Movie Night at the Virtual Cinema: Licence to Kill

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, I've been using Oculus Quest and SKYBOX VR to watch movies in a virtual movie theater, focusing on films I either never saw in the theater, or have never seen.

Licence to Kill is Timothy Dalton's second, and final, film as James Bond. It was released in the summer of 1989, which was a huge summer for genre films. Other films in theaters at that time were Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Ghostbusters II, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, and the biggest film of 1989, Tim Burton's Batman, among others. I had never seen Licence to Kill until now, watching it in SKYBOX VR's virtual cinema environment.

Warning: Minor spoilers follow.

I only knew a little bit about this one before watching it, basically just that it was considered a dark film, was originally going to be titled Licence Revoked, and that it involves Bond out for revenge for the death of his friend Felix Leiter's new wife, and Leiter's maiming by a villain-induced shark attack.

I had no idea what I was getting into.

The film has quite a cast. Not only does it include the short-haired Assistant D.A. from Law and Order (Carey Lowell, who I knew was in the film), it also includes Terri from Three's Company (Priscilla Barnes), Kitana and Shang Tsung from 1995's Mortal Kombat (Talisa Soto and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), the low-life scumbag from Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Benicio del Toro), the bad guy from Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park (Anthony Zerbe), and Wayne Newton! The main villain is played by Robert Davi, who was a prolific portrayer of villains in 1980s TV, and who I know best from the 2004 - 2009 series Stargate Atlantis.

This is definitely an odd one as Bond films go. Something about it just looks off. To me, it looks more like a TV movie than a theatrical one, and the casting of Davi as the villain doesn't help, given his prior roles (and I mean no disrespect to him). And it starts off in a very goofy way: Bond and pals Felix Leiter and Sharkey are dressed in grey tuxedoes and on their way to Leiter's wedding. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency pulls a helicopter up alongside their limo to let Leiter know that they've got a fix on notorious drug dealer Sanchez (played by Davi). Bond and Leiter go after Sanchez, leaving Sharkey to go to the wedding and let Leiter's bride-to-be know that they'll be late. This sequence ends with Bond, hanging from a cable attached to a helicopter, tying another cable around Sanchez's plane, which they then tow away, while Bond and Leiter parachute to the wedding. It's truly weird. Weirder still is how much attention Leiter and his new bride (Terri from Three's Company!) give Bond after the wedding. They almost make the whole occasion all about him. Eventually, Sanchez escapes, has his goons kill the bride (Terri, no!) and kidnap Leiter, and it all goes downhill from there.

I don't want to say much more, other than this one really didn't feel like a Bond movie to me until the 2nd half, but overall, it's one of the stranger Bond films, and not really consistent with much of the series. Wayne Newton was great in it though! He plays a small, and again, weird, part, but I laughed.

Oh, just one more thing: as the film ends, they start playing If You Asked Me To by Patti LaBelle over the end credits. I've heard this song many times and had no idea it was in a Bond film...and it's really out of place. The final line in the movie leads into it, and that line alone didn't really make any sense. That song was stuck in my head for the next 12 hours...

Watching this one in the virtual theater was, strangely, the most immersive experience I've had yet in SKYBOX VR. At times I actually forgot I had a VR headset strapped to my head. And on the original Oculus Quest, the theater looks great (unfortunately, it looks like a hazy mess in Quest 2 thanks to its LCD screen, ugh). It was a fun time.

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