License To Kill (1989)

Timothy Dalton impressed me greatly in "The Living Daylights," bringing a cold seriousness back to the character of James Bond that had been sorely lacking for some time, definitely since Connery but arguably all the way back to "From Russia With Love" in 1963. It was a great change of pace to see the series grow up a little bit from the cartoonish sideshow it had become under the wacky yoke of Roger Moore. And after Dalton took the lead, the series was set to finally give us a Bond film that was adult and pretty freaking dark, almost like an experiment to see how far the franchise could push it and still maintain its audience.

And while it remains the least successful Bond film when talking about the US box office (despite it still being a respectable moneymaker worldwide), "License To Kill" is, in my humble opinion, one of the absolute best entries in the entire series. It showcases Dalton giving his best performance as Bond, some of the most hard-hitting, exciting action to be seen up to that point, and a storyline that is still probably the darkest one they've ever attempted. There's nothing cheeky about this. There are few things that are lighthearted in it. This film is about one thing and one thing only: James Bond getting really mad and laying a titanic smack-down on the poor fools who dared to piss him off. And I had a great time watching it.

At the beginning of the film James Bond is in Flordia attending the wedding of his good buddy Felix Leiter (David Hedison), but that doesn't mean that the two of them don't have to time to stop an international drug lord, Sanchez (Robert Davi), from escaping on their way to the church. So Bond simply jumps on to Sanchez's plane from a helicopter, lassoing it and pulling it out of the air. Then they both parachute out, landing outside the church right in time for the wedding like a collective boss.

I didn't know Bane was in the Coast Guard...

Unfortunately for Felix, things don't work out very well after that. Sanchez escapes after bribing a DEA agent, and he's not too happy about the whole situation. So his solution is to kill Felix's wife and feed Felix to a shark. After finding Felix missing a few appendages and having a note on him reading "He disagreed with something that ate him" (which is kind of darkly hilarious), Bond swears vengeance, going so far as to resign his post after M orders him to stand down and leave. Tracking down Sanchez, Bond poses as an assassin for hire in order to get close to him, which puts him in the middle of a huge drug trafficking ring. While digging himself deeper and deeper into Sanchez's operation, Bond covertly screws with him, using deceit and stealth to pick his operation apart bit by bit while ingratiating himself with Sanchez the whole time.

It's some of the most clever scheming we've seen Bond do, although that isn't that tall of an order, really. Let's be honest: Most of the time he kind of stumbles across clues and leads, and his good fortune is often the only reason he succeeds at all. How many times have we seen Bond get captured, only to retroactively look back and realize that had he not gotten caught, something he usually tries to avoid, the villain would have gotten away with everything? Being lousy at stealth seems to be the best thing that usually happens to Bond. Hell how many times has he been saved at the last minute by someone else? I still can't believe that he's wound up straddling a nuclear bomb not once but twice and has had to have someone else stop it out of nowhere since he has no idea what he's doing. It's just nice to see him in charge of a situation for a change instead of flying by the seat of his pants, although the man is forced to improvise occasionally.

You know, sometimes you're scuba diving, you see a plane, you gotta get away so you think to yourself "I'm gonna harpoon that plane," so you do, and you ski behind it a bit till it takes off and then you jump on the plane and fly away. We've all been there.

Dalton is on fire here, showcasing Bond at his most rage filled and vengeful we've seen him up to this point. There are scenes when he's talking to Sanchez in which I wasn't actually sure whether or not he was going to be able to contain himself and not just jump up and tear the guy's throat out with his teeth. But it's all part of the bigger plan. Bond wouldn't be content with simply killing him - He's going to DESTROY him. You can tell that he's both enjoying the hell out of toying with the bastard and kicking himself constantly for not putting one between his eyes already. It's fantastic.

"License To Kill" is also interesting because, apart from "On Her Majesty's Secret Service," this is the most personal we get with Bond in terms of his relationships. "OHMSS" had his marriage and whatnot, but in "License To Kill," by starting off with Bond chumming about with his friends (who are about the only friends we've ever seen him have in the series) it grounds him far more as a character. We actually see his relationships with them as opposed to just being told they're his friends. That means that when bad things happen to his friends we understand why Bond is so pissed, and we empathize with him even when he's probably going a bit too far in terms of killing people in revenge. It's really the only Bond film that's done that to this extent.

Look how pissed he is. He's going to assemble the holy hell out of that gun.

