Licence to Kill

Licence (British spelling) to Kill was an attempt to cash in on Timothy Dalton's more serious take on the James Bond character, and it ended up flopping a bit. At first I thought people just might not have been ready in the 80s for such a style for the series, but in truth the film's execution just isn't as good as it could have been. First off, much like Quantum of Solace, the story is about Bond going rogue to finish a mission. Here he's mostly driven by revenge, but since they didn't actually have the balls to kill off the Felix Leiter character even though they don't use him again anyway until after the reboot, his quest is a little more flimsily built on another who we never even met until this movie. He does some swimming and some infiltrating and some backstabbing and some romancing, but it's never quite as interesting as it could be with such a good concept as turning Bond back into a hard ass.

Instead of some grand, world changing scheme, Dalton is again facing off against a villain with a more personal plan of just making a buck. I gotta say, while eccentric personalities with secret bases in unlikely locations with plots to completely change the planet and set off nuclear weapons get old after a while, a drug dealer like Sanchez selling drugs and killing people who try to stop him is kind of boring. And really, the cop who let him go for a couple million bucks is the one he should have been pissed at, what do you expect Sanchez to do once he's free and has his captor at his mercy? He didn't even kill him! Still, drugs are bad, and of course Sanchez is dead and his entire operation is destroyed by the end of the film. The girls are okay despite one being best known for starring in the Mortal Kombat movies and the other getting her hair cut too short after her "look, I'm super hot now" makeover. As the last film for the second M, second Moneypenny, and fourth different Bond, it's not bad, but not as good as it could have been or should have been with the idea.

James Bond stats
Theme song: "Licence to Kill" by Gladys Knight
Foreign locations: Bahamas, Florida, Latin America
Bond, James Bond: 1:08:40
Martini shaken, not stirred: 1:06:15
Ladies seduced: 2
Chases: 3
Kills: 10
Non-lethal takedowns: 10

The Living Daylights

Here we arrive at the fourth Bond, who brings with him only the second Moneypenny in the series. The movie is a bit of a mixed bag, because it was still originally written for Moore's joke-heavy style while Timothy Dalton plays the role pretty straight and gritty, which a lot of people didn't like at the time but got Daniel Craig accolades almost two decades later. The humor is still intact here and there with things like a chase down a snowy mountain in a cello case. The tone shifts really seemed to come fast and furious. After the opening, the story begins with Bond overseeing a Russian officer's defection to the west with the sniper rifle, and he's all business and super serious. Then he send him across the border in an oil pipeline. Wacky! Later, he helps sneak the female assassin out of town, who turns out to be the officer's lover. Serious. Then they escape some authorities in the most gadget-heavy chase sequence I've seen in the series. Wacky!

This back and forth continues throughout the film. It's not jarring or anything, it just felt a little unusual. The plot involves the fake reinstatement of a Russian initiative to kill spies, betrayals, drug trades, arms dealers, Afghan terrorists played as good guys, and fake assassinations. Despite all the bad crap going on around him, Dalton is surprisingly non-lethal in this film, racking up one of the smallest kill totals in the series. While others nearby are fighting his battles, he's doing his part to stop the villains without murdering all of them, although he does do a bit of that. The main Bond girl is a bit dim and doesn't wear the standard issue very-little, but for some reason I liked her. The chemistry between the two was good and believable for the first time in a while for the series, and her character just worked. John Rhys-Davies is likable as a Russian general Bond ends up working with, and this movie also marks the final appearance of General Gogol, who's been alternately an ally and an antagonist since the third Moore film. This was Dalton's only perceived success in the role, and a pretty solid Bond movie.

James Bond stats
Theme song: "The Living Daylights" by A-ha
Foreign locations: Gibraltar, Czechoslovakia, Vienna, Morocco, Afghanistan
Bond, James Bond: 7:25
Martini shaken, not stirred: 56:30, 1:18:25 (unspoken)
Ladies seduced: 2
Chases: 2
Kills: 2, plus explosion victims
Non-lethal takedowns: 10