8 / 10
Official trailer
Bond Goes Rogue
The film opens with Bond and Felix Leiter parachuting into Felix’s own wedding after arresting Franz Sanchez, a Latin American drug lord.
It’s a happy, silly opening, and it’s the last happy thing in the movie. Sanchez escapes with the help of a bent DEA agent, goes to Felix’s house on his wedding night, kills his new wife and feeds Felix to a shark. Felix survives, barely, missing a leg. On the bed is a note: he disagreed with something that ate him.
Bond finds them. M orders him to Istanbul on another assignment. Bond refuses, M revokes his licence to kill, and Bond knocks out the guards and walks away from the service to hunt Sanchez on his own.
That’s the setup, and it’s the boldest thing the series had done since On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. For once, Bond is avenging a friend, and he doesn’t care what it costs.
I like my Bond angry, and this is the angriest he ever got before Craig. Licence to Kill is the Bond film I’d hand anyone who thinks the series is all gadgets and raised eyebrows. The middle drags and the music does nothing for me, and that keeps it at an 8, but the wedding that turns to horror and the tanker finale hit harder than almost anything else the franchise made in that era.
For Writers
Licence to Kill opens with a wedding, a happy, silly celebration, and then destroys it. The joy of the first scene makes the violence of the second unbearable.
If you want a loss to land, show the reader what’s being lost first. Give them a scene of happiness, and make it specific: a joke, a toast, a stupid dance. Then take it away. The reader grieves the thing they just watched. Skip the happy scene and your tragedy becomes a news report. The reader nods, notes the death and moves on, and you’ve wasted the biggest emotional moment in your book. Give it the scene it needs.
Timothy Dalton Was Right
Dalton had been saying for two films that he wanted to play Fleming’s Bond, the cold, damaged professional in the books, and here he finally got the script for it. His Bond is furious. He’s reckless, he’s ruthless and he’s frightening, and there are moments where you aren’t sure he’s the good guy.
Audiences in 1989 didn’t want that. They’d had twelve years of Roger Moore raising an eyebrow, and they wanted jokes and gadgets. The film did poorly in America, drowned out by Batman and a summer full of blockbusters, and Dalton never got a third film. Seventeen years later, Daniel Craig played exactly this Bond in Casino Royale, and everybody called it a revolution. Dalton got there first, and he got punished for it.
I’m firmly on Dalton’s side. His Bond scares me a little, and I think that’s exactly right for a man whose best friend was just fed to a shark. Craig got the credit for a revolution Dalton had already staged. That’s backwards, and Dalton deserves the credit.
Sanchez
Robert Davi plays Franz Sanchez, and he ranks near the top of the series’ villains because he’s real. No volcano lair, no plan to rule the world. He’s a drug lord who runs a small country through money and fear, and he values loyalty above everything.
When a lieutenant betrays him, he has the man’s heart cut out. When his girlfriend sleeps with somebody else, he whips her with a stingray tail.
Davi plays him with a quiet, reptilian charm, and his relationship with Bond is interesting. Bond infiltrates his organization by making himself useful, and Sanchez comes to like him, even trust him. That makes Bond’s revenge crueller, because he destroys Sanchez by turning his own paranoia against him.
This gang of rogues is a gift. There’s a young, snarling Benicio del Toro as the knife-happy henchman Dario, Anthony Zerbe as the oily Milton Krest, and Wayne Newton, of all people, as a crooked television preacher laundering drug money. Newton has no business working in a Bond film, and he’s a delight.
For Writers
Bond wins by making Sanchez trust him, then secretly turning the drug lord’s own paranoia against his closest lieutenants. The villain’s strength, his obsession with loyalty, becomes his weakness.
The most satisfying defeats come from inside the villain.
Figure out what your antagonist values most (loyalty, control, reputation or family), then build your hero’s plan around using it against them. The reader will feel the justice of it, because the villain destroyed themselves with their own nature. That’s far more satisfying than a bigger gun. It also means your climax grows out of character. Good climaxes grow from who people are, and luck and firepower are cheap substitutes that readers see through every time. My article on why villain motivations fall apart goes further.
