007 goes rogue, losing his license to kill from his Majesty's Secret Service, when an American CIA chum is badly injured when fed to a shark by a menacing drug lord in charge of a Latin American drug cartel with influence around the globe. This is far, far removed from the James Bond series I am accustomed to, but does seem to have been a decent critical success, although I know of quite a few disgruntled Bond fans who believe this deserves to be wiped clean from the franchise. Anyway, the kind of villains in this Bond film may be a little too realistic, less colorful, belonging more in a Steven Seagal movie. But certain factors are Bond; this has a sizable amount of field work for ingenious inventor Q, who I don't believe has ever seen so much action, normally popping up in one memorable, customary scene to introduce the movie's various devices to use to help the secret agent get out of tight jams that threaten his life, the beauties are definitely easy on the eyes (Carey Lowell is a terrific Bond girl, tough, stubborn, courageous, sexy (what a pair of legs, my goodness!) and still quite feminine when upset at her man also shares a bed with the stunning, mouth-watering Talisa Soto, the squeeze the main villain covets), and he gets a chance to go underwater in a frogman suit numerous times and there is a shark that gets to feed on humans (both good and evil). Robert Davi is at home in his part of ruthless drug-lord, Franz Sanchez, demanding loyalty from those who work for him, so worked up against a partner who helps him run drugs into US (Anthony Zerbe, particularly slimy, a part he can sleep walk through and still make your skin crawl) that he throws him into a diving bell, cutting a line on the outside watching his head explode (!), believing he has betrayed him (Bond planted this in his mind successfully). But the plot is really tailor made for someone less sophisticated than a character like Bond, more appropriate for someone like Norris who can play a crusty, less civilized Texas Ranger or Seagal as a profane, straight-forward NYC cop. That said, if this plot is to work, I can't imagine Moore or Connery could play it with any hint of believability, so Dalton, who wasn't necessarily ever given his fair reward by the Bond Franchise, and all that intensity and bravado does so with conviction and panache I applaud. License to Kill won't make the top lists of many Bond fans, but I bet fans of Lethal Weapon will enjoy it; it has a fair share of violence and some definite nasty sorts for Bond to vanquish (Benecio Del Toro, so young but fierce, has a small but memorable part as an acid-grinning thug). Several actors show up in the cast such as David Hedison, returning to the franchise as Leiter, Wayne Newton (of all people) as a guru whose palace is actually Davi's drug manufacturing plant, Everett McGill as an American CIA agent who betrays his country for money he'll never get to spend, Priscilla Barnes as Hedison's newly married victim of circumstance, Don Stroud as Davi's military muscle, and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as a Hong Kong agent undercover as a drug supplier. What this movie does well is show that vigilantism can interrupt hard field work, but Dalton's Bond is damned determined to get revenge for his friend. With help from Desmond Llewelyn's Q and Lowell's pilot (both wearing a variety of disguises and masquerading as different types of people), Bond just might be able to persevere. Latin America for the most part is the choice of setting for this film.
Review of Licence to Kill
