With The Living Daylights performing well and getting mostly favourable reviews, it seemed that the franchise had found a new star worth of taking on the mantle and work swiftly began on the next entry. That movie would go through multiple re-writes and a very late change of name following test screenings, as well as providing a lot of significant lasts in the history of the franchise itself. But would it sustain the momentum of its predecessor or had the end of the Cold War finally neutered the appeal of 007 once and for all?

Oddly, although I’ve seen The Living Daylights more times than I can count over the years, I’d only seen Licence to Kill maybe twice before this viewing, and the last time had been long enough ago that once again I had murky vague recollections of certain plot points – the mauling of Felix by a shark, the explosive chase sequence involving tanker trucks at the end and a speedboat escape from a bar full of baddies – and came to this largely fresh. I’m pleased about that, because I can hereby confirm that this is, in my opinion, the stronger of the two Dalton outings for the character and easily among the top five in the franchise.

The reasons for that are perhaps the same reasons why the film disappointed many reviewers at the time, and continues to be one of the lower rated entries in the entire EON franchise. Though it maintained several of the Bond tropes – title theme, pre credits scene, shaken not stirred etc – Licence to Kill really does a lot more different with the character than it does the same. It’s a markedly different tone of film even from its own predecessor, and it dispenses with a lot of the wackier elements which had been allowed to flourish under Moore’s tenure.

Starting with the Bond Girls, this film has two. No more, no less. James here doesn’t fall into bed with a strong of different women, rather he allies with one and ends up going off into the sunset with the other. That dalliance is perhaps the more traditional of the two – mistress to our villain, Sanchez, cruelly beaten and treated by him, but with enough independence of spirit to occasionally escape his grasp for the arms of another (not that that ever ends well for her). Lupe is better than similar characters from the past – mostly; she comes across as calm calculating and a bit of a survivor. The script somewhat lets her down somewhere in the second act in this respect by having her declare she loves James so much when she barely knows him, mostly to manufacture a rather feeble attempt at a love triangle between her and the other female lead, but otherwise Talisa Soto does well with what she has and makes a compelling character.

Carey Lowell on the other hand gets to be Pam Bouvier, a tough ex-army pilot and DEA informant who’s next on the hitlist for Sanchez. Frustratingly, Bouvier’s character is somewhat diminished in the second and third act by that aforementioned love triangle. When she meets James she’s dismissive of his pistol, unimpressed by his declaration he’s there to save her and indeed ends up saving him. She acquits herself well in fights, is cool under pressure and tenaciously refuses to do what she’s told despite James’ many attempts. It’s all great, mould-breaking stuff for the franchise, and then… then they have to have her get jealous of Lupe and James’ little clinch and… eh… we were so close, lads.

James himself feels utterly inhabited by Dalton, who understands the character as a whole – not just the charm and the talent but also the darkness, the driven need for vengeance and the flaws which that gives him. Bond here is actually somewhat of a liability in many ways, arguable responsible at least in part for the death of several people supposedly on ‘his’ side, and blinded to the realities of this by his need to avenge the fate of Felix and his new bride. It means, for the first time in the franchise to date, that the film feels like it’s actively inviting the audience to find faults in our ‘hero’. He’s not simply the chiselled perfectly dressed guy who beds the women and always gets everything to work out in his favour. Instead he’s a hot-headed chancer, often blessed more with luck than judgement, and prone to mistakes that can prove costly.

The opening of the film – possibly my favourite ever for a Bond film – beautifully sets all this up by shorthanding the relationship between Bond, Leiter and Della, Leiter’s new bride. They’re on their way to Leiter’s wedding but get a call that Sanchez is in town and vulnerable, so of course they pop off to chase after him in a series of stunts which might mostly have been done in CGI today. The parachuting alone is impressive, the fact that a full sized prop of a plane was literally towed underneath a helicopter is Nolan-levels of commitment. But aside from the impressive action, these scenes give us a real sense of the genuine bonds of friendship between James and Felix, and also his closeness to Felix and Della as a couple. There’s even a quick reference thrown in to Bond’s having been married once, a long time ago, and the maudlin look on Dalton’s face let’s us know how well that ended (Take that, Bond-as-codename scholars!). Of course, this being a Broccoli Bond film (his last in an active role before his death), it can’t help but succumb to the oldest tropes, fridging Della early on in a senseless move (especially because Felix himself is left alive) and then having Leiter apparently over it and laughing along with his old mate Jimmy at the end from his hospital bed. Plus ca change…

