Licence to Kill


Licence to Kill is a 1989 spy film, the sixteenth in the James Bond series produced by Eon Productions, and the second and final film to star Timothy Dalton as the MI6 agent James Bond. In the film, Bond resigns from MI6 in order to take revenge against the drug lord Franz Sanchez who ordered an attack against Bond's friend and CIA agent Felix Leiter and the murder of Felix's wife after their wedding.
Licence to Kill was the fifth and final Bond film directed by John Glen and the last to feature Robert Brown as M and Caroline Bliss as Miss Moneypenny. It was also the last to feature the work of screenwriter Richard Maibaum, title designer Maurice Binder and producer Albert R. Broccoli, who all died in the following years.
Licence to Kill was the first Bond film to not use the title of an Ian Fleming story. Originally titled Licence Revoked, the name was changed during post-production due to American test audiences associating the term with driving licence. Although the plot is largely original, it contains elements of the Fleming novel Live and Let Die and the short story "The Hildebrand Rarity", interwoven with a sabotage element influenced by Akira Kurosawa's film Yojimbo.
For budget reasons, Licence to Kill became the first Bond film shot entirely outside the United Kingdom: principal photography took place on location in Mexico and the United States, while interiors were filmed at Estudios Churubusco instead of Pinewood Studios. The film earned over $156 million worldwide and received generally positive reviews but criticism for the darker tone.
Licence to Kill was followed by GoldenEye in 1995, with Pierce Brosnan replacing Dalton as Bond.

Plot

agents collect MI6 agent James Bond and his friend, CIA agent Felix Leiter, on their way to Leiter's wedding in Key West, to have them assist in capturing drug lord Franz Sanchez. Bond and Leiter capture Sanchez by attaching a hook and cord to Sanchez's plane and pulling it out of the air with a Coast Guard helicopter. Afterwards, Bond and Leiter parachute down to the church in time for the ceremony.
Sanchez bribes DEA agent Ed Killifer and escapes while he is being transported. Meanwhile, Sanchez's henchman Dario and his crew ambush Leiter and his wife Della and take Leiter to an aquarium owned by one of Sanchez's accomplices, Milton Krest. Sanchez has Leiter lowered into a tank holding a Tiger shark. When Bond learns that Sanchez has escaped, he returns to Leiter's house to find that Leiter has been tortured and that Della has been murdered. Bond, with Leiter's friend Sharkey, start their own investigation. They discover a marine research centre run by Krest, where Sanchez has hidden cocaine and a submarine for smuggling.
After Bond kills Killifer using the same shark tank used for Leiter, M meets Bond in Key West's Hemingway House and orders him to an assignment in Istanbul. Bond resigns after turning down the assignment, but M suspends Bond instead and revokes his licence to kill. Bond becomes a rogue agent, although he later receives unauthorised assistance from Q after Miss Moneypenny secretly contacts Q Branch, worried about Bond's disappearance.
Bond boards Krest's ship Wavekrest and stops Sanchez's latest drug shipment, stealing five million dollars in the process. He discovers that Sharkey has been killed by Sanchez's henchmen. Bond meets and teams up with Pam Bouvier, a pilot and DEA informant, at a Bimini bar, and journeys with her to the Republic of Isthmus. He seeks Sanchez's employment by acting as an assassin for hire. Two Hong Kong Narcotics Bureau officers, who were hoping to discover Sanchez's drug manufacturing and distribution plant, prevent Bond's attempt to assassinate Sanchez and take him to an abandoned warehouse. Sanchez's men rescue him and kill the officers, believing them to be the assassins. Later, with the aid of Bouvier, Q, and Sanchez's girlfriend Lupe Lamora, Bond frames Krest for the assassination attempt and the earlier theft of Sanchez's $5 million by planting the money aboard the Wavekrest. Sanchez locks Krest in a decompression chamber and cuts the pressure line, causing Krest's head to explode. Bond is then admitted into the inner circle.
Sanchez takes Bond to his base of operations, which is disguised as the headquarters of a religious cult. Bond learns that Sanchez's scientists dissolve cocaine in petrol and sell it disguised as fuel to Asian drug dealers. The televangelist Joe Butcher serves as middleman, working under Sanchez's business manager Truman-Lodge, who uses Butcher's TV broadcasts to communicate with Sanchez's customers in the United States. During Sanchez's presentation to potential Asian customers, Dario enters the room and recognises Bond. Bond starts a fire in the laboratory but is captured again and placed on the conveyor belt that drops the cocaine bricks into a large industrial grinder. Bouvier arrives and shoots Dario, allowing Bond to kill Dario by pulling him into the grinder.
Sanchez and most of the others flee as fire destroys the base, taking with him four tankers full of the cocaine and petrol mixture. Bond pursues them by plane, with Bouvier at the controls. During a chase through the desert, Bond destroys three of the tankers and kills several of Sanchez's men. Sanchez attacks Bond with a machete aboard the fourth tanker, which crashes down a hillside. A petrol-soaked Sanchez attempts to kill Bond with his machete. Bond then reveals his cigarette lighter—his "best man" gift from Felix and Della—and sets Sanchez on fire. Sanchez staggers to the wrecked tanker, causing an explosion and killing himself. Bouvier arrives shortly afterward and picks up Bond.
Later, a party is held at Sanchez's former residence. Bond receives a call from Leiter telling him that M has congratulated him for his work and offers him his job back. He then rejects Lupe's advances and romances Bouvier instead.

Cast

  • Timothy Dalton as James Bond, an MI6 agent who resigns to take his revenge on drug lord Franz Sanchez.
  • Carey Lowell as Pam Bouvier, an ex-Army pilot, and DEA informant.
  • Robert Davi as Franz Sanchez, the most powerful drug lord in Latin America, mentioned as having been wanted by the DEA for years.
  • Talisa Soto as Lupe Lamora, Sanchez's girlfriend who has romantic feelings for Bond.
  • Anthony Zerbe as Milton Krest, Sanchez's henchman who operates Wavekrest Marine Research, and whom Bond sets up to turn Sanchez against him
  • Everett McGill as Ed Killifer, a corrupt DEA agent who frees Sanchez from custody.
  • Frank McRae as Sharkey, a friend of Felix Leiter who owns a boat charter business.
  • Desmond Llewelyn as Q, Bond's ally who supplies Bond with various gadgets and helps him in the field.
  • Robert Brown as M, the head of MI6 and Bond's superior who revokes Bond's licence to kill.
  • Caroline Bliss as Miss Moneypenny, M's personal secretary.
  • Anthony Starke as William Truman-Lodge, Sanchez's financial advisor.
