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"

The Iceman (2013)

I'm not the biggest Michael Shannon fan, but I'm willing to bite the proverbial bullet on this one and admit that he can be pretty darn good, if slightly one-note. I guess when you're playing a remorseless hitman your range might be slightly limited by necessity, but at the very least Shannon was able to make the character of "The Iceman," Richard Kuklinski, come alive to a slightly terrifying degree.

Based on the true story of a mob hitman who was believed to have killed over 100 people, "The Iceman" is a story about a very, very bad man who does very, very bad things without really feeling much about it one way or another. Kuklinski's main deal is that he's a very angry person with little to no control over himself, and tends to solve problems by hurting/killing things. So, when in the late 70's the mob-run porn racket he's working for is shut down, the local mafioso running it (Ray Liotta) decides Kuklinski would make an excellent hitman. He's right about that, and Kuklinski becomes a legendary killer over some 20 years.

I said before that I'm not a huge Michael Shannon fan, and while this hasn't made me a convert or anything I will admit that he's really good in "The Iceman." He's got this great duality going on, where he'll be a stone faced killer one minute, with eyes that look like they're ready to fire lasers out of them, and the next minute he's with his family and that hardness melts away. But there's always those eyes of his that never soften. To paraphrase Robert Shaw, Kuklinski's got dead eyes that don't seem to be living until he shoots you. It's a great performance.

"Is that a gun in your hand or are you just...oh."

Most of the movie is watching Kuklinski brutally kill people with emotionless efficiency, and while it can border on repetitive, it's never so over-the-top as to feel gratuitous. Don't be mistaken, though, the film isn't a highlight reel of gore or anything. In between all of that death is the shocking balancing act that Kuklinski does with his wife and children, who somewhat unbelievably have no idea that he's a mob hitman.

Winona Ryder plays his wife, Barbara, and while it's easy to not like her character simply because she is so dense as to not have any idea what's going on, Ryder is charming and quite believable in the role. She provides a much needed juncture between the two different worlds, and I found her to be charming and I felt really bad for her and her two daughters because we all knew that eventually the jig is going to be up, and Kuklinski is going to be outed as the monster he is.

There's quite a number of celebrity cameos in this, of varying degrees of usefulness and celebrity. David Schwimmer has a decent if slightly hard to buy role as a lowlife mobster, and much like his part in "Band of Brothers" as a drill-sergeant, he actually does a very good job with the exception of being hard to take seriously because he's David freaking Schwimmer. Chris Evans plays a serial killer who gets around in an ice cream truck, which is weird, and James Franco even shows up for about 47 seconds for a single scene in which he has like a dozen lines and then gets shot. But he's James Franco so he got slapped on the DVD cover and has featured billing. Whatever.

Nearly his entire performance is spent cowering. Oh well. Still better than "127 Hours."

A guy who surprised me was Stephen Dorff, whom I didn't even recognize at first since he's rocking a sweet mustache. Like Franco he's got a single scene, but Dorff absolutely tears it up with the short screen time he's given. He's playing Kuklinski's brother who is behind bars for the rape and murder of a young girl, and he begs Richard to help him out and asks for money to hire a better lawyer to hopefully spring him. When Richard refuses, it gets ugly quick, and Dorff is scary intense. In fact it's probably the best acting I've ever seen out of him. I guess I'm just too used to seeing him in Uwe Boll productions to give him much credit.

I know that this isn't a very accurate biography of Richard Kuklinski in many ways. Most of the negativity coming down on it from general consensus concerns the fact that the film skips a lot of important things during his upbringing, and makes him out to be a much nicer guy than he was in real life where his family is concerned. And it's true that the film makes him out to be a caring father who doesn't care for anything else in the world other than his family, when in real life there was literally nothing nice about him at all.

It's like if Mitt Romney and Bruce Campbell merged and then became a cartoon character...

All that being said, "The Iceman" still succeeds as a chilling, rather bleak drama about a professional hitman, even if they're taking liberties with the truth. But hey, that's film, right? That's why it says "Based on a true story." I'm not looking for a documentary with this: I'm looking for a well made film.

Check out the trailer for "The Iceman."

THE BOTTOM LINE - "The Iceman" is an entertaining crime drama that manages to be both fascinating and repulsive at the same time. While you see horrible things happening throughout, it's nearly impossible to look away. This is mostly due to Michael Shannon's performance, which by itself is worth the price of admission. The dude's eyes can set you on fire from the other end of the room, I swear. This one is worth a look.