1989 | Dir. John Glen | 133 Minutes
"British agent. I knew it! You have class."
A Latin American drug kingpin disfigures CIA Agent Felix Leiter and murders his wife on their wedding day. To avenge his friend, James Bond goes rogue and dismantles the cartel from the inside.
Licence to Kill is a questionable total departure from the James Bond formula. Timothy Dalton's second and final 007 adventure is a bloody revenge film that sees Bond driven by personal vendetta, forsaking his professional duty to serve the British government. While the stakes are the lowest ever for a Bond movie plot, the violence on display, delivered by reliable series regular John Glen on his fifth and last turn behind the director's chair, is brutal and occasionally shocking as characters graphically lose limbs, explode, and ground into pulp. Though the one-liners are dispensed more sparingly than ever, they are all the more jarring juxtaposed against the over-the-top carnage. It's a fine action film in its own right, the explosive climactic tanker truck chase in particular is a fantastic sequence, but it's ultimately a lesser outlier installment of the James Bond series.
Timothy Dalton cements his status as a colder, more brutal James Bond than his predecessors, doing everything he can to make this relatively humorless take on the super spy still appear heroic. Having to bury his natural charisma under layers of anger and anguish, Dalton deserved a better final Bond film. As the skilled pilot and CIA informant love interest Pam Bouvier, Carsey Lowell is believably tough and feisty but slightly struggles as a convincing match for Dalton's Bond. Conversely, Talisa Soto is lovely but somewhat bland as the femme fatale Lupe Lamora. The intimidating Robert Davi fits perfectly as drug lord Franz Sanchez, his performance makes the cartel boss feel more threatening than some of the series' megalomaniacal villains armed with doomsday weapons.
As Sanchez's underlings, the film features Anthony Zerbe as slimy trafficker Milton Krest, Anthony Starke as cocky financial advisor Truman-Lodge, and a young Benicio del Toro stands out as Sanchez's loyal and sadistic enforcer Dario. Returning from Live and Let Die, David Hedison reprises the role of Felix Leiter, slightly more than a minor role this time around, while Priscilla Barnes delivers a brief but spirited performance as Leiter's doomed bride Della. The cast also includes Frank McRae as the standard unfortunately disposable Bond ally Sharkey, Everett McGill as corrupt DEA Agent Ed Killifer, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as undercover MI6 Agent Kwang, and entertainer Wayne Newton as lecherous televangelist and minor cog in Sanchez's trafficking operation Professor Joe Butcher. While the highly amusing Desmond Llewelyn once again enjoys an expanded role in the story as Q, Robert Brown and Caroline Bliss make their brief final appearances in the series as M and Moneypenny.
An odd combination of relatively low stakes and extreme violence, Licence to Kill is a unique James Bond film that discards series standards with mixed results. While his traits are put to good use on this tale of bloody revenge, Timothy Dalton's short-lived darker take on Bond deserved to go out on a better film than this one.
THE COLD OPEN
Slightly too long but all and all entertaining, it's another high-flying stunt for Dalton's Bond as he literally fishes Sanchez's plane out of the sky. Concluding the sequence with Bond and Leiter parachuting down to Leiter's wedding is pure 007 cheese.
THE THEME SONG AND OPENING TITLES
Gladys Knight's "Licence to Kill" is disappointingly bland, perhaps best remembered for opening with same notes as Shirley Bassey's "Goldfinger" if nothing else. Patti LaBelle's "If You Asked Me To" playing over the end credits is much more memorable, a catchy pop single that can easily stand on its own. Maurice Binder's final opening title sequence isn't his most memorable. It prominently features an Olympus camera and film strips alluding to the sniper rifle made out of camera parts that Q lends to Bond in the picture.
THE BOND GIRL
Pam Bouvier is a step in the right direction for Bond love interests, proving to be a capable operative in her own right, one hell of a pilot as demonstrated in the climatic tanker truck chase when she provides Bond with invaluable air support. The way she uses her sex appeal to infiltrate Joe Butcher's compound to reach Sanchez's drug lab is amusing. Unfortunately, the huffy jealousy she displays upon seeing Lupe's attraction to Bond takes much away from her character's overall respectability.
THE BOND VILLAIN
His plans are relatively ambitious for a drug lord, and he goes to great lengths to turn his operation into a global enterprise - creating a cult as a clandestine way to communicate with his business associates, engineering a method to smuggle cocaine in gasoline - but Franz Sanchez is still just a drug lord. He's interesting to watch - quick to demonstrate how he values loyalty over money with swift violence, treating his pet iguana better than his woman - but he pales in comparison to the vast majority of Bond villains.
FEATURED HENCHMAN
Devoid of basic human remorse, the gleefully violent Dario is one of the more memorable underlings of the series. His brutal death by grinder is one of the most graphically gory exits for a Bond villain's henchman.
BEST GADGET
The plastic explosives disguised as Dentonite brand toothpaste is gloriously punny.
FLEMING FIDELITY
The manner in which Leiter is disfigured with the accompanying note "He disagreed with something that ate him." is lifted from Ian Fleming's second James Bond novel Live and Let Die published in 1954. In the book, Leiter loses an arm and a leg when crime boss Mr. Big captures him and feeds him to a shark. The drunk and abusive Milton Krest and his ship the Wavekrest are adapted from Fleming short story The Hildebrand Rarity first published in Playboy magazine in 1960.
FRAGMENTS
- The son of Pedro Armendáriz who portrayed Karim Bey in From Russia with Love, Pedro Armendáriz Jr. appears as Isthmus President Hector Lopez
- Talisa Soto and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa went on to appear as Princess Kitana and the shape-shifting villain Shang Tsung in 1995's Mortal Kombat based on the video game
- At the bottom of the end credits, the film advertises that "James Bond Will Return"
MCU CONNECTIONS
- Benicio del Toro (Taneleer Tivan in Thor: The Dark World, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Avengers: Infinity War)
