Licence To Kill

Licence To Kill, simply put, is the most controversial James Bond movie (at least, so far...).

I think that it's safe to say that critical opinion about this film, both among "real" critics and Bond fans, is far more sharply divided that any other.

Yes, every Bond film is simultaneously someone's favorite and at the same time someone's worst. That's part of the fun.

But usually some sort of "critical consensus" forms about a movie. Yes, there are outlying opinions, but usually the reaction to a Bond film fall within a particular range.

But not Licence To Kill. This movie seems to be the literal definition of "love it or hate it." There rarely seems to be any middle ground--many, many reviewers have it amongst the best or amongst the worst. From what I've seen, there seems to be a greater standard deviation of opinions on this film than any of the other Eon Bonds.

Now, I'm a fairly tolerant person, opinion-wise. If you hate a Bond movie I love, or love one I hate, I can dig that. I don't agree, but I respect your right to feel that way. And usually, I can understand where our difference of opinion comes from, even if I disagree. If you like Diamonds Are Forever more than I do, or hate For Your Eyes Only, I can understand where you're coming from, even if I ultimately disagree. If you want to say that From Russia With Love is too slowly paced and rank it 7 spots below You Only Live Twice, well, I think you're crazy, but more power to you.

But, with regards to LTK, I have one question for everyone who absolutely hates this movie:

ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MINDS??

Seriously, LTK is a great, great James Bond movie. And yet, it gets nowhere near the respect it deserves. And those who don't like it...well, they loathe it. Even some people who should like it--they like the "realistic" Bonds, they hate the bloated spectacles and over-the-top humor--come out bashing on this film.

So allow me to alter the form of my review, for a least a little bit, as I defend the movie against some of the reasons people have used to diss on it.

**LICENCE TO KILL IS RACIST/USES ETHNIC STEREOTYPES

Even if this charge is right, it sure seems to be an odd place to bring it up, as Dr. No and Live And Let Die, just to name two, are far worse violators.

In some quarters, especially in 1989, it was fashionable to critique LTK as condoning stereotypes by having Bond oppose a Latin American drug lord. Somehow, that was racist, or at least ethnically insensitive, by somehow promulgating the one dimensional portrait of all Latin American countries as corrupt narcocracies.

Well, in the first place, there were corrupt Latin American governments that worked hand in hand with various drug cartels. Just a few months after LTK was released, the United States invaded Isthmus...oh, I mean Panama...and deposed Manuel Noriega for essentially turning his country into a one-stop money-laundering drug trafficking. So, "ethnically insensitive" or not, the portrait painted in this movie had the undeniable defense of being true.

Secondly, look at the history of drug lords in the Bond movies. We've had African Americans and Caribbeans (LALD), Greeks (FYEO), Afghans, white Americans, and Russians (TLD). So the viewpoint of the franchise has hardly been one of "all drug problems originate in South America." Even within this movie, we meet a pack of Asian drug lords. And virtually every one of Franz Sanchez's senior cronies is a gringo. So the objection only makes sense if your rule is "you can show every other nation and ethnicity as running drugs, but if you show a powerful Hispanic drug lord, you're suddenly offensive." Obviously, I reject any such rule.

**THE MOVIE IS TOO SERIOUS/NOT FUNNY

Richard Maibaum himself said this...he only worked on the outline and (some portion of) the first draft, because of the writers' strike of 1988. But it's a common criticism.

Were these guys watching the same movie I was? This movie has tons of humor. What it doesn't have are the groan-inducing puns and ridiculous "haha Bond is driving a gondola on dry land!" moments that passed for humor in other Bond movies. But Sanchez is hilarious (in an evil way, obviously), and there are lots of moments of dry humor and situational humor between Bond and Pam, Bond and the bank manager, Bond and Q, Pam and Wayne Newton, Truman-Lodge is hilarious...look, just watch the movie again. In many subtle ways, there actually is an awful lot of humor here.

In this film, Bond is a man driven mad by the need to avenge the maiming of his best friend and murder of his bride on their wedding day (which obviously James knows something about). The overt jokiness of the Roger Moore era would have been totally inappropriate in such a context. Now, you can argue that such material might therefore be inappropriate for a Bond film, and we can discuss that. But to say the film isn't funny enough? Please.

And if LTK is "too serious," well, so what? There isn't room for a more serious entry in the franchise? Are we to be locked forever into cookie-cutter, paint by numbers Bond movies, with no room to try anything new or different?

Maybe our tastes have changed. Just for the sake of comparison, why is this film "too serious" and "not funny enough," when the Bourne films are praised so highly? Go ahead an find me an iota of humor or non-seriousness in those movies...they make LTK look like a Matt Helm picture. Casino Royale (2006) was pretty grim-toned, as well. Maybe the late 2000's are a better fit for this type of movie than the late 1980's, with visions of pigeons doing double takes still dancing in our heads.

**IT'S NOT BOND--A MUNDANE REAL WORLD VILLAIN, NOT MANY EXOTIC LOCALES, ETC.

It's funny...the villains' plot in TLD and LALD was to run drugs. Was that "not Bond?" Goldfinger visited Miami (in stock footage) and Kentucky. Was that "not enough exotic locales?" Bond unnecessarily goes back for revenge at the end of Octopussy and TLD. Are those movies "Death Wish or Rambo, but not Bond?"

There has never been a static, arbitrary definition of what Bond is. OHMMS can be sandwiched between YOLT and DAF...Moonraker can be followed by FYEO followed by Octopussy. Whatever magic criteria you suggest that would somehow exclude LTK from being what Bond is supposed to be about is also going to have to exclude some films you do approve of.

**IT'S TOO VIOLENT

Whereas having your gonads crushed with a carpet beater is OK, I guess.

I recommend that people who say that LTK was "too violent" go and read the Fleming novels, because despite being written 30 years earlier, they had a level of violence that makes LTK look like Austin Powers. Bond was regularly tortured, and the villains and henchman died terrible, painful and humiliating deaths. Saying something is "not Bond" because it's "too violent" shows a fundamental lack of understanding of what James Bond is. Felix getting chewed up by a shark? Straight from the Live And Let Die novel (along with the exact wording of that note).

As to the actual violence in the movie, there's less than you think. Much of it is actually offscreen, with direction and editing to create the impression that's it's so bad. Lupe's lover's heart is removed offscreen, for example (unlike the heart removal in the also-PG-13-rated Temple of Doom). You don't actually see any of Felix's injuries (or Killifer's for that matter). We see just a red mist, not any of Dario's limbs getting ground up (not unlike the snowplow scene in OHMSS)...In a film titled Licence To Kill, about an agent with, you know, a licence to kill, and who has killed lord knows how many bad guys by this point in time, it's odd to get overly squeamish about violence, isn't it? This isn't a country club! Plus, compared with other movies out simultaneously, LTK has a rather light death count. More people died in Batman...more people died in Last Crusade (but that's OK, because they were Nazis!), and more people died in Lethal Weapon 2. For that matter, more people died in TLD, VTAK, TSWLM, etc, etc.

Enough. To heck with the haters. It's time to talk about why this movie rocks so hard.

As Michael Wilson ended up doing most of the writing, he gets most of the credit. There are a couple of Fleming crumbs around here--the character of Milton Krest and his boat the WaveKrest come from the short story The Hildebrandt Rarity, the title LTK was obviously a Fleming phrase (albeit never used as a title in his work), Felix's fate comes from the LALD novel--but the full story of LTK is wholly original to the movie. And Wilson knocked it out of the park.

The main idea is dazzlingly simple: Bond's friend is brutalized, Bond goes rogue to get revenge. That's it. During an era when many critics began to whine that Bond movie plots were "incomprehensible" and "impossible to follow," we get a simple premise that many of those same critics rejected as "not Bond." Sigh...