The plot reminds me of "Quantum of Solace," although "License To Kill" is a much better movie, mostly due to the action being decipherable and easy to follow. It's got that same dark, intense story with Bond being more like The Punisher than a secret agent. But the difference is that while "License To Kill" is dark, it is still possessing of a certain "action movie esprit de corps" that allows it to be fun in an "Oh he just WRECKED that guy!" way, as opposed to simply being a slog through a depressed rage with an overly shaky camera and no fun to be found anywhere, which is exactly what "Quantum of Solace" ended up being.

The supporting cast is very strong, which isn't always the case. I liked Pam Bouvier as Carey, the Bond girl and CIA agent who helps James out in his investigation. I was a fan of hers because she's probably one of most useful female leads in the series, and definitely one of the more competent. She's a straight-up badass, too, packing more heat that Bond usually does when, upon us first meeting her, she whips out a shotgun like it's nothing and gives him a look like "What, you don't have one of these?" And I'm pretty she actually saves Bond more times than he saves her. How many Bond girls can you say that about?

The villain was cool, with Robert Davi doing his best Raul Julia/Joaquim de Almeida impression. I took great pleasure in watching how cold and methodical he was in every horrible thing he did. Even when he seals a guy in a decompression chamber and does things to the pressure so as to make the dude's head explode, there's really not much malice behind it. He's not even that mad. It's strictly business, and that makes the things he does almost more horrible. And having his main henchman be a young Benicio Del Toro doing his weird Benicio Del Toro thing was pretty fun, too. It was like Del Toro was playing Davi's wild, cracked out side that he couldn't himself display because he had to be the boss, and I liked that.

He does a good Christian Bale impression, too. Quick, somebody get that man two hookers and crank "Sussuido."

This is also by far the most screen time Desmond Llewelyn ever got as Q, and seeing him out in the field was an absolute delight. He's still doing his grumpy, exasperated "Pay attention, 007" bit, but now he gets to behold his gadgets in action, and you can kind of see the giddy pleasure he gets out of it. And any excuse to see more of Q is always a welcome thing to these films.

Oh for crying out - you are so holding that hat there on purpose.

I seriously liked this movie a lot. It's such a shame that Dalton only got two films to be Bond, because he had the potential to completely make the character his own. Now, he did manage to do that during his short tenure, but a couple more films would have cemented his legacy as more than just a passing reference and the only Bond actor brought up as little as George Lazenby. But alas, the next Bond film after "License To Kill" took a very long six years to get made. So long in fact, that Dalton declined to return for it. In many ways that's a damn tragedy, because it turned out to be one of the best films of the entire franchise. On the other hand, it also introduced the guy who was the Bond I grew up with, and whom I have nothing but great affection for. It also marks the beginning of the modern Bond film, for better and for worse. Either way, I'm excited.

Just watch Dalton deliver the line "I'm more of a problem eliminator" and tell me he's not tearing it up.

THE BOTTOM LINE - "License To Kill" is a fantastic movie. It's action packed, it's clever, it's well acted, and it's also very well shot and put together, having had the 80's to figure out how to actually edit an action movie properly. It's difficult to argue that it's one of the darkest entries in the series, which may alienate fans of the more goofy films, but we'd been getting that crap for over twenty years. It was time 007 grew the hell up. Dalton is a dynamite Bond, and he spends the vast majority of this movie kicking ass. It's an awesome time. If you're picking a short list for the definitive Bond films to check out, make sure this one is on it.

JAMES BOND

WILL RETURN IN

"GOLDENEYE"

Savages (2012)

Considering that not only was the last Oliver Stone movie I watched, "Alexander," so bad that it was one of the only movies I've ever hit the STOP button on, but that the only thing I'd heard about "Savages" was "OH MY GOD NO," I was skeptical going into this one. Or at the least, my expectations could have been entered into a limbo competition.

"Savages" ended up being one of those films that on the surface was easy to dislike. It's way too proud of itself, the protagonists are unlikable, and there is a lingering reek of style over substance prevalent throughout, and I wouldn't care too much to see it again. On the other hand, I didn't feel it was as bad as I had heard it was. In fact, much to my surprise and to the film's credit, I was never bored with it. But in the end there were two things that stopped it from being what I would otherwise consider a solid movie.

