Thanks for the link. That’s a shame it wasn’t made. Y’know, I seem to recall now how little-marketed “Licence to Kill” was in 1989, because I never did see it in the theater. Why I didn’t get around to seeing it, I can’t rightly remember why, because the two franchises I’d always try to see were James Bond and Star Trek. I saw the first Timothy Dalton one in ‘87 on the first day it came out, and managed to persuade my father to take me to a late Friday night showing (I was 13), and I think half the crowd was plastered, because I’d never sat in such a raucous theater crowd before, with drinks and popcorn flying in the air and people shouting all over the place. Damn !
But the first Dalton outing was like a seemless transition from Roger Moore, everything about the film actually seemed like a Rog Moore style one, with Rog missing (it would also be the last one scored by John Barry). It would be 8 years before I saw the next one, “GoldenEye”, in 1995, and my complaint about that one was because of the considerable passage of time (6 years) between the prior film (for which at least 2 more should’ve been made in the interim, both with Dalton), a turnover of the old crew from the earlier films, no John Barry, and pretty much no continuity (save for Desmond Llewellyn’s presence, the only thing left), I felt like it, on the whole, no longer had that classic JB feel.
To date, GE was the last JB film I’ve seen in the theater (and partly because I got severely ill shortly after the film came out, which damaged my ears and equilibrium, so I can no longer tolerate the loudness in theaters - I’ve seen only one film in a theater since then, that being the last of the recent trilogy of the Star Wars films, and that was so terribly loud, I had to cover my ears for the duration of it).
I gave my opinion on the current guy, Daniel Craig, taking over from Brosnan, that while you can see the continuity from his films, I feel like it has gone way too far afield from anything I watched as a youngster. Bond as an ice-cold blonde thug who seems more like a SPECTRE operative. It just doesn’t seem right. Ultimately, the real problem I have with the post ‘80s Bonds is that they seem so totally forgettable not long after you see them. You don’t remember the distinctive themes like you did with John Barry and the performers, and even the villains lack something special as they once did. We can all quote Goldfinger as JB is about to be split by the laser beam (”Do you expect me to talk ?” “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to DIE !”), but who the hell quotes from Elliot Carver or can’t-remember-the-name of the last villain in Quantum of Solace ? See what I mean ?