But the beauty part is the way Wilson sets it up and makes it so very compelling. First, it's not just any friend, it's here-from-the-beginning ally Felix Leiter. And for the first time, a returning actor as Felix Leiter, which helps to strengthen the perceived bond between them (and, I should mention, someone who can actually act, which sadly has never seemed to be a requirement for the role). And it wasn't just that Felix was mauled--he was mauled on his wedding day, at which Bond was best man, and his wife was killed. Note the way we get a deliberate callout of Bond's previous marriage, so we remember Bond's OHMSS tragedy, and understand why he is so obsessed with getting revenge for Felix.

Secondly, there's no "I'm taking a leave of absence" while M winks at Bond going off on his own. Continuing the theme set up in TLD, the bureaucracy is set up against Bond. This is the American's affair, and besides, you're supposed to be in Turkey!! Meanwhile, the Americans won't do anything because of extradition treaties and sovereignty and, well, just because, I guess. There's no time, no institutional imperative, to help individual agents or seek true justice--that's "sentimental rubbish." So Bond not only has to undertake his incredibly dangerous revenge mission, he has to do it while overcoming opposition from the British, from the Americans, from the Isthmusites...and then Hong Kong Vice, and then his own allies. The movie keeps putting more and more obstacles in his way.

But, unlike some unfavorable reviews, this is no Rambo or Death Wish knock off. Bond doesn't go in like some Terminator, guns ablazing. In fact, not very much outright killing is actually done by Bond himself. Instead, he uses his wiles and skills to infiltrate Sanchez's group, and proceeds to gaslight Franz into killing most of his own associates. Watching Bond play Iago to Sanchez, and destroy him piece by piece, is enormously satisfying.

Timothy Dalton's performance makes it all work. His 007 sees his own tragedy replayed in Felix's life, and is obsessed, almost beyond the point of reason, with revenge. Some people didn't care for Dalton's take on Bond, and I can appreciate that, but I don't see how anyone cannot appreciate the performance he gives here. More than any other actor in any other Bond movie, here Dalton IS the personification of Ian Fleming's James Bond, a cold-blooded killer usually restrained by his mission for queen and country. Stripped of that, and driven by vengeance, Dalton gives us a Bond who you can believe has been pushed past the point of rationality, who will stop at nothing to get the bastard who maimed Leiter.

Franz Sanchez makes a wonderful foil. Robert Davi gives us a smooth, self-confident drug lord, a man who is so comfortably the master of his own universe that he feels invulnerable. No, he's not interested in genocide, or blackmailing the world--why bother when you're already wealthier than anybody else, and control the government?? But gaze past the drug lord persona, and Sanchez is a classic Bond villain--self-absorbed, always speaking in platitudes which he doesn't follow himself, possessive, vain...give him a nuclear powered laser, and he'd fit right into most other Bond movies. Hell, when one of the Asian drug lords dares to merely ask a reasonable question, Sanchez sends the army to blow up his villa!! That's Blofeld worthy!

The fun part is the way Sanchez is done in by his own platitudes. He likes to go on about how it's not about the money, it's about the loyalty, and about his word. But like the televangelist obsessed with fornication, he's merely covering up his own weakness. Despite the "it's not about the money," everything he did was about dollars. He said he prized loyalty, but he always had to buy it. He threw cash around--to the president of Isthmus, to Killifer, to Bond after Krest is killed--as a reward. That's not loyalty, that's bribery. And Sanchez's loyalty was one-way...he allowed the merest whispers to sour him on Krest, on Heller, on Truman-Lodge. Granted, Bond did a lot to turn him paranoid, but the moment push came to shove, his only loyalty was to himself. The same with his "word of honor": once the heat was turned up, he was perfectly willing to rip off the Asians of their half-billion and their cocaine. Truman-Lodge calls him on it, and gets shot. Sanchez's fall is almost Shakespearean.

Without grabbing my stopwatch, I believe Sanchez probably gets more screen time than any other Bond villain, from the teaser until the end. And he gets more face time with Bond. And unlike most Bond villains, we get a real character arc with Franz. With that, and Davi's memorable portrayal, I'm very confident when I declare that not only was Sanchez the best Bond villain of the eighties, he's also the best Bond villain we'd seen in 20 years.

Bond and Sanchez also embody the theme of recklessness--Sanchez through overconfidence, Bond through obsession. Sanchez goes to the Bahamas to personally bring back Lupe, when he could have easily just allowed his goons to do it. By letting Leiter live, he blows Krest's operation out of the water. Even if Bond hadn't tracked it down, Felix had seen enough to lead the authorities there. Despite warnings, he takes the Asians to his secret lab. And he lets a former British agent into his inner circle, with virtually no background check or guards. Sanchez believes he's invulnerable, which leads him to keep taking ridiculous chances, which leads to his downfall.

Bond is also ridiculously reckless. Despite the fact that some of Sanchez's men had to have seen him in the Bahamas, on the WaveKrest, and in the bar with Pam, Bond strolls right into the lion's den. It's mere luck he's not outed immediately. When he comes out of hiding on the WaveKrest, unarmed and vastly outnumbered, that's pretty much the definition of reckless. He's so careless that he doesn't even notice he's being tailed by Hong Kong ninjas, and he's lucky his mission didn't end there (either being shipped back to England or killed in Heller's assault). He keeps rejecting assistance from Pam and Q, even though he can't possibly succeed without them.

But unlike Sanchez, Bond realizes what he's doing and shapes up. After realizing he's blown a Hong Kong vice sting and gotten some British agents killed, and after realizing he'd queered Pam's deal with Heller to retrieve the stinger missiles, he begins to understand the consequences of his actions. After the wake-up call, he's still driven and focused, but he's much more willing to accept help, and much more careful about the collateral damages his quest is calling. Only Sanchez's men get hurt after that.

Speaking of Sanchez' men, Dario is one scary-ass mofo. The future Oscar winner Benicio Del Toro was a mere stripling of 22 when LTK was filmed, but he owns the screen whenever he's on it. The audience is unable to tear their eyes away from the palpable menace he radiates. Let me ask you--was there ever a creepier line in the entire history of Bond films than "we gave her a real nice honeymoooooooooon"?? It's too bad that in order to preserve Bond's secret, the story had to keep Dario offscreen for most of the middle of the movie (ostensibly to pick up the stingers from the contras, who had earlier kicked him out for being too nasty..hmmm). I do wish Wilson had found a way around that, as more Dario would have been a good thing. A great henchman.

Another thing the movie does is stuff itself to overflowing with a crazy wonderful set of characters. Even the smallest roles, like the bank manager, stick in your mind. From Professor Joe to Heller to Truman-Lodge to Krest to Sharkey to Killifer to poor poor Della, this movie is more populated than many other 007 films, chock full of memorable supporting roles and fun performances.

The movie is also enhanced by some outstanding stunt work, and great set pieces. The "lassoing" of Sanchez's plane, while ridiculous, is fun. The "waterskiing" scene is great (although I have to ask...since the plane didn't turn and was accelerating for take-off, how did Bond manage to catch up to it and grab on?? Bad physics, methinks.) Of course, the cherry on the sundae is the tanker truck chase. Yes, the trucks were specially modified to do the wheelie and the "drive on one side's wheels" (there's a great feature on that on the DVD), but they really did the stunts, and the whole sequence makes a thrilling climax to the movie. Great driving, great explosions, exciting direction...it's the most satisfying Bond climax since FYEO.

Alas, the movie isn't perfect, I will acknowledge. We have two Bond girls this time out, neither one quite reaching the upper tier in my book. Talisa Soto is...well damn it, she's frakkin' gorgeous. She's maybe even the most beautiful woman ever in a Bond movie. (Aside: The human race was doomed to extinction the moment she married Benjamin Bratt...their plan: to spawn a race of super-beautiful humans who will subjugate the ugly spuds like us...) Sadly, however, she's no great actress. Her range is quite limited, and her attempts to extend beyond that come up sounding flat and emotionless (at best). Lupe is also far too passive. Aside from lying about seeing Bond on the boat, she does nothing at all to help James rescue her or topple Sanchez. She's nowhere to be seen for the final half hour of the film, until the very, very end, where she shows up reaping the rewards of apparently inheriting Sanchez's belongings without doing any of the heavy lifting.