"Savages" is a movie about two weed dealers, Ben and Chon, and their girlfriend Ophelia, known simply as O. I should also mention that this movie features gratuitous use of stupid names. I can't tell you how difficult taking a film seriously is when one character has a name that when spoken sounds just like "John" but isn't, and the characters are saying things like "Tell us where O is!" Try looking between N and P you stupid stoner clods.

Oh yeah. I'd love for my rescuers to get baked out of their minds before coming to save me.

Back to the story. That was not a typo earlier when I said O was Chon and Ben's girlfriend. They have a polygamous relationship, which is a concept I have a hard time understanding. Personally I've never been able to wrap my head around sharing a girlfriend with another dude, but I am the jealous type. Ben is an annoying hippie, and Chon is a less annoying ex-military guy who smuggled "the best weed in the world" back from Afghanistan, which they used to start up their business. They've been very successful, so much so that a Mexican drug cartel wants a piece of their action.

When Ben refuses to go along with the deal, the cartel kidnaps O and holds her under threat of death unless Ben and Chon do exactly what they say. And while the cartel is certainly a bunch of jerks, Ben and Chon really have nobody to blame but themselves for what happened. They were stupid, they tried to be smarter than the cartel, and it didn't work so good. Well, that and they let O just traipse around just asking to be kidnapped mere hours before they were set to leave the country. Oops.

That gag in her mouth? Best. Feature. In the film.

The rest of the movie is about Ben and Chon trying to get O back from the cartel using sabotage, a squad of former soldiers and a crooked DEA agent, all while dodging a vicious mobster who is on their trail. To be honest it's not a bad little setup, and I found the plot to be genuinely interesting and well presented.

Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Johnson as Chon and Ben, respectively, both do passable jobs in their roles. Johnson has proven himself to be a fantastic actor as the lead in "Kick-Ass" and was almost unrecognizable as John Lennon in "Nowhere Boy." Here, he's stuck playing a Buddha quoting, hippie douchebag, so he's a bit of a pill, but I guess he did an amiable enough job doing so. He does feel a bit wasted here, as the problems of the movie did tend to overshadow what was a good performance, particularly his disgust and anguish when he is forced to take place in cold blooded killing.

Taylor Kitsch has been something of a reverse-lucky rabbit's foot since starring in not one but two indescribably colossal bombs this summer: "Battleship" and "John Carter." I'm not sure he'll be finding much work after 2012, especially since his best performance thus far has been in "Savages," a movie which barely made its money back. The dude is a walking box office curse. Normally I'd feel sorry for him, but I haven't been impressed enough by his performances to care that much. And yes, this is his best role to date, but he still comes off like a less-charismatic Channing Tatum.

"Hold on. Something's wrong...my god...I don't have a joint in my mouth! Ben? BEN!!! HELP!!!"

Blake Lively as O is, to put it bluntly, terrible. Everything about her in this film is terrible. I'm not sure how you make a character this obnoxious and whiny likeable, but it certainly isn't by casting a crap actress in the role. Like "Highlander 2" trying to retcon Zeist out of the consciousness of moviegoers, Blake Lively should have been expunged from "Savages." And while that would have wrecked a bit of havoc with the plot, it could still be fixable. Have them trying to rescue their pet hamster or something, I don't know. Whatever they chose, it'd be a step up.

There are some shining gems in "Savages," however. They can be found in Benicio Del Toro's absolutely brilliant turn as a terrifying mobster/gardener/80's hairstyle spokesperson, Lado. He's greasy, he's gross, he's creepy, and he's so scary and intimidating that you can never be sure what he's capable of. The closest comparison I can throw out there is that he reminded me of Javier Bardem in "No Country For Old Men." If there was one single reason to see this film, this is it.

Oh my god that hair. Glorious.

The other person who was great in "Savages" was John Travolta. His personal life aside, I'm a big fan of his, and like Nicolas Cage I'm always entertained as hell watching him. Here he's playing the crooked DEA agent who is keeping Chon and Ben safe for some deeply personal reasons. The best scene in the movie, and indeed the best bit of acting in the whole film is a scene between Travolta and Del Toro, surprise surprise, the two best actors in it. In it, Del Toro has Travolta at gunpoint, and Travolta pleads for his life, urging Del Toro to understand why killing him would be the stupidest thing for him to do. It's a dynamite scene which is far better than I expected considering the rest of the cast.

"Ben, am I tripping or is John Travolta in our back seat?"