It’s Violent
This was the first Bond film to carry a PG-13 rating in America, and it earned it. A man is fed into a shredder. A man’s head explodes in a decompression chamber. Krest dies messily. Dario goes into a cocaine grinder. Sanchez burns. It’s the most brutal Bond film of the pre-Craig era by a mile. The violence has a purpose. The whole film is about revenge, and revenge is ugly, and the film makes you see the mess it leaves behind. It isn’t pretty and it isn’t meant to be.
Pam and Lupe
Carey Lowell plays Pam Bouvier, a former Army pilot working as a CIA informant, and she’s the best Bond woman of the eighties. She’s tough, funny, capable and irritated by Bond more often than she’s charmed by him. She flies planes, shoots people and saves his skin more than once.
Talisa Soto plays Lupe Lamora, Sanchez’s girlfriend, who’s terrified of him and falls for Bond. Her story is the more conventional one, but she has her own courage, and she helps bring Sanchez down.
Q Takes a Holiday
The film gives Desmond Llewelyn his biggest role in the series. Q, who has always treated Bond with exasperated affection, turns up in Isthmus City on his own time, carrying a suitcase full of gadgets, to help him. He’s out of the lab, in the field and clearly having the time of his life.
Q in the field is my favorite thing in the film. He’s the one person in the service who sides with Bond over the rules, and Llewelyn plays it with such twinkling pleasure that every scene he’s in warms up a very dark picture by a few degrees.
The Tanker Trucks
The finale is one of the great action sequences in the series: a chase across a mountain desert road involving a convoy of tanker trucks carrying cocaine dissolved in petrol. Bond drives one on its side, jumps between them, fights Sanchez’s men, and in the end sets Sanchez on fire with the lighter Felix gave him as a wedding present.
The stunt work is real and dangerous, the trucks tip, skid and explode for real, and the sequence has a grit the Moore films never had. The climax holds up against anything in the series, and it ends Bond’s revenge in exactly the right place.
For Writers
Felix’s wedding present, a lighter, is what Bond uses to set Sanchez on fire. An object planted in the first scene pays off in the last.
Readers love a callback that closes a circle.
Give your story one small, ordinary object early on, a lighter, a key, a photograph, tie it to the emotional heart of the conflict, and bring it back at the climax. Don’t explain it. If you’ve done it right, the reader will make the connection themselves and feel the click. Explaining it kills it stone dead. Don’t have a character point it out. Let the object do the talking, and trust your reader to remember where they saw it last. They almost always do.
The Slow Middle
The middle section drags, with too much time spent on Sanchez’s business and a clumsy subplot involving Hong Kong narcotics agents. Michael Kamen’s score is fine but forgettable, and Gladys Knight’s title song is a decent imitation of Goldfinger.
Those are small complaints. Licence to Kill is an 8, the most daring Bond of its era, and a film that was punished for being ahead of its time. Dalton deserved a third film. He never got one, and that’s one of the dumbest decisions the franchise ever made.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Licence to Kill makes Bond’s mission personal, and that changes everything about how the audience watches him. He’s avenging a friend, and every choice he makes carries a moral weight the series rarely bothered with.
Stakes that belong to your character personally will always hit harder than stakes that belong to the world. A threat to a city is abstract. A threat to a friend is real.
Take the biggest threat in your story and ask who it hurts that your protagonist loves. Put that person at the center of the danger and watch the tension climb.
Dalton’s Last Word
Yes. It’s an 8, and it would sit higher if the middle didn’t wander off into Sanchez’s business and that clumsy Hong Kong subplot. What’s left is the angriest, most personal Bond before Daniel Craig, Dalton at his best, Robert Davi’s terrifying Sanchez and a tanker finale that still holds up. It got punished for being ahead of its time, and I think it deserves the audience it never had.