Meanwhile, Carrie Lowell (currently seen 27 times a day on Law & Order reruns) fares a little better. She's no great shakes as an actress herself, but compared to Soto she's Streep. But the tone of her performance often feels the teensiest bit off. She's supposedly been flying in Latin America for years, and is now working for the CIA, but she never quite comes off with the requisite toughness...or at least not consistently She comes off alright in the bar scene, but after that she seems to cycle endlessly between competence and confusion, between plucky resourcefulness and helplessness. Part of that comes down to the script, but part of it is also Lowell's apparent inability (and director John Glen's?) to find a firm grasp on the character. Watching Pam is rather like riding a roller coaster, she's so all over the place.

That being said, Pam is a good companion for Bond, she's helpful, she's (mostly) good in the clutch. Unlike many Bond girls, she knows how to use her sexuality to get her way with men, like Professor Joe. She flies, she can handle a gun , she can improvise well in a pinch....Now if only she had thought to tell Bond about the Attorney General's deal with Heller, things might have gone better...

But oh, dear lord, what a TERRIBLE ending. Never has such a good Bond film worked so hard in the final 2 minutes to undo everything it's done so well for the previous two hours. It's uncanny how off-kilter and rushed it seems. Felix Leiter has recently lost a wife and a limb (it looks like he gets to keep the arm), but his phone call with Bond is jovial with no acknowledgment of what's gone on. "Go fishing? Great!! That'll make up for my lost honeymoooooon!" Meanwhile, Bond has risked his own life and limbs, and thrown away his career. Does Felix even say thank you? Nope. It's as if they beamed this scene in from a different movie!! Sure, you don't want to end on an overly grim note, but after a gritty and relentless story, aren't we entitled to some emotional closure, rather than a sitcom closing laugh?

Also botched in the ending? M passing on his message through Leiter. Even if it was gruff and unforgiving, we needed to see M say he wanted Bond back, not have that relayed through a third party. Bond's off-handed "why don't you hook up with the President, Lupe?" is so casual and so comes out of nowhere that the audience thinks that Bond has to be joking. As far as we've seen, Bond hasn't even met the President, and suddenly he's throwing the dude his cast-offs? Worst of all might be Pam, on the final drop of her emotional roller coaster. Suddenly she stalks off crying when she thinks Bond is going to choose Lupe...I'm sorry, this really hurts the character for me. Instead of screaming "Bullshit!" like she did earlier, or confronting Bond and Lupe angrily, suddenly Pam is a crier??

So much damage done in two minutes...the whole tone of the movie lost, characters behaving randomly...it's as if they didn't have the final scene done yet, and had some gopher on the set scribble something down with five minutes to go until filming. And don't get me started with the winking fish!

Still, despite that, this is a top tier, nay, top 5 Bond movie. I love virtually every frame of this movie, and could go on for much much longer if Ichose to. Would I want every movie to be like this? No. But I'm thankful that the producers have the good sense to throw a curve at us every once in awhile, that they're not so sedentary that they keep repeating the same movie over and over again. Having Bond do something completely different reminds us of how much we appreciate the usual trappings, while at the same time expanding our understanding of what is possible in this franchise. And as we take the first full steps into the truly post-Fleming Bond era, ironically we get the most Fleming-like Bond movie of all.

And so we come to the end of the Dalton era. Although it was a mere two films, it was a fairly good two films, with clever adaptations of whatever Fleming material was left, and a move to push the character in a new direction. Sadly, interminable legal entanglements would put the franchise on hold for six years, and Timothy Dalton decided to move on with his career rather than wait around. That's too bad, because I rather enjoyed his take on Bond, and I remain convinced that had he been able to put another couple of movies under his belt, his stature would be greatly enhanced. Instead, the "only two movies" label makes it too easy to lump him into a group with "only one movie" Lazenby. But after the iconic Bonds by both Sean Connery and Roger Moore, Dalton and the writers were bold enough to give us yet another completely different Bond, distinct from his predecessors yet true to his literary origins. Dalton didn't shrink from portraying Bond as rash, as a deadly assassin, a man with no time for bureaucracy, as a man jaded beyond belief yet willing to throw everything away for a friend, for justice. That was a radical break from the past, and Dalton made it work. Thank you, sir.

Whither Bond from here? After deaths and retirements among the Eon brain trust, after never-ending legal travails, Bond would go in an exciting, fascinating new direction. But all the media would hear is one phrase: "Sexist, misogynistic dinosaur." Sigh...

SNELL'S RANDOM NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS:

**Lupe's lover had armed guards, who were killed by Sanchez's men...who was this guy? Another drug dealer, a rival? Some VIP? Did he know what he was getting into? Surely Lupe knew the consequences of getting caught...did she warn him?

**Can a helicopter really keep pace with a plane? I admit to absolutely zero aeronautics knowledge, but that always seemed odd to me...

**How I always pictured my wedding day would be:

**"Don't let him take you alive." Really? Narcotics agents with suicide pills? Really? Then again, knowing how Sanchez treats cops he catches, maybe it's a good idea...

**Sanchez's financial wizard, played by Tony Stark, ladies and gentlemen!!

OK, not that Tony Stark, but actor Anthony Starke.

By the way, was it just me, or back in the day did everybody say that the part of Truman-Lodge should have been played by Michael J. Fox? He was in the limelight as uber-capitalist-wannabe Alex P. Keaton on Family Ties. But Tony Stark is THE capitalist, so...

**My spellchecker reaaaaally hates the British spelling of Licence. I'm just sayin'...

**Isthmus is only the second fictional nation in the Bond franchise, along with San Monique in LALD. Not coincidentally, I'm sure, both depicted governments involved in narcotics trafficking. Oh, c'mon, Eon, did you really care whether or not Panama was offended? If you can say mad Russian generals want to run drugs, why can't you set this movie in a real country?

**So, I guess Bond forgot all his ninja training from YOLT, huh? He's taken out like a punk by two Hong Kong ninjas, and showed no martial arts knowledge at all.

**Since we're doing old home week, in bringing back Felix Leiter, why not bring back Quarrel Jr. from LALD as well? Who's this Sharkey cat?

**Not only is the theme song kind of blah, after its release it was found to be..ahem..."based upon" the horn line from Goldfinger. Credit was given, royalties were paid...but "blah" and ahem "based upon" make two strikes for this song. Matters aren't helped by the sappy "If You Asked Me To" over the end credits...

**So Sanchez has a huge hidden underground complex, an ultra advanced drug lab, state of the art for cocaine smuggling, costs millions of dollars...and one beaker of gasoline is enough to completely destroy it?

Seriously, I understand that drug lords might not follow OSHA standards or face fire department inspections...but since at any given time there are THOUSANDS of gallons of gasoline sitting around that complex, wouldn't you think there'd be SOME fire suppression technology around? That maybe the guys with extinguishers who ran in could have stopped what was a fairly small fire?

**The Hemingway House is a private for-profit tourist attraction. So, why does MI-6 gets to use it?? Did they pay a lot of money? Is the Hemingway House owned by Universal Exports, and thus a permanent front for British intelligence? The federal government made the Hemingway House an official National Historic Landmark--would they let a foreign government use that as an HQ? Is MI-6 squatting? Are there secret MI-6 snipers in the Statue of Liberty??

**Wayne Newton is god. And Professor Joe Butcher is hilarious. No dissent will be tolerated on this matter. Danke Schoen.

**Goodbye M, or rather Robert Brown as M. You give us a good farewell performance, a dynamite scene with Bond, but I still wish you'd had a final scene to reconcile with Bond (or fire him for good).

**Goodbye also to Caroline Bliss' Moneypenny. Too many tears, not enough sexy, sorry. At least she was bright enough to call Q for help.

