Licence To Kill’s iconic
tanker chase features
some of the most
dangerous stunts in
Bond history. Here’s
how they pulled it off
•••
WORDSCHRIS HEWITTFOR MUCH OF its running time,Licence To Kill
— aka Timothy Dalton’s second and final outing
as 007 — does something interesting for a Bond
film. It forgets to be a Bond film. Instead, it turns
into a very ’80s rip-roaring rampage of revenge,
as Bond — miffed because Latin American drug
baron Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi) has
unsurgically removed the legs of Bond’s BFF
Felix Leiter, via sharks without frickin’ laser
beams attached to their heads — infiltrates
Sanchez’s organisation, waiting for his moment
to strike. So it’s not about saving the world.
It doesn’t trot the globe, instead largely staying
put in the fictional Isthmus City. Yes, Bond
sleeps with two women, but his heart’s not really
in it. And the action is determinedly low-scale.
Certainly there’s nothing in the way of the
large-scale lavish stuntwork with which
the Bond franchise made its name.
Until, that is, the climax, when Bond
remembers he’s Bond, and everything goes
bonkers. There are gunshots. There are
explosions. And, more pertinently, there is
a full-on, foot-on-the-throat, ten-minute chase
sequence involving Bond, who’s in a plane with
Carey Lowell’s Pam Bouvier, hunting down
Sanchez, who’s in a tanker filled with drugs
and fuel, along a vertiginous mountain road,
that culminates in one of the greatest practical
stunts in Bond history. No, inmoviehistory.
“The tanker chase was a bit daunting,” says
special-effects legend Chris Corbould, who was
charged with supervising all the big bangs on the
film’s second unit. “It was really my sole job on the
whole film for the nine months I was in Mexico.”
As with most Bond films, the sequence —
bar the odd insert shot of actors acting — was
handled entirely by the second unit, under the
auspices of Arthur Wooster. It was, as the old
cliché goes, like a military operation, involving
around a dozen tankers that Corbould had to
source and then make film-ready. And the
location — Mexicali, on the Mexican border —
didn’t help, either. “From where our hotel was
to the location was a two-hour drive each day,”
recalls Corbould. “It was a pretty gruelling shoot.
That put four hours onto our day before we’d
even shot a frame.”
You can do a lot in a two-hour drive to work.
In 1988, your options were perhaps more
limited. There was no Candy Crush. No Netflix.
No internet to browse idly. But you could read
a book (if you weren’t the driver). You could
listen to music on a newfangled CD player. Or,
if you were Simon Crane, the British stuntman
doubling for Timothy Dalton onLicence To ❯“It was a bit daunting...”
The infamous tanker chase
sequence, shot on the Mexican
border, inLicence To Kill(1989).