Still, a Bond movie is often only as good as its villain, and here I think is where a large part of the issue for many long term fans lies. Sanchez is believable as a drug baron – utterly ruthless, prone to excessive violence and also exceedingly paranoid and suffering from fragile masculinity. It’s been suggested that Sanchez is in fact a dark mirror of Bond but I think that’s a step too far for me. Yes, both are violent killers, but James is rarely cruel, nor is it ever implied here that he enjoys what he does. Sanchez, by contrast, clearly enjoys feeding a man to a shark, blowing a man’s head up in a pressure chamber and attempting to shred Bond in a mulcher, feet first. He’s also sadistic in his treatment of Lupe, beating her with a whip (which seems to be a detail added purely to establish early on that he’s a wrong ‘un rather than because it has any further significance to the plot because yay women as props to exhibit the violence of the male ego, I guess?). That said, he’s less two-dimensional than previous Bond villains have tended to be. He doesn’t have a grand plan to take over the world or blow it up, simply runs his drug empire and seeks to expand it and make himself richer. He rewards loyalty (expressly declaring it more important to him than money) and has the corresponding level of paranoia of any such powerful man in a business where violence is the rule. It is this paranoia which James is able to exploit, leading to Sanchez disposing of one of his lieutenants for him in a spectacular incident, and also covering himself for a botched assassination attempt when sheer dumb luck sees him rescued from being sent back home to the proper authorities when Sanchez’s men raid their base.

He’s not flamboyant like Goldfinger. He’s not a genius like Blofeld. He’s not even a duplicitous, multi-identitied man like Mr Big/Dr Kananga. He’s just a drug lord, who wants to shift product and is murderously efficient at getting any obstacles out of his way. The closest concession we get to the usual trappings of a Bond Villain is the weird religious cult headquarters acting as a front to his secret lab where the drugs are hidden in gasoline. He has no real catchphrase (beyond the aforementioned one about loyalty), no pet cat and no obvious tics or scars. He’s just a believable bad man in a worse world. That taking away of the escapist element of the main antagonist is what serves, as much as anything to ground the movie as grittier and more ‘real’ than previous outings, and is likely at least partially what alienated a lot of established fans of the franchise.

Proving that it’s not all Grim Up Dalton, Desmond Llewellyn turns in perhaps his most substantial and definitely his best performance as Q, joining James’ crusade to avenge Leiter at Moneypenny’s behest and providing lighter moments as well as grounding James as more than a two-dimensional psychopath. Posing as ‘Uncle Q’, he provides not only the tools but the expertise to help James out. Nothing especially outlandish here in the gadgets department either (thank god) and more importantly, the best onscreen rapport to date between a Bond and Q. Dalton and Llewellyn have great chemistry on screen, and there’s none of the ill-tempered huffing from Q or teenage pranks from Bond. Here are two men who have clearly long worked together and respect one another’s talents (Dalton’s ‘You’re a hell of a field agent..’ feels heartfelt and genuine here, like the man genuinely fears his older friend might be lost to him if he carries on) and it serves to elevate the film subtly but brilliantly.

Of course, it is a grim film compared to previous entries. It cannot escape notice that the violence here is more pronounced and more graphic, and it’s small wonder that certain scenes actually had to be toned down for the release. The subject matter is inescapably dark and it does feel – as many opined at the time – that the movie is at least drawing inspiration from the action flicks of the time, such as Lethal Weapon and Robocop. With regards to the women, it feels like it does half a job, willing to give them more depth and capability but not quite ready to relinquish James’ magical hold over all of them. The plot of James losing his licence to kill and going rogue is one that we would see revisited, and again it helps to keep that moodier feel with our hero on the run not just from the enemy but his own side as well. Acting against that is the aforementioned tendency his single-minded pursuit of Sanchez has to get people killed. Arguably this parallels Leiter’s own journey, making it all the more infuriating as they sit and laugh together at the end. That’s our Bond-verse boys though, they never learn, because they never have to.

Musically, with John Barry unavailable due to surgery, Michael Kamen turns in the score and it’s understated to the point of being unnoticeable. This arguably serves the tonal shift, but whereas I can sit and hum the Living Daylights score quite happily even now, I’d be hard pressed to give you a single bit of the Licence to Kill score just 24 hours after seeing it. The title theme, belted out by soul legend Gladys Knight is a solid entry into the Bond Theme canon, with clear influences from Shirley Bassey’s Goldfinger theme in both arrangement and style.

So ultimately, why do I love a film so much that does as much ‘wrong’ as it does right? Dalton is a dream, inhabiting the role in a way that others simply never quite achieved. The stunts and action sequences are ridiculous but seldom to the point of being silly. The characters are more three-dimensional and well-realised (with certain faults) than previously. In short, it represented a real attempt to change the whole tone, theme and direction of a franchise that was already several decades old. It’s not perfect, but for its time and in context, it’s ambitious, and I’d always rather see an ambitious failure than a ‘safe’ success. Dalton may have never got the chance to wear the tux again, but by god did he make the most of it while he had it.