**Goodbye, Albert Broccoli. This was the last film he would do any actual producing on, as he stepped aside to let his daughter and stepson take the reins. It's easy to forget Broccoli's contribution to the series, but without him, we would never have seen the Bond franchise, at least as we've come to know it. It was his deep love for Fleming's character that caused him to pursue the film rights several times, it was his passion for the project that convinced United Artists to commit to a six-picture deal when no one else seemed interested (and only days before Harry Saltzman's option on the novels expired). It was his commitment to Bond that kept him at it when the first two films didn't become break-out hits, and it was also his commitment that kept him from playing on the fame of his series by spreading himself too thin--he focused almost exclusively on 007. The stories are too numerous to tell here, but it's remarkable how there are almost no negative stories about the man. Thank you, Cubby, from all of us.

**President Lopez is partially a blast from the past, as he is played by Pedro Armendariz, Jr., the son of the man who played the much beloved Kerim Bey in FRWL. It's too bad LTK couldn't give him more to do...

**I declare the Polaroid camera with laser beam flash that takes x-ray pictures to be the best gadget ever.

**This is the first time we've seen Bond playing blackjack. At first he loses, playing "like a real jerkoff," which convinces Sanchez that it's OK to raise the limits. Then Bond starts winning huge. Runs like that are fairly unlikely just with normal luck...was Bond counting cards??

**Bond was on the run, Q hadn't contacted him, yet...so where exactly does a rogue agent go to get a fake manta ray costume?? Does some shop in Miami specialize in those??

**Maybe those stingers weren't such a threat after all...Sanchez's goons miss Bond's truck at close range (thanks to trick driving, admittedly), and Sanchez himself barely nicks Pam's cropduster when it's onlya few feet away!!

**Hat tip to Peter Lamont for some great sets, including Sanchez's crib, and the wonderful Olimpatec Meditation Institute.

**Bond Score: 2. Lupe and Pam. Cumulative Bond Score: 45

And, as always:

It will take six years, though. But it will only take me a week...

The Living Daylights

Alex, you were right.

My good friend Alex has argued with me for years that I've been too harsh in my evaluation of The Living Daylights. I've always regarded it as somehow less than the sum of its parts, as a film that seemed caught between Roger Moore era and (in my mind) the classic Licence To Kill.

Well, I'm ready to concede that I was wrong. Oh, TLD isn't a perfect Bond movie, by any means. And a couple of its flaws still bug the, well, living daylights out of me. But upon rewatching, I found TLD to be much better than I had remembered. And I will be moving it up the list accordingly. So, this one's for you, Alex.

This movie, of course, introduced Timothy Dalton as 007, and it was a fairly momentous change at the time. Roger Moore had been in the role for 7 movies and 14 years. And we were into the era of home VHS, so even those too young to have enjoyed him at the time were increasingly familiar with Sean Connery as Bond. So Dalton had the unenviable task of following two giants (and the other fella). Could a classically trained actor who was little known outside of England, who was given the role by default after the producers first choice became unavailable, be up to the task? And given the way other movie franchises were redefining the vocabulary of action films--and redefining box office expectations for them--how would the writers and producers respond?

Our answer comes quickly in the teaser, which is the best in (at least) a decade. No coy "aren't we cute" humor, no physically impossible stunts played for laughs, no Beach Boys songs...just a taut little mini-movie that also sets up the main plotline rather well. A routine training exercise at Gibraltar turns deadly as someone uses the occasion to spring a trap on the the Double-O section, as 004 gets offed right in front of Bond's eyes. Bond's relentless pursuit of the killer, while dodging paintballs and real bullets, immediately tells us that this isn't a Moore movie. The tense direction, the great stunt work, and the sheer physicality that Dalton brings to the role here, is something that had been missing from the later Moore era. Given that neither Connery's nor Moore's Bond actually appeared in a teaser until their third movies respectively, and that Lazenby's was nowhere near this exciting, I have little trouble declaring that Dalton has the "best first teaser" of any Bond (thus far...Brosnan and Craig will have something to say about that, obviously).


Oh, and about the "safe sex Bond." For those of you too young to remember, this was the first Bond of the AIDS era, and with the transition to Dalton a lot of hay was made in the press that we wouldn't see Bond sleeping with tons of woman anymore, and that in TLD Bond would be with just one woman throughout. Which just goes to prove that pundits and critics don't, you know, actually watch the movies, as Bond scores in the freaking teaser!! Tune in two weeks from now as we watch the media go wild in a similar way over Bond being a "sexist, misogynistic dinosaur."

The theme song...ahh, yes. I know a lot of you out there like a-Ha's take, and more power to you. But me, I don't cotton to it. While it does have a catchy chorus, everything else in the song is treacly and forgettable, just feeble and stilted Euro dance pop (uh oh, now I've done it). It feels like the producers were making a blatant attempt to recapture the success of Duran Duran's "A View To A Kill," but failed to notice that a-Ha was no Duran Duran. Most telling--when another song (by the Pretenders) is used more often, and much more successfully, in the score than a-Ha's tune.

The first scene post-teaser is straight of the Ian Fleming short story. In Fleming's version, Bond has to protect a defector escaping from Berlin, and when the sniper turns out to be a woman, 007 refuses to kill her, adjusting his aim so that he only shoots the rifle out of her hand. When a bureaucrat threatens to tell M, Bonds tell him to go ahead, and hopes he'll get fired for it.

The way this story is used in the opening is the most important indicator of how Dalton's Bond is going to be different. First, the writers Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson decide to use the whole story, and make it a lynch pin of the movie's plot. In this way, TLD is much closer to For Your Eyes Only than Octopussy or A View To A Kill, which used some Fleming stories for just background, or for a title only, respectively. There wasn't much Fleming left for the writers to use now, but they were going to use it seriously and make it integral to the movie.

Yet they also decided to broaden that short story out. The actual escape, with Bond and Saunder's competing plans, isn't from the story--that's original. And it sets the tenor for Dalton's brief stint. It was to be Bond vs. the Bureaucrats, 007 trying to do what's right while still accomplishing his missions. In both of his movies, everyone around Bond seems forced to act according to pre-ordained roles, with no free will: 007, we can't tell you the escape plan; James, you must murder Pushkin; James, you can't go after Sanchez; James, no questioning orders. It's a fascinating shift in the tone of the series, and maybe it couldn't have gone any farther after Licence to Kill pushed it to the limit, but it was damned interesting to watch while it was going on.

Finally, there was an awareness of the outside world that had seemed lacking in the Moore era. The Trans-Siberian pipeline was big news in the day, and a development of some controversy (and still is today, thanks to Europe's growing dependence of Russian natural gas). Yes, they made it a bit humorous yet never over the top. And it was the first time in a while that they had tried to take a real-world issue and Bond-ize it (and let's give credit--it was pretty clever and well done). LTK would take a much more real look at the war on drugs and its implications than the cartoonish Mr. Big of Live And Let Die ever did. Not everybody approved of this approach, but it was clearly the modus operandi of the Dalton films--no more genocidal billionaires, just some real world issues given a 45 degree twist and turned up to 11.

Dalton himself had re-read much of Fleming before taking on the role, and it shows. Just as in the TLD short story, his Bond comes across as very world-weary, very blase. He's seen a lot of death, and he doesn't have time for the comedy antics anymore. He is a killer; can you imagine Roger Moore being sent on an assassination mission? In some ways, his portrayal of Bond is closest to Fleming's conception--a no-nonsense killer who questions what he's doing, who uses the martinis and woman to make bearable the life he leads. He's burned out on those, too--look at the way he almost has to talked into a dalliance with Linda (the boat lady) in the teaser--"I'm no nonsense, I've got a mission, another comrade dead--oh, all right, if you insist!"

Some have said Dalton doesn't do humor as well as Connery or Moore, and to an extent that's right. But if you've seen other films he's down, it's clear that he can do conventional humor. It might be more accurate to say that he just does the comedy differently.Whereas Connery used the death quip as a bitter, sarcastic taunt at a fallen foe, and Moore practically turned to the camera and wiggled his eyebrows in an attempt for a laugh, Dalton plays it very much in his conception of the character--it's a desperate (but failed) attempt to lighten the burden after yet another death, a vain cry against the darkness of the spy's life. It's almost as if he's trying to laugh at himself, but failing miserably.

