Greatest movie scenes ever # 29

Treal Lee & Prince Rick - Mr. Hit Dat Hoe



Did Oksana Grigorieva star in Mad Max and Lethal Weapon or direct Apocalypto? No, she didn't, so that's why we're fully paid up members of Team Mel here at The Martorialist. What we really respect about Mel, though, is the fact that he's so rich and powerful he can seemingly treat day-to-day life as little more than elevator musik which occurs inbetween getting blowjobs. It's the same philosophy our pal Lil B (he left a comment here once, you know) subscribes to, albeit on a much grander scale.

Lil B - Suck My Dick



But the adoration was curdled last week with Mel breaking the Bros-Before-Hoes code when he scoffed at the parenting skills of Oksana's previous baby-daddy Timothy Dalton AKA our favourite James Bond on account of the masterpiece that is Licence To Kill. You all know how the Timothy Dalton Bond story goes - audiences reared on Sean Connery and Roger Moore weren't ready for a non-traditional moody, broody Bond in the 80s so the movies flopped and MGM axed Dalton - but the reality is much more complex than that : Roger Moore's valedictory Bond movie A View To A Kill (dubbed Carry On Spying by Bond purists) was generally considered to be the Bond franchise's Jump The Shark moment, so the back-to-basics The Living Daylights was both a commercial (it outgrossed Die Hard and The Lost Boys) and critical success when it arrived in 1987, and Licence To Kill was generally well received by critics in 1989, with its poor showing at the box office now attributed a combination of budget constraints imposed on all the eighties Bond films after MGM overspent on Moonraker in 1979, a disaster of a marketing campaign due to a last minute name change (it was originally called Licence Revoked but the title confused some Americans at U.S test-screenings, though it remains unconfirmed that anyone thought the movie was going to be based on a plot where Bond loses his driving licence and relies on the two Coreys to ferry him around as he tries to impress Heather Graham), fanboy tantrums over it being the first Bond flick not to be based on an Ian Fleming novel, and a 15 rating due to it featuring the type of violence hitherto unseen in Bond movies.

Ah, yes, the violence. Audiences reared on the increasingly camp villains and action scenes from the Moore years just weren't ready for Argento style crimson splatter and a ruthless bastard like Franz Sanchez, a baddie loosely based on Pablo Escobar, Manuel Noriega, and Sosa from Scarface who made up for his lack of any sort of conventional Bond Villian gimmicky with a cold blooded streak worthy of eighties movie villain titans like Hans Gruber and Clarence Bloddicker. What other criminal mastermind in the Bond pantheon would've popped the balloon of a disloyal stooge with such creativity?



While Licence To Kill underperformed in America, it fared better across the rest of the globe and MGM bigwigs were so impressed by the movie that they wanted Dalton to sign on for at least two more outings as Bond. Unfortunately, a 6 year legal battle then ensued over who owned the rights to the James Bond character and our boy Timothy decided he couldn't hang around waiting forever and amicably relinquished the role in 1992. A damn shame because, Goldeneye aside, the Brosnan movies were so-so and the darker Daniel Craig rebirth of the series has been such a commercial and critical success that you'd think Craig invented Penicillin, the internet, and Nando's sweetcorn.

Bonus Licence To Kill action :



A 21 year old Benecio Del Toro, apparently the youngest actor to ever play a Bond bad guy, as Sanchez's henchman Dario. Easily the best line in the movie.