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General Info - Licence To Kill (1989)

Perhaps the most questioned film of the series, Licence To Kill was the second, and ultimately last, outing as 007 for Timothy Dalton. Questioned due to its poor marketing (the name didn't get changed from "License Revoked" until the last minute) and its markedly different approach to Bond (too action-man like). The future would not auger well for the film. Released against other box office hits (Batman and Indiana Jones...) the film just managed to gross more than A View To A Kill.

It would take a great deal of legal work and six years before Bond returned to the screen, in Goldeneye, making remarkably true the statement placed at the end of the Bond films... "James Bond Will Return".

The Plot

It's Leiter's wedding day! Nonetheless, work remains for this CIA agent and, by chance, it appears that the ever-wanted criminal Sanchez is in town. Leiter, accompanied by his Best Man (Bond, naturally), chase the drugs baron and have him arrested. Sanchez has other ideas, though, and makes an elaborately planned escape, through, bribe, and gets his revenge on Leiter by having his new wife - Della - killed and by butchering Bond's oldest ally. A vengeful Bond goes after Sanchez, despite warnings, and an eventual resignation, from 'M' and MI6. With the help of free-lance CIA agent Pam Bouvier, a friend of Leiter's, Bond goes to Isthmus City to wangle his way into the whole drugs operation - with the target being its head. He attains the confidence of Sanchez, through convincing the paranoïc villain that members of his close-knit group are conspiring against him, and is invited to witness the organisation's drug processing plant while a deal is ebing set up with Oriental drug dealers. Bond has the lab where the drugs are dissolved (therefore hidden) inside petrol - to be tankered worldwide - burned down and embarks on a massive chase to the death involving the very same petrol tankers - as the villains try to flee the building. Bond and Sanchez meet up for a final fight, only to see Sanchez burned alive in his own drugs-ridden petrol.

Budget: $35m - Gross: $156.2m - Fastrac007 Rating: 48%