Dalton's conception of Bond is one of the reasons the romance with Kara works so well. Her innocence and optimism is such a stark contrast to Bond's cynicism and weariness that it makes their relationship much more interesting than many of the ones in the later Moore era. Kara may not be the best Bond girl ever, but this is surely the sweetest romance of the entire series. Just watch how she gradually transforms Bond, from the cold woman-manipulator a la Roger Moore to a man who feels guilty about what he's done to her to caring for her. And after the climax, after he has already been sent off on his next mission, he comes back to see her--this is the first time we've ever seen this in the franchise!!

Maryam d'Abo, much to her credit, finds the right note to make all of this believable. She's a civilian, but she's not a helpless screamer, as was Stacy Sutton. She's game enough to stand by her man, Koskov, even things get difficult and she's hassled by the KGB. She's frightened by events around her, but summons up enough courage to muddle through and be a real help (mostly) to Bond...just don't let her fly the plane. Her performance helps set the standard for the category "innocent civilian swept into events beyond her control" of Bond girls.

The producers also step up the globetrotting aspect of Bond. After being almost completely confined to France and San Francisco last time out, this time we're on a whirlwind tour of Gibraltar, Czechoslovakia, rural England, Vienna, Tangier, Afghanistan, Pakistan...the locations are mostly used to good effect, and (until the last half hour really begins to drag) keep the audience interested during the lulls in the action.

A special shout to Thomas Wheatley as Saunders, one of the series' greatest sacrificial lambs. Presented as essentially a snooty weasel in the opener, the script has enough confidence in itself not to leave him as a one-dimensional character. Saunders and Bond develop a grudging respect for each other, and the audience actually begins to like him, which make's Saunder's death all the more painful. Wheatley's performance makes the transition believable, and his death...well, ouch, what a way to go. (Unfair question department--maybe this is a European thing, but how many places have their automatic doors' workings exposed like that, so anyone can get to them? Just asking...)

Which leads us to Necros, a great henchman. With his ubiquitous Walkman playing the scary "Where Has Everybody Gone?" whenever he's in action, he brings an air of badly needed menace to the proceedings, even though he doesn't have much dialogue, or much to do besides kill, kill, and kill again. He's a worthy opponent for Dalton's first outing, the relentless killer who gives James one hell of a fight after building up the audience's desire to see him taken out.

One major misstep with Necros, however, is during the "kidnapping" of Koskov from the safehouse. Don't get me wrong...it was very well done, and exciting (milk bottles as grenades??). And the kitchen fight was wonderful...thrilling and innovative, reminiscent of the legendary train car battle between Bond and Red Grant in From Russia With Love. Except...who the hell was Necros fighting? Much of the impact of this great, great fight scene (which took 3 days to film!) is diluted because we have absolutely no idea whom he is fighting. It's a character we've never met, never had a single line of dialogue from...we don't even know his name! (Hint: it's stuntman Bill Weston, credited only as "Butler, Blayden"). It's not Bond, it's not someone we know or have any emotional investment in. I'll grant you, there might be some level of cool in the argument that "this proves how tough MI-6 is, when even their anonymous butlers are badasses." But from a dramatic standpoint, I don't think it helps your movie when the film's most exciting physical conflict takes place with our hero (played by a new actor) is nowhere to be seen. Given the time and energy they invested in this one scene, they should have re-jiggered it either to include Bond (having Necros "defeat" him there would add extra juice to their final fight later), or made sure the butler was a character the audience had some reason to care about.

The second misstep is the "ice chase" in Czechoslovakia. After going to such lengths to give us more realistic action scenes in Gibraltar and Blayden, we immediately descend into the nadir of bad Roger Moore set pieces. Things happen not because they make sense, or are physically possible, or are remotely believable, but because they're "funny"--which completely takes us out of the mood the movie had set for us. Using the laser to somehow cut completely through the police car so it can fall apart in a funny way? Driving in a circle on the ice to cut a hole to sink another one? Now we're back in Bugs Bunny territory, or Pink Panther territory, not James Bond.

Another difficulty is that, like most 1980's Bond films, TLD is too long for the story we're given. Maybe the producers were paid by the minute, because Octopussy, VTAK, TLD--they all go on at least ten minutes too long. After the "assassination" of Pushkin, the pacing of the film just feels off, flat and distended. The stuff in Afghanistan, while all well done, just goes on far, far too long--it lasts for over 35 minutes!! Despite all of the excellent stunt work, and all of the lovely pyrotechnics, do we really need to see every explosion in the battle, every bag of heroin loaded, every shot fired by both sides? It goes on for so long, in one continuous crisis after another, that the audience is exhausted when we get to the final shot-out with Whitaker, which now comes across as a total anti-climax. Throw in the fact that there is absolutely NO transition to that final fight (Bond and Kara escape from the plane, then suddenly Bond is back in Tangier stalking Whitaker. No explanation, no transition, no Kara...it just suddenly happens!), and the whole ending feels tacked on, instead of being a natural development.

(Just to show that I'm not merely a complaining backseat director, I offer the following suggestions how to pep up the films last half hour. While it's good to see Felix Leiter finally return after 14 years, John Terry gives a horrendous performance, and Leiter's presence adds literally nothing to the proceedings. Cutting his scenes costs nothing and speeds things up. And cut at least 5 minutes out of the Afghanistan business, including the circling back to blow up the bridge business. And throw in some kind of transition scene, maybe with M recalling Bond but he insists on going to finish off Whitaker.)

The ending also feels a bit squishy because the villains' plans aren't terribly exciting. It's a fairly prosaic plot--trick Bond into killing Pushkin so we can make money selling drugs--that doesn't lend itself to a thrilling conclusion. There's no bomb to disarm, no catastrophe averted...just a bunch of bags of heroin dumped out of the back of a plane (not even destroyed!!) and the rest blown up in a plane crash. Yes, Bond did avert the evil scheme...but somehow it just doesn't feel like a significant victory, does it? Because there was no tension from a countdown of any type, and because the stakes were so low, we don't get the sense of relief that we're used to from Bond thwarting the bad guys' plan.

The other reason the denouement falls so flat is that we one again have villain misuse, as we did in Octopussy. To begin with, we have pretty weak villains this time out. Georgi Koskov, with all his hugging and sputtering, comes off more pathetic than evil. But I will defend Jeroen Krabbe to this extent--watch Koskov when he drops off Bond and Kara in Afghanistan. He's no longer a buffoon--he's a mean bastard, someone you could almost buy as a true villain. It's only when he's around people he's trying to trick--Bond and MI-6 early on, or Pushkin--that he adopts the aspect of the fool. Krabbe is portraying Koskov as acting. The only problem is, Krabbe is not very good at it, taking Koskov's "performance" too far over the top, weakening the character in our eyes. And the script doesn't do him any favors, not letting the true Koskov show through until 3/4 of the way through the movie, and then for only a couple of minutes.

As to Whitaker, well, I've never been a Joe Don Baker admirer, so I'll just restrict my critique to the fact that the script gives him absolutely nothing to do. He has very few scenes, and only two (one each with Pushkin and Bond) where he does anything more than growl orders at people. And then he just keeps spouting off his faux military cliches. The writers never elevate him above a brief character sketch--and neither does the performance.

But the problem is, as in Octopussy, Bond settles up with the wrong villain. Until the finale, Bond HAS NEVER EVEN MET Whitaker. So there is no sense of a plot culminating, no sense of an ultimate confrontation between enemies--just two guys who've never met stalking each other in a dark room, and even then they never come face to face. You feel as though someone should have stepped in and introduced them first. The final confrontation, as a result, is completely lacking in any dramatic tension. Meanwhile, the villain Bond should really want to settle with is Koskov, who lied to him directly and used him and left him to die in Afghanistan. But just as with Orlov in Octopussy, Bond doesn't get to deliver the coup de gras to Koskov. Pushkin does, and the final blow (presumably?) is delivered off-screen by anonymous KGB agents. Terrifically unsatisfying. (Not to mention the actual resolution to the fight with Whitaker---dropping a statue on him--is pretty lame)

A final reservation I have is the whole Afghanistan business...it just feels...off, somehow. No, I don't have the post-9/11 reservation some folks do. Applying 20 years of geopolitical hindsight can be foolhardy thing to do to a fantasy adventure series, and in 1987 few foresaw the Soviet withdrawal and its consequences coming. And frankly, Kamran Shah sure doesn't seem like the Taliban type.

