License to Kill

Crap
Total votes: 2 (40%)
Not Crap
Total votes: 3 (60%)
Total votes: 5

Movie: License to Kill (1989)

13
I've been watching a lot of these on DVD lately. It's weird to see them uncensored and especially weird to see them without TBS/Spike's commercial interruptions.

Is Bond the most overrated movie franchise ever? I think at this point Star Wars exceeds it. There's just no reason viewers or critics should let some kind of mystique surround these movies, many of which are cheesy, two-star action/sci-fi flicks. Some of them are grating in ways I never noticed when I was 13. Of the ones I've seen recently, the way the Japanese people act in You Only Live Twice and that Japanese intelligence has an army of ninjas are really bad. And those gay guys in Diamonds are Forever are just ridiculous. Naturally, 007 dispenses with the aftershave guy the slick, Savile Row way: by shoving a bomb up his asscrack. Naturally, the gay guy squeals with pleasure. And so on.

I like the women when they're strong and competent, less when Bond has to just lead them around. North By Northwest gets on my nerves this way at the end, as Eva Marie-Saint's previously solid character turns into a total wuss who gets her sash tangled on some branches and is winded after 30 seconds of running. But License to Kill is a good movie in part because Carey Lowell is sharp - she saves Bond's life twice, once by wielding a 12-gauge when Bond stupidly brings a pistol to the pirate bar.

The druglord villain was good. He was neither wacky nor incompetent and therefore uncommon in the series. But toward the end he loses more of his marbles than is really plausible or necessary for Bond to win. You can't build a cold, calculated, loyal villain for 100 minutes and have him start shooting his friends and running around with a machete in the last 20.

Dalton did well, though he shouldn't have been so cold. The Living Daylights had many good elements, but that insufferable girl with the cello wasn't one of them.

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