James Bond's Darkest Hour: An Essay on Licence to Kill

https://www.ajb007.co.uk/discussion/52705/james-bonds-darkest-hour-an-essay-on-licence-to-kill

In 1989 marketing began for Licence to Kill. Filmed entirely in the United States, its posters featured a glaring Dalton and the tagline: “James Bond’s bad side is a dangerous place to be.” This would be a harsh, uncompromising, dark, bitter Bond, combining everything that audiences worldwide had shown that they wanted from a modern action film. Nothing could go wrong. Or could it?

It’s well known among Bond fans that Licence to Kill remains the least financially successful film in the series. Facing a perfect storm of critical opprobrium and very strong competition from Tim Burton’s Batman and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Licence to Kill was distinctly underwhelming in the UK. It underperformed more dramatically in the United States. Clearly, this was not proving the sure-fire hit it had been designed to be. Yet why was this the case? Since 1989, many explanations have been put forward, including an overstuffed box office schedule and general ‘franchise fatigue.’ But neither of those explanations are quite convincing. Although the competition from Indiana Jones and Batman was indeed a menacing prospect, James Bond was just as big a ‘tentpole film’. For Your Eyes Only had done decent business against Raiders of the Lost Ark in the summer of 1981. The ‘franchise fatigue’ explanation also doesn’t hold water, especially since this was only Dalton’s second Bond film, coming after a moderately successful debut and much advertised pop culture festivities surrounding the cinematic Bond’s 25th anniversary in 1987.

Instead I will examine the content of the film itself- and this, unfortunately, provides some explanation for why Licence was poorly received. Hilary Mantel in The Spectator took issue with the film’s violence, declaring that “there is a smirking perverse undertow which makes the film more disagreeable than a slasher movie.” While It might appear a little exaggerated for the violence in Bond to be decried in such hair-raising terms, Mantel has a point. While there are a few individually violent sequences in The Living Daylights and A View to a Kill, none come close to the almost gleeful and lengthy killing in Licence to, ahem, Kill.

Felix Leiter is fed to a shark and maimed, bloody gore floating in the water; the devious Milton Krest’s head explodes onscreen, providing the opportunity for more buckets of red stuff; the sadistic henchman Dario falls into a rock crusher; and so on. All of the film’s villains meet spectacularly grisly and bloody ends in a style and level of violence completely alien to the screen Bond. Even with the slam-bang gun battles of the Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig films, and the torture scenes of Casino Royale and Spectre, Licence to Kill is still an astonishingly grim affair today, more so from the perspective of 1989. For comparison, when filming For Your Eyes Only Roger Moore refused to perform, and had to be heavily persuaded to agree to, a scene where Bond kills a henchman in cold blood. In Licence, by contrast, a battered Dalton sets the villain on fire with a lighter and the character is seen writhing for several seconds in agonised incineration.

Similarly, Roger Moore complains about scenes in A View to a Kill where the villain uses a machine-gun to slaughter several of his own workers, laughing maniacally as he opens fire. But the cartoonish antics of Moore’s tenure, occasionally violent as they are, stand a million miles away from the style, tone and direction of the repeated scenes of slaughter in Licence to Kill. Reflecting Mantel’s comparisons to a “slasher movie”, Licence to Kill was handed a 15 rating from the BBFC and an R restricted from the MPAA, and this was only given after censors warned that the original unamended cut would garner an 18 rating, joining the company of Scarface and Friday the 13th. The 15 rating was still unknown to Bond at the time, and echoes the finished film. Bond is ruthless; his allies coolly professional; his enemies a cabal of drug dealers. To children eagerly awaiting the next instalment, the message was clear: this isn’t your father’s Bond- and it’s not aimed at you, either. Was this really, audiences wondered, the same series that had released Moonraker ten years earlier?

But the real problem wasn’t the violence- though that may well have hurt the film’s box office, as well as adding little to the film. The most serious flaw is the plot, featuring as it does Bond going rogue and disobeying M’s orders. Variations of this idea have since featured in Die Another Day, Quantum of Solace, and Spectre, yet in Licence to Kill it simply does not work. In previous films, such as On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, there was palpable tension between Bond and M, but for Bond to blatantly ignore M’s instructions and go outside the law is a foolishly misguided development.