MovieChat Forums > Licence to Kill (1989) Discussion > Just kinda....cheap-looking?

Just kinda....cheap-looking?


I mean...look at the production values in Skyfall. Heck, the whole sequence in Macau alone tops anything in LTK by a longshot. For starters, the villains.....

Everett McGill as Killifer is just a dopey, annoying guy who sounds annoying and is never much of a menace or threat. I guess I'm just used to the eccentric, exotic...foreign villains with the cool foreign accent (rather than a Texas accent).....in their exotic lairs.

And then there's....Robert Davi? Really? He was the go-to, B-level actor of the 80's. So when i saw him show-up as the main badguy in LTK I thought: "Really? THAT guy??"

Heck, even the guy who played Milton Crest" was a poor man's Dennis Hopper. And don't even get me started on the appearance of...Wayne Newton?? You can't have a big name performer like that playing a badguy in a Bond movie. That would be like having Elton John portray a drug smuggler in the movie.

And did we really need Pricilla effin Barnes from Three's Company as Felix's wife for f_cks sake??
Talk about taking us out of the moment. Every time I saw her I automatically thought of Teri...from Three's Company. They should have gotten some incredibly hot, unknown exotic model to play the part. Not a ......SITCOM star.

The sets looked cheap. The locales looked like back lots at a sound stage. Even the Bond girls were just...meh.

And Dalton as Bond is....stuffy.

With this movie coming out in the 80's, it needed more of that high-gloss, exotic, visually stunning 80's production value. Your average Miami Vice episode had more spice.

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Post Moonraker the producers went a bit Planet of the Apes on the series. Apparently the budgets didn't shift, even as the years and costs did.

They went to Mexico to shoot at Cubby's instance apparently in order to save some money. It looks cheap because it was made cheap.

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They filmed part of this in my hometown of Key West, FL. The church Bond and Felix parachute down to the wedding at was the Catholic church I used to go to growing up.

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Neat!

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This movie had such a cheap look. Even the villain (Robert Davi) was cheap, b-level, bargain basement meh.

With a staple of Bond films being exotic locales and style…I’d love to see what Michael Mann could do with a Bond movie.

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Yes, I watched it today. It looked like a made for tv film

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I would've agreed with you at one time but I saw it in a cinema a while back in 4k restoration and it looked fantastic.

The teal of the water and the orange and red in the explosions in particular looked incredible.

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