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Originally posted by: Warbler
I hate License to Kill. Bond movies are supposed to be spy movies. To me that movie belongs more with the Dirty Harry movies than with the Bond movies. Was it really necessary to Felix Lighter's legs chewd up by a shark? Too dark for a Bond movie.
For the record, much of Licence (that's the spelling of the movie according to the spine on my shelf), including Felix's limbs getting gnawed off by the bad guy was derived from the novel for Live and Let Die. Since the movies, starting with You Only Live Twice, started largely ignoring the books more and more, it left a lot more material to derive for future movies after the books were all exhausted. Dalton was actually very responsible for getting the filmed Bond back to Ian Fleming's character, and people called it too dark. He got Bond to actually tangle with SMERSH, whom politically-correct MGM made the Broccoli's drop in favor of the less-political SPECTRE in all the movies of the 60s (when SMERSH was still active in the USSR).
Personally, I'd love to see not only Casino Royale made into a real Bond movie as is finally planned, but Moonraker too. That was a stellar novel and the only resemblance it has to it's horrible film of the same name is the name of the bad guy. Literally, that's it.
Now, if we'd only see in the movies what we saw of Felix in the book after the shark attack: a scarred, mangled CIA op with a hook, a cane and an eyepatch ... that would be priceless.