Licence to Kill

A reaffirmation: Dalton was doomed from the start. After watching this movie, one wonders what a third Timothy Dalton-James Bond movie would have been like. Hell, this one barely feels like a Bond movie: again the tone is grim; there isn’t even the traditional Cold War context to the story (this one is all about Bond’s personal vendetta against a Latin American drug dealer); and, most baffling of all, the production values took a steep nose dive for some reason. Watching this movie feels a lot more like tuning in to a TV movie rather than a big screen outing in filmdom’s most durable franchise. This film seems cheap, unimaginative, and joyless. Whatever one thinks of Dalton as Bond, all of these problems couldn’t have been all his fault. However it happened, bringing in fresh blood--for both the outlook and the character--was a dire necessity by this point.