License To Kill

Taking a further step into the gratuitously edgy, Dalton's second and unfortunately final outing as 007 features Bond's best friend Felix Leiter (a character so wallpaper I can't remember a single thing he's done in any of the other films he's been in) having his wife raped and murdered and an arm and a leg chewed off by a shark. The villain also beats his mistress with a whip and at one point a Klansman dropkicks a puppy into a gas chamber (OK I made that one up). Despite this, it's still a pretty good movie, if you look at it as Bond Vs Scarface in much the same way that Moonraker was Bond Meets Star Wars.

We need to bring back this aesthetic too.

The Bond Girl this time is Pam Bouvier, who is pretty much the ideal modern (2019) heroine, except that she's good looking and likeable. But she can kick ass(tm) and don't need no man(tm), except for Bond of course because this is still sort of a Bond film (they weren't totally not Bond films until Cr**g). She even backsasses Bond constantly like a Twitter thot, and yet there's a charm to it, very much unlike a Twitter thot, perhaps because it was the 1980s and dystopia still seemed very far away.

This scene where she demonstrates "shaken not stirred" is a perennial favourite.

The best stunt involves a car on fire shooting off a cliff and narrowly missing a plane, but Bond also does a wheelie in the cab of an oil tanker and waterskies without skis, and the baddy has an iguana, so personality abounds in general. The atmosphere is very much 80s/90s actioner though, with a bar brawl, credibly sleazy goons and big orange fireball explosions. There's even a cult leader/televangelist who works as a front for the cartel out of a cool temple, which borders on heavy-handed social commentary but is fine because he's actually pretty funny.

Spilling over that border like a caravan of human traffickers, however, is the gleefully reactionary vigilante plotline, as Bond is explicitly out for personal revenge and is in theory wanted by the British government, but by the final scene all is forgotten, possibly because they realise they'll need Bond to stop a nuclear war or something next week. If I'm being fair I would give a Cr**g joint shit for this, but it's different because in the pre-Cr**g days Bond actually did save the world on the reg so he can pretty much get away with the odd unsanctioned murder spree.

nothin personnel...ese...