All of which is to say that if you haven’t seen Licence To Kill, you have missed one of the best, truest-to-character Bond films of the entire series. Now that it’s out on Blu-ray, you have a great opportunity to see the real precursor to Daniel Craig’s 007.
First, don’t be put off by the cheesy cover, which shows Dalton and Carey Lowell, who played chief Bond girl Pam Bouvier, airbrushed to within an inch of their lives. What you can pay attention to on the cover is the inset of a tanker truck with a small plane flying over it, with a man about to drop down onto the roof of the tanker. That’s taken from the climatic action scene in the film, which has enough explosions to satisfy anyone’s thirst for mayhem.
The story: Following a savage attack on CIA buddy Felix Leiter (David Hedison) that included the murder of Leiter’s new wife (played by Priscilla Barnes), a frustrated Bond quits Her Majesty’s secret service and goes AWOL to hunt down the bad guys, drug lord Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi) and his henchman, Dario (Benicio del Toro). He’s aided by Pam, a Leiter informant, and Q (Desmond Llewelyn), who’s been dispatched to Isthmus City, Sanchez’s headquarters, by Miss Moneypenny.
Sanchez has quite the set-up: He owns the main bank in town and the main casino, not to mention the country’s president. He also operates an ingenious cocaine distribution and money-laundering operation, involving dissolving the cocaine in gasoline, transporting it by tanker, and then reconstituting the drug. The money-laundering side is fronted by a self-proclaimed spiritual healer, Professor Joe (Wayne Newton), with the finances being handled by whiz kid Truman Lodge (Anthony Starke). Sanchez is seemingly untouchable.
But, at the start of the film, Sanchez makes a key mistake. He leaves the safety of Isthmus to hunt down his girlfriend, Lupe (Talisa Soto), who’s gone off with another lover. The U.S. DEA tracks him down to an island within U.S. jurisdiction, and Leiter and Bond take a detour from Leiter’s wedding to help capture Sanchez. That taken care of, the wedding goes off after all and all is celebration until Sanchez escapes with the help of a crooked colleague of Leiter’s, Ed Killifer (Everett McGill). Sanchez’s men grab Leiter, kill his wife, and take Leiter to another Sanchez-run operation, a marine center in the Florida Keys. There, Felix has a close encounter with a great white shark.
Bond tracks down the marine center and meets Milton Krest (Anthony Zerbe), a supposed oceanographer who actually works for Sanchez as part of the drug trade. Bond and another friend of Leiter’s, Sharkey (Frank McRae), go after Krest, leading to a lot of problems and a great action sequence as Bond gets away from the bad guys and ends up with a plane full of drug money.
Bond and Pam team up soon afterward; sparks fly in a variety of ways (she’s a bit more hardheaded than many of the women Bond’s dealt with), and the pair head to Isthmus. Bond’s arrival coincides with that of a group of Chinese drug lords, including one who is more than what he seems. Bond meets Sanchez through the casino, takes a shot at killing him that goes wrong, and ends up captured by reps from Hong Kong narcotics and the British government. But before they can send him back to London, they’re attacked in turn by Sanchez’s men, who assume that Bond is also a bad guy. That gets Bond into Sanchez’s home and, ultimately, his operation. Bond begins to sow seeds of discord by making Sanchez question the loyalty of those around him. That works fine until Dario shows up, and recognizes Bond from an earlier encounter. At that point, all hell breaks loose, leading to the tanker chase sequence involving multiple gas tankers, lots of explosions, missile launches, and a final showdown between Bond and Sanchez. Want to guess who wins?
I love Licence to Kill. The script was written for Dalton, unlike The Living Daylights, which was largely written with Moore in mind. This Bond is darker, more deadly, but also very, very human. There are nifty Bond gadgets, but they don’t take over the picture. I think Carey Lowell was a little bit of a lightweight to play opposite Dalton, but her Bond girl reminds me most of Honor Blackman’s Pussy Galore from Goldfinger, one of the all-time great strong Bond females. Davi is outstanding as Sanchez; he and Dalton seem at times like opposite sides of the same coin. And in his second film role, Benicio del Toro is all freaky badness as Dario, already someone to watch. For me, this is really the film that begat the great work Daniel Craig is doing now as Bond.
The Blu-ray has some terrific special features (although the special features menu is overly complicated and it’s easy to miss some of the content the first time around). There are two commentary tracks, although they’re not the traditional commentaries. They consist of excerpts from interviews with director John Glen and some cast members (Lowell, Davi, del Toro, Hedison) in one case and with writer Michael G. Wilson and some crew members in the other. While some of the comments are relevant to the action happening on screen, many are not.
Glen is featured in several other places, including commenting on several deleted scenes and in some on set footage shot back in 1988-89 when the film was being made. In that same vein, there’s some home video footage of various locations featuring production designer Peter Lamont and a quirky sequence with pilot Corky Fornoff discussing the various aviation scenes. Keeping up the odd side of things, but also quite fun in its own way, is a video on the Kenworth Trucks that were used in the film that I’m sure was shot for the company’s internal use to focus on how cool it is that their trucks featured so prominently in a Bond film.
“Bond ‘89” is a featurette done on-set at the time of filming with interviews with all the main cast, including Dalton. There’s also a making-of featurette, most interesting for the information on the stretch of highway where the chase scene was filmed and how pretty much everyone involved came to believe it was truly haunted, as local legend had it. The original trailers are also there, a selection of stills, and two music videos. The first is for the title track, sung by Gladys Knight, and it’s a Bondian video, with lots of shots from the film. The second is for the song that played over the end credits, “If You Asked Me To,” sung by Patti LaBelle. Nary a spec of Bond in that video; it’s all Patti.
I’ve seen Licence to Kill many times, and it looks great here. The picture is 1080P, with a widescreen aspect ratio of 2.335:1. Audio is English 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio with options of Spanish and French 5.1 Dolby Digital. Subtitles are English, Spanish, Cantonese and Korean.