No, my reservations stem from the contemporary implications that the movie seems to not have a firm grasp on. Afghanistan was a huge battleground of the Cold War. But it's kind of hard to tell that from the movie's treatment of the issue. Yes, Koskov and Whitaker were evil, but only at the margins--Russia was trying to get more weapons to kill the Mujaheddin. Pushkin was just pissed because those two were trying to enrich themselves first, rather than immediately buying weapons. When Bond was trying to convince Kamran to help, by saying the drug money would be used to buy weapons....well, hold on, so would the original $50 million they got from Russia!! Yet Bond doesn't want to kill Pushkin--even though it was British policy to oppose the Soviets in Afghanistan, Bond doesn't want to stop it, unless someone gets greedy and kills a couple of British agents? Meanwhile, after he escapes, Bond circles back with the plane and blows up a bridge full of Soviet tanks and troops who aren't part of Koskov's plot. Some would consider that an act of war, for heaven's sake--yet Pushkin and Gogol never so much as shrug at it! When M presented Kamran to Gogol in Vienna, that should have been a major diplomatic incident, akin (in Soviet eyes) to presenting an al-Qaeda representative to the U.S. ambassador!! And even if she was an innocent dupe, is it remotely plausible that a Czech defector who had helped fight Soviet troops would be given an unrestricted emigration visa? None of what happens rings true to how the parties should have behaved.

Earlier I praised TLD for taking a topical issue and giving it a Bond twist. Here, they fail. The fiction of the Bond movies--that the USSR and the West were basically friendly competitors except for the occasional nutty general--completely falls apart when you set your movie in the hottest battleground of the end of the Cold War, and still try to ignore the Britain and Russia were on opposite sides there.

I've probably spent way too much time dwelling on the plot's shortcomings, because I do feel that the film's good points outweigh them, by a fair margin. But TLD could have been a GREAT Bond movie, instead of merely a good one. The romance is one of the series' strongest; they keep the plot slowly unfolding, so the audience is never sure what the villains' real plan is until late in the film (which might explain part of the disappointment--all this murder and defection and kidnapping and skulduggery, only to have it turn out to be a glorified drug deal?!?); aside from the ice chase, the action scenes and stunt work are top notch, a definite step up from the late Moore era; and Dalton makes a very effective debut as 007. Better villains, better pacing, and a stronger ending would certainly have made this one of the top rated Bond films ever. Without those, though, the movie falls short of classic.

Still, it is pretty good. Satisfied now, Alex?

Tune in next week, when for Bond, this time it's personal!!

SNELL'S RANDOM NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS

**How did Koskov and Whitaker know about the training exercise at Gibraltar? Sure, it probably wasn't top secret or anything, but it also probably wasn't widely advertised, especially to the Russians. Did they have a mole in MI-6?? And for that matter, how did they know about that safehouse at Blayden, and that Koskov was stashed there?

**Speaking of which, maybe they should have left a more obvious clue to inspire MI-6 to kill Putin. The little "smiert spiomun" tag was found "near the body," apparently much later; Bond doesn't even hear about it until after Koskov re-escapes. If there had been a stronger wind, the tag would have blown away, and no one would have known...

**Since the mission is to penetrate the RADAR installation at Gibraltar, may I suggest that parachuting in from a plane might not have been the most effective infiltration route? Those things show up on radar...

**That's probably the best mobile office for M ever...

**After not hearing anything about other Double-O agents for a while, suddenly they're name dropped every movie, and also dropping liked flies. 009 dies in Octopussy, 003 in VTAK, now 004...and 008 gets a mention.

This is also the first time we get any actual face time with any of the other OO's, and, well, given what we see here, they're not terribly impressive, are they? 002 is tangled in a tree and shot with a paintball 10 seconds in? 004 makes no real effort to save himself and screams like a baby on the way down? Is James really that much better than the rest? Or has he just been incredibly luckier over the years??

**Given that Koskov and Whitaker are trying to keep things hidden, isn't buying a $150,000 cello at a public auction just a little bit too conspicuous? It was the only link that led Bond to Whitaker...and surely someone in Kara's orchestra would have noticed that she suddenly had a freakin' Stradivarius, wouldn't they? Certainly the sudden appearance of such a capitalist luxury would have led to some investigation by the Czech secret police or the KGB (Yes, I know they planned for Kara to die, but the cello would have still been around, right? And it would have led the KGB to Whitaker...).

**Speaking of being too conspicuous...isn't the use of the VTOL to blast upwards from the inside of the building where Koskov exits the pipeline a bit too attention-getting? Everybody, including the Czech border guards, turns to watch it take off. Doesn't that kind of give away the game? Now everybody knows the terminus for this escape route, so they can figure out the beginning...the fancy plane has ruined it for future use, haven't they? Koskov was already in the west...why not just drive him to the airport or military base, instead of flashing a big neon "look how we escaped" sign??

**This is a top KGB assassin??


Exploding teddy bears??**Just asking--they still had milkmen in England in 1987? And they'll let any old yob claiming to be his sub into a high security safe house??

**That evil scheme has one heckuva profit margin--from $50 million (which wasn't even theirs) to half a billion? S.P.E.C.T.R.E. could learn a thing or two here...

**Speaking of which, where exactly were they planning on selling heroin? Did Koskov and Whitaker already have a deal set up? Was the Soviet army in the drug dealing business?

**Caroline Bliss never did much for me as Moneypenny...despite it being 1987, she always seemed more clingy and dependent than Lois Maxwell did 25 years earlier....

**Walter Gottel was too ill for the demands placed on the role, so Gogol was "promoted' to the foreign service (really? That was a promotion?) and John Rhys-Davies as General Pushkin takes over his old job. JRD does a fine job, too, bringing the right mixture of authority and understated menace to the role. He has a good chemistry with Dalton; it's a shame that they don't get more screen time together.

**Ladies and gentleman, the first bird flipped in James Bond history:

**Bond Score: 2. Linda and Kara. Cumulative Bond Score: 43

And as always:

Tune in next week as 007 just says "NO!" to drugs, and makes a Hemingway joke no one ever gets...

A View To A Kill

You know what A View To A Kill needs? This movie needs more c....

No, I promise, despite Christopher Walken's presence, that I will not make that joke. He's playing Max Zorin, not legendary producer Bruce Dickinson. Bond movies are a serious matter, and I won't cheapen this with trite references to pop culture catch phrases and late night comedy routines. I owe you, my committed reader, that much.

Still, VTAK desperately needed something, as the Roger Moore era comes to an end with a whimper, not a bang. It's not a good movie. In fact, I think it's the second worst Bond movie. But it can be a little tough to put your finger on why. What it come down to, mainly, is that the movie needs more...well, more cowbell, dammit.

It's not as if the filmmakers aren't trying hard...but almost every decision they make seems ill-conceived. And as a result, the movie plays as pedestrian, even boring at points. It's as if they forgot they were actually making a James Bond picture, and settled for giving us a bunch of standard action movie cliches.

The shortcomings of this movie can best be summed up by one shot:

A aged Nazi trying to throw a lit bundle of dynamite at Bond. Really. That's our final crisis? That's not Bond--that's Die Hard Meets The Road Runner.

Richard Maibaum and Michael Wilson team up for their third consecutive Bond script, and Wilson is a full producer at this point. But it's almost as if these two have forgotten what makes Bond Bond. Of course, they have very little Fleming to work with here, just (part of) the title of a short story. In From A View To A Kill, Bond must track down a hidden sniper who is ambushing NATO dispatch couriers in France. Not a lot to build a movie upon, obviously. (Note: I have yet to hear any explanation as to why they dropped the "From" in the title...What, you can't have a Bond movie start with the word "From?")