This brings us to the big problems of "Savages" that had to haven been changed for it to be a decent movie. And while one of those wasn't a deal breaker, it was just really annoying, there is a problem in this film that nearly ruins the entire experience. It also goes beyond my normal nitpicking and becomes something that I don't think a single person watching would be able to call good.

The first change that would have to be made is that the prevalent voice over crap that narrates the film needed to go. Every instance of Blake Lively spewing her overly tongue-in-cheek nonsense should have been removed from the soundtrack. There was no reason for any of that tripe to be in there in the first place, because her exposition is never telling us anything that A) we couldn't have simply found out via visual cues B) isn't redundant because it's often obvious what's going on or C) is crap that we didn't need to know in the first place.

"Savages" thinks it's so freaking clever with it, when it comes across as merely trite and pretentious. The opening voice over tells us "Just because I'm telling you this story doesn't mean I'm alive at the end of it. Yeah, it's one of those stories." Not only is this line reading done very poorly, as Blake Lively is bad at everything having anything to do with acting, but it comes across as snarky and too proud of itself by half. And if there's one thing I hate it's snarky, overly sarcastic characters. And O could be a poster child for snark, if such an organization existed.

I was also confused by O being this all-knowing voice telling us things that she would have no way of knowing, which makes me curious as to how she is telling us this stuff besides the fact that she's the narrator. She spends a good chunk of the movie in captivity (which coincidentally is the most tolerable section of the film, as she's pretty much out of the picture), so how is she supposed to know about events going on that she isn't witness to? Maybe you're saying that she's telling us all this after the fact after getting clued in by Ben and Chon, but if that's the case, how does she know about things that happened when none of them were there? It's a minor nitpick, sure, but she was so irritating I was finding fault all over the place purely out of spite.

Was Benicio texting her when he was off doing his own thing or something?

This breaking of the fourth wall like that is not a small bit annoying, particularly since nothing in the rest of the film does anything close to that. The rest is like a normal, albeit very stylized, 90's film. That is until the ending, which is the other thing that needed a huge overhaul.

The end of "Savages" is, without hyperbole, probably the worst ending to any film I've seen this year. It's so moronic, unwanted and frankly insulting to the audience that it takes what would have otherwise been a flawed yet respectable enough movie and turns it into something that is borderline unrecommendable. I'm not joking either. The end of "Savages" is so bad that it may well be the only thing you'll remember. At the very least it will be the only thing you'll be talking about once the credits start rolling. And they will not be kind words.

I knew about the ending going into it, and while it did instill me with a bit of dread and irritation knowing that the movie I was admittedly invested in and halfway enjoying was going to have a crap ending, it did soften the blow just a bit when it came. So for those of you playing along at home I'm going to go ahead and just tell you about the end, on the off chance you'll see "Savages."

At the end of the movie Chon, Ben, O and Lado all die in a shootout. Everyone is dead. Credits should have started rolling on what would have been a dreary ending, but an acceptable and fitting one. And then Blake Lively starts in with her BS about how "That's how I imagined it was going to happen." The screen starts freaking out, the movie starts rewinding itself and *BAM* we're back at the start of the end scene again - only this time it goes down differently as Lado betrays his boss, and everyone but her lives happily ever after.

Yes. They actually pulled a "Clue." Only it sucked.

It's enough to make you yell at the screen. It's enough to make you face-palm. It's enough to make you feel like you've wasted the past 2 hours. And it's enough to make you wish upon everything holy that Blake Lively's character had been cut completely from the film.

I did all of those things once the "It was all a dream" ending hit. And I knew I was coming, too. I can only imagine how mad I would have been had that caught me off guard. So I'm telling you right now: Do yourselves a favor and stop the movie when they die. The film is over. Roll credits and be happier in the knowledge that you prevented a B- movie from going to a D+. Yeah, the ending is that bad. Everything else is just kind of...mildly acceptable.

In the end it really seems like Oliver Stone was trying to make another "Natural Born Killers." He did not succeed. So...when is he going to make another Vietnam movie?

THE BOTTOM LINE - "Savages" wasn't as bad as I had heard, but it had its share of problems. The severity of those problems depends a lot on your personal tastes. Since I hate snarky characters and too-clever-for-itself writing, it bugged me a fair amount. Take all that out and stop the movie with 5 minutes left and you've got a decent, bloody crime thriller. Although several points are automatically docked for the movie coining the term "Wargasms." Ugh.