Where are the good Bond films? License to Kill was worse than Diamonds Are Forever! This one should have been called A License That Allows Us to Produce Shit and People Will Still Watch It!
There is no point explaining anything about this movie so let’s head straight into the scoring:
The Story gets +1 because it has James Bond in it. The Look gets a +0 because it looked like an episode of MacGyver. The Overall Casting gets a +2 …Oh wait, it wasn’t an episode of Magnum! It gets a +0 for Overall Casting and Commitment to Genre will score a +1.
Subtotal: +2.
License to Kill gets a +1 for Priscilla Barnes, TV’s Terri from Three’s Company and loses a point for Talisman Soto getting a spanking as it’s just stupid. It gets +1 for a great theme song but loses it (-1) because of Sanchez (Robert Davi) lifting a fake-heavy suitcase. It steps up with the breakout performance of Benicio DelToro as James Dean but then loses it for feeding Felix Leiter to the sharks. “Your license to kill is revoked!” What? There goes another one (-1).
The fight scenes remind me of Elvis movies but this sad and pathetic film has the misfortune of having neither the King nor his music. Instead it has Timothy Dalton who looks (and strangely sounds) like Patrick Stewart with hair. As the movie crawled on through it’s own shit, I couldn’t help considering how it would sound if Elvis was delivering the lines and periodically sing. It actually got better, much better. But then the fantasy began to break down like a glitch in the Matrix and License to Rock was replaced by License to Suck. Oh, look! There’s no Elvis but…can it be? Yes, it is! It’s Wayne Newton! Danke Schoen! Oh…Thanks for nothing, Wayne. The film loses a point (-1) for ripping off any of the worst Elvis movies then gains one back (+1) because of my awesome imagination and my ability to supplant Elvis into the cast.
Q programmed the camera gun with a fucking calculator. He’s so inventive. Later he talks into his broom-transmitter and after making a report throws it away! Talk about disposable technology but in 1989 that broom probably cost £2 million. There goes another -1. Lastly, another point goes (-1) because the petrol truck driver keeps a bowie knife behind his sun-visor? How handy for the cab-fight but really, one bump and he would have been a eunuch! The last criticism I’ll give and I give on point deductions is that this film looks like a 80’s cop show because the cast is almost entirely made up of TV actors yet another failure is not having wrangled Mr. T in this movie.
Final Score: +0.
What, no points for Anthony Zerbe? He rocks!