So instead, they crafted yet another Goldfinger knockoff as a plot. The similarities are even more striking...and far less subtle...than Octopussy. Bond investigates our villain for smuggling, but stumbles upon the villain's plot to destroy the U.S. supply of gold/microchips to make himself rich. The producers show no shame whatsoever in completely duplicating the famous Goldfinger study scene, down to the map rising out of the table and the one objector being escorted to his death.

But that's not the real problem...we Bond fans have proven very forgiving when Eon borrows from itself. No, the real flaws in this movie become apparent when you look at the action sequences they choose to surround this framework with. They give us lot of set pieces that are, frankly, completely underwhelming and pedestrian. Let's look at just a few:

• Bond rousts a few of Zorin's thugs at Stacy Sutton's crib. There's not anything wrong with this scene, but it's just a lot of punching. It's all very standard, from the rock-salt filled shotgun to the ashes-filled urn Stacy smashes a thug with. There's no pizazz, nothing that says this is a James Bond production...nothing that, frankly, couldn't have turned up on an American P.I. television series of the era.
• Bond rescues himself and Stacy from a burning elevator shaft. Again, competently done, but where's the Bond? Watching 1 full minute of Bond carrying Stacy down a ladder isn't what I've come to expect from a 007 movie.
• The firetruck chase through San Francisco is no Bullitt, that's for sure. For 90% of it, Bond isn't even driving. They're in SF and don't use the hills?!? The jump over the drawbridge isn't a jump...they use clever editing to conceal that the firetruck doesn't jump AT ALL! And the Keystone Cops, let's smash as many police cars as possible finale belongs in the Blues Brothers, not a Bond movie.
  

Yes, they are some better action sequences elsewhere in the film, but these examples pretty clearly show that the producers were struggling to define what Bond was at this point. There is nothing special about any of them, nothing to make you say "Wow, I've never seen anything like this in other movies!" In other words, no cowbell. For much of VTAK, there's nothing to separate the movie from an episode of Spenser For Hire or Magnum P.I. (not that there's anything wrong with SFH). The sense of bigger than life, the fantasy, the 5-minutes-into-the future that we expect from the franchise is sadly lacking in the movie. So in a way, it's completely fitting that we finish up in a glamorous quarry. And their sense of what we expect from a Bond film is so off, when they do give us the fantasy, it's an old Nazi throwing dynamite. Sigh...

Part of the lack of glamor comes from the surprising decision to once again have Bond go gadget-less. But unlike For Your Eyes Only, they don't give this gadget-less Bond realistic villains; heck, Zorin is practically Gadgets 'R' Us. And unlike FYEO, they don't compensate by putting gadget-less Bond in exotic situations, and letting him show off his superiors skills and thinking. There's no "watch Bond outdrive the bad guys with a Citroen!" Instead, Bond is in mundane situations, doesn't show impressive skills, and lets Stacy do the driving.

Another factor might be the San Francisco locale that dominates the second half of the film. Because of all the American movies and television shows set there, I think it's just difficult for San Francisco to come across as exotic or intriguing to audiences. We have a "been there done that" feeling, and because of the familiarity we're comparing the film to Bullitt and Dirty Harry and every TV show that made better use of the locale. And when the best they can give us is a non-exciting fire truck chase, well, the comparisons aren't going to help our opinion of VTAK.

The third factor is the constantly changing MacGuffins--the movie has absolutely no idea of what it wants to be about. See if you can follow. In the teaser and the opening scene, Bond is supposed to track down the source that leaked secret British microchip technology to the Russians. Someone stealing microchips hardened against electromagnetic pulses could be interesting, except for one thing--after the scene in M's office we NEVER hear those chips mentioned again. At all. Nada.

Somehow, instead, Bond gets side-tracked into investigating Zorin's horse racing interests. There seems to be no way that line of inquiry could answer the question of who's leaking classified microchips. Nonetheless, VTAK proceeds to spend the next 40+ minutes in a pointless horse doping exercise (even if he proves that Zorin is cheating at horse racing, how, exactly, does that help them catch the microchip thief?). It's not a good sign when only 12 minutes in, the script completely forgets what Bond's goal was.

Not to worry, though. Once Bond leaves France, we never hear about the horses again. Not a SINGLE WORD. The movie's ADD turns Bond's attentions to Zorin's oil wells, which have absolutely nothing to do with either the leaked microchips OR the horse scandal. So once again we're onto a completely irrelevant line of inquiry. Fortunately for James, this one just happens to stumble upon Zorin's big plan.

Don't get me wrong--we've seen digressions from 007's main investigation before. Bond started out investigating gold smuggling in Goldfinger, diamond smuggling in Diamonds Are Forever, and octopus smuggling--oops, Russian art treasure smuggling--in Octopussy. But in each of those cases, that investigation directly led to the villains' real plan. In VTAK, none of it connects. It's almost as if Bond is taking random paragraphs from Zorin's Wikipedia biography, investigating it, dropping it, picking another...And, in those other movies, Bond succeeds at his initial assignment, and solves the smuggling problem. In VTAK, he never does find any evidence linking Zorin to the leaking of the microchips. No closure there.

Another sign that the writers had no confidence in their story was the large number of sacrificial lambs they load into the script. 003? Dead. Achille Aubergine, the French detective? Dies. Sir Godfrey Tibbett? Dead. Chuck Lee? Dead. The sacrificial lamb is a venerable concept in the Bond series. Having a close friend or ally killed gives Bond extra motivation and increases the audience's emotional investment in Bond's quest. But if you have to do it 4 times--and 3 of those times we have virtually zero emotional reaction--you're just flailing around. And don't get me started on the way Tibbett and Lee are killed in the exact same fashion. That's just plain laziness, compounding the laziness of giving us multiple sacrificial lambs to "advance" the plot.

The final plot deficiency I'll discuss (for now) is the complete lack of tension resulting from Zorin's plot. We're never shown a single building or inhabitant of "Silicon Valley," we don't get any close-ups of citizens about to die. Nope, all the movie can give us is (repeated) shots of a lone fisherman on Lake San Andreas. That, and lots and lots of shots of mine shafts. In Goldfinger, we saw the soldiers who were going to die, and Fort Knox. In Octopussy, we saw some of the potential victims of the nuclear bomb at the circus. But in VTAK it's all remote and abstract and uninvolving. Some people we've never met in a place we've never seen might die--so let's spend more time in the quarry! There's just no tension in our crisis situation.

Enough of the bad. Let's talk Christopher Walken. Max Zorin is given a back story that requires him to be both a genius and a psychotic, and Walken plays it to the hilt. Does he overplay it? Sure. But the pedestrian antics and meandering plot required someone to come through with a high energy performance, and Walken brings the cowbell. In a lot of ways his performance is similar to Klaus Maria Brandauer's as Largo in Never Say Never Again--a lot of self conscious ticks and mannerisms, and a bemusement at his own "superiority." But I think Walken does a better job of connecting to the rest of the cast than Brandauer did. Zorin enjoys showing off his intellect, and loves to berate those around him. I don't know that I can say that Walken makes Zorin into top-tier Bond villains. But he's in the top-tier of Moore-era villains, and his antics were appreciated by this viewer.

The teaser is fairly lame. It's not bad, per se. But it's yet another winter sports extravaganza, and haven't we had enough of those? We don't see anything here that we haven't seen before (multiple times), and things fall especially flat when they try to get trendy by having Bond improvise a snowboard from a snowmobile ski (apparently, snowboarding makes it impossible for Soviet troops to aim at...). Adding insult to injury is the Beach Boys song. This is especially heinous for 3 reasons. 1) The Beach Boys in a winter scene? Please, irony that cheap isn't worth doing. 2) If you are going to do a Beach Boys song, why California Girls? It's a "snow surfing" scene that has inspired the use of the Beach Boys, so why in heaven's name not use one of their surfing songs?!? California Girls means nothing to the plot or scene!!! Choosing that song looses whatever weak irony you actually had. 3) It wasn't even really the Beach Boys!! The song was performed by Gidea Park, a Beach Boys "tribute band!!" Good gravy, if you can't get the real thing, what's the point?!?

