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

A View to a Kill

Roger Moore's send-off as the longest-tenured James Bond is a bit of an underwhelming one, and probably should have come sooner. The movie certainly isn't terrible, and is better in a lot of ways than its predecessor. I've lost track of how many times Moore's Bond has gone skiing (it's like three or four), something which every Bond seems to do except Connery, strangely; but he does so in the opening sequence, killing his only victims until the very end, and of all five, he actually directly personally offs zero of them. It's a bit unusual how sometimes he'll destroy a small army by himself, and others he'll barely harm a fly. I wonder if it's a conscious decision on the part of the filmmakers to mix it up from film to film, because while movies often follow similar story structures to previous entries in the series, if he was always involved in the same amount of violence people might wonder what the point is.

This is also a high water mark for number of different girls slept with, pretty impressive for a 58 year old. The problem is that it's hard to believe he could pull it off, he doesn't so much romance them as just let them fall into his bed. Even Moore himself he either didn't have chemistry with or downright didn't like the two main women. And it took me this long but I finally got fed up with his constant boring witticisms. When he's infiltrating the villain's base with the girl, he points to a hiding spot on a vehicle and says "Why walk when you can ride." Does every god damn thing out of your mouth have to be a quip, dude? It's okay to talk like a normal person once in a while. I liked Christopher Walken as the antagonist, he's one of the more psychotic ones in the series and actually has something approaching an interesting background. He's pretty much the highlight of the movie, although his penchant for theatrical executions over definite ones is his downfall as usual. Not a bad movie, but again, not a great one.

James Bond stats
Theme song: "A View to a Kill" by Duran Duran
Foreign locations: Siberia, France, California
Bond, James Bond: 32:05 (fake name), 1:12:10 (other fake name), 1:33:55, 1:34:30
Martini shaken, not stirred: Not ordered
Ladies seduced: 4
Chases: 3
Kills: 5
Non-lethal takedowns: 5

Octopussy

Here's another Moore Bond film I didn't really appreciate, mostly because it seemed more concerned with making the audience chuckle than exciting them. It's sort of like Moonraker, but instead of an utterly absurd final act it's just pervasively silly almost the entire time. It's just hard for me to be interested when action sequences are played for laughs instead of any sense of tension or suspense. There's a part on a speeding train late in the movie which is decent, but otherwise it's a pretty goofy film. An early scene in India is less a chase than a personal challenge by the filmmakers to see how many clichés they could stuff into a single scene. Sword swallowers! Walking on hot coals! Juggling torches! I mean, at one point Bond is trying to escape some pursuers in a jungle and swings away from them on some vines, and the iconic Tarzan shout plays. Just for no reason. This movie is fucking stupid.

It does have some decent elements, though. The plot involving Fabergé eggs, nuclear weapons, East/West Berlin, and the tenuous truce between the USSR and the western world is one of the less terrible ones in Moore's tenure. Maud Adams, in a rare return for a Bond girl actress and I believe the only one to do so as a different character, has been treated relatively kindly by time in the nine years since The Man with the Golden Gun, and is still pretty good at it. And I mean, Jaws isn't in it. The main henchman is a big, mostly quiet Indian fellow, and pretty forgettable... but he isn't Jaws. The final action scenes are a mixed bag, the stuff with the circus people in the chateau is silly as usual, but the airplane sequence is fairly tense and an okay climax. It's a shame the movie is so silly, because otherwise it's really not bad.

James Bond stats
Theme song: "All Time High" by Rita Coolidge
Foreign locations: Latin America, India, Germany
Bond, James Bond: 31:20
Martini shaken, not stirred: 1:08:40 (Unspoken)
Ladies seduced: 3
Chases: 2
Kills: 13 humans, 1 spider, plus explosion victims
Non-lethal takedowns: 10