Licence to Kill tilt onto its side, it was not necessary as Julienne was able to pull off the stunt without the aid of camera trickery. Initially Vic Flick, who had played lead guitar on Monty Norman's original 007 theme, and Eric Clapton were asked to write and perform the theme song to "Licence to Kill" and they produced a theme to match Dalton's gritty performance, but the producers turned it down and instead Gladys Knight's song and performance was chosen. The song (one of the longest to ever be used in a Bond film) was based on the "horn line" from "Goldfinger",
Licence to Kill hero of the "Batman" film" that was released at the same time as "Licence to Kill". Adam Mars-Jones of "The Independent" gave the film a mixed review, pointing out that it took out some of the more dated ideas from the Fleming novels, such as imperialism; he wrote that the writers were "trying in effect to reproduce the recipe while leaving out ingredients that would now seem distasteful". Overall Mars-Jones thought that "James Bond is more like a low-tar cigarette than anything else – less stimulating than the throat-curdling gaspers of yesteryear, but still naggingly implicated in unhealthiness, a feeble