Ahh, but the theme song, that's another matter. Duran Duran got the gig when their bassist John Taylor drunkenly went up to Cubby Broccoli at a party and asked, "When are you going to get someone decent to do one of your theme songs?" I've got to try that sometime...The song is the first attempt at any kind of rock in the theme since Live And Let Die, and the first uptempo song since The Man With the Golden Gun, and the first stab at anything resembling "New Wave." And it succeeds spectacularly. Who knew John Barry had it in him? Suffice it to say, I love the song to pieces, ranking it as the #2 Bond theme song ever. It's also the ONLY Bond theme to ever hit #1 in the Billboard charts, and the ONLY one to reach as high as #2 in the British singles chart.

Tanya Roberts is an extraordinarily beautiful woman, and very, very sexy. Very very very sexy. She is not, however, a particularly good actress. Perhaps I'm a bit nuts here, but I will say that her performance, while bad, was better than the non-performances given by some other Bond Girls of the era (I'm looking at you, Lois Chiles). At least Roberts is capable of actually portraying emotion, albeit badly, and actually reacting to events around her in a human fashion. It might just be a quirk of mine, but I tend to prefer a bad-but-actually-human performance to someone who is just a mannequin for 2 hours.

With that being said, she is pretty bad, and even worse, she makes Stacy into a screamer. She screams so much, I felt like I was watching 1960's Doctor Who at times. Which is not what you want from your Bond Girl. Stacy's not much use in a scrap, her knowledge isn't particularly helpful, and she's so dim that a blimp can sneak up behind her. But damn, she is easy on the eyes...

Obviously, this was Roger Moore's last go round as 007. As he himself acknowledged, he was getting very long in the tooth. Others will say unkind things about the "work" he supposedly had done, the stiffness of his face, etc. I won't go there, because I really don't know enough about such matters. But I will say that, for the most part, Sir Roger seems very low energy in this film. Perhaps his advancing age (and abilities?) was the reason he has fewer stunts, and Bond seems much less active, than in earlier films. On the flip side, there is nothing as embarrassing for Moore as the "Sit!" or the Tarzan swing from the previous movie. And while this isn't his finest outing, it's not his worst, either. Salutations, and thanks for 7 movies, sir.

The team of director John Glen and writers Maibaum and Wilson did 5 consecutive movies together, and (in my opinion) those movies follow a curious U shape in terms of quality, starting at a peak in For Your Eyes Only, bottoming out a VTAK, and building back up to another peak by Licence To Kill (your mileage may vary, obviously). I've always wondered why this is, and I upon this current watching of the films, I think it's clear that they were struggling to find out how to handle the franchise with the stream of Fleming material mostly dried up. Fleming's material was so generally so strong that adapting it was usually "easy;" but everyone involved was still trying to get the feel of how to create original Bond material.

And in VTAK they clearly came up short. Too much of the film is standard American action movie material (or even TV movie material), and unfortunately succeeds in dragging Bond down to that level. The fantastic, the unfamiliar, the amazing "something you've never seen before" we've come to expect from Bond movies just isn't there for the most part. The problem is not a lack of effort, or coasting, but a lack a proper vision for the series. VTAK needed more cowbell.

Would things improve? Yes, they would. But that's a matter for next week...

SNELL'S RANDOM NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS:

**Farewell, Lois Maxwell. Thank you. (Especially appreciated was her little homage to My Fair Lady at Ascot...). You'll always be Moneypenny to me.

**Isn't it the tiniest bit embarrassing that the British Minister of Defence is completely unfamiliar with even the concept an electromagnetic pulse and the military ramifications? Isn't that sort of, you know, his job?

**It's a good thing that Britain and Russia now have microchip technology that is immune to electromagnetic pulse, right? So now, no one could ever use EMP technology, say, via a satellite, against them? Right?? They'll never have a problem with that again...

**Nothing personal against Fiona Fullerton, but wouldn't casting Barbara Bach in the small role have been worth 10,000 bonus points? Pola Ivanova is just fine, but a cameo by Agent XXX would have been the coolest thing ever...

**I wish they had done more with Mayday, perhaps given us a tiny bit of background or such. Of course, they rarely do that with henchmen...but I would have appreciated even a sentence or two about where she was from, or what her deal was. Like Walken, Grace Jones brought the cowbell to an otherwise overly calm affair.

That being said, like Jaws before her, her redemption came much too easily. She was knowingly complicit in everything Zorin did, a willing partner in mass murder. Would James really say "OK, you killed Tibbett, you killed Chuck Lee, but all is forgiven now?" Plus, her outrage at Zorin is a bit much. She watched him eliminate every other ally he had--did she seriously think she was immune?? She helps stop the bomb not because it's the right thing, but because she's pissed at Max...hardly noble. When she screams "Get Zorin for me," if I had been Bond I would have shouted back "burn in hell, you murdering bitch!" But that's just me.

**General Gogol sure seems to get around for the man who is the head of Soviet intelligence. Remember, this is a time when the very identity of the real-world M was (in theory at least) classified. But in the past few movies we've seen Gogol meeting M several times...so much for classified. Plus Gogol has been gallivanting around to Greece, East Germany, France, San Francisco...I mean, I know it's detente and all, but the head of Soviet Intelligence just strolls all over America in 1985? Really?

**The cutesy ending makes little sense. If Bond is missing and they're "presuming the worst," than how do they know that Bond saved Silicon Valley? If he never reported in, no one would have even known what Zorin's plan was, let alone that Bond thwarted it. Everyone else involved--everyone!!--died, good guy or bad. So if they don't know whether Bond's alive, the KGB wouldn't know to give him a medal...

**Wait a minute...Q has a Winnebago??

**Stacy is living in San Francisco in 1985 and doesn't know what quiche is???

**Zorin's continued pursuit of Stacy makes no sense, and ultimately leads to his downfall (and yes, I'll concede that "he's a psychopath" would answer most questions about his unusual methods/motives. But please allow me to rant anyway). He brings her to France to pay her off, so she'll drop the lawsuit and end the legal wrangling over the oil company. But why? Main Strike is in 3 days, and there's no possibility that Stacy could stop it. She doesn't cash the check, yet there's no injunction or legal move that comes in time to thwart his plans. So (other than to give 007 his only lead), why bother to fly her to France, and why bother to send goons to terrorize her when she doesn't accept the money?!? It's a pointless distraction, it does nothing to advance Zorin's plans, and leads Bond straight to Main Strike....

**I'm no geologist, so I'm ill-equipped to judge some of what Stacy tells us. But where's the earthquake? We're told that flooding the faults will cause earthquakes, but both faults won't move at once because of the "key geological lock" that Zorin wants to blow up. Well, Zorin floods the fault with an ENTIRE LAKE. Even if you don't get the massive destruction he planned, shouldn't something happen? A minor earthquake, a tremor? Anything? Either Stacy greatly exaggerated the risk, or the writers hoped that we would forget.

**I'll concede right now that this is entirely me, but I don't like to see Patrick McNee reduced to mainly comic relief. He's Steed, dammit...he should be allowed to be a little more competent! Sigh...

(BTW, his appearance makes 4 former Avengers starring in Bond films: Honor Blackmun, Diana Rigg, Joanna Lumley ((she was one of the allergy girls in OHMMS)) and now McNee. Tanya Roberts, of course, was a former Angel...so the count is now Avengers 4, Angels 0. Sorry, Charlie.)

**Bond score: 4. Sir Roger goes out with a bang, as it were. Kimberly Jones (the iceberg driver), Mayday, Pola Ivanova, and Stacy. Cumulative Bond score: 41.

And, as always:

What, no title for next time? It looks like the franchise is entering some uncharted territory here. Tune in next week as Barin, Prince of Arboria joins MI-6 and teaches us about safe sex...