Brosnan and Craig eras. It signaled the, in book, retirement of Leiter via shark attack. With head explosions, immolation, folk getting mulched and eaten by shark, it had it all. Funny thing, the latter was written with Dalton in mind before Brosnan stepped in.īack to License to Kill, that movie was and still is nuts. ![]() GoldenEye was the movie, like for many, that stuck with me. The first Bond theatrical release I can remember, but I didn't see it until much much later. Still, I do agree with the general sentiment here regarding Timothy Dalton’s Bond: He was damn good in the role and its a pity he didn’t get to do more with it. I know many people like this film and I wish I did to, but I never could get into it. Granted, when the film was released the Miami Vice TV show was all the rage and therefore a drug smuggling operation seemed like a logical plot to follow, but the film just seemed too ridiculous to me at times (when the Ninjas showed up in South America, I was beside myself, though later the 18 wheeler stunts were just as silly). He looked, to my eyes, positively morose through most of the film, like he felt like he was wasting his time. I didn’t like the film but, even moreso, it looked to me Dalton, who definitely did a “grin and bear it” reading of some lines in The Living Daylights (lines obviously intended for a Roger Moore), seemed to be having a great deal of fun in the role in that film. When License to Kill was released, I eagerly went to the theaters ( cougholdfart) to see it and the moment it was over I thought “This is the last time we’re going to see Dalton in the role.” I was proven right, years later, when Pierce Brosnan, who the producers originally wanted to take over from Roger Moore but who couldn’t because of his contract with the TV show Remington Steele, got the job. Way, waaaaaaaaaaayyy back when The Living Daylights was released, I saw the film in the theater and thought Dalton made a terrific Bond and looked forward -very much so!- to seeing his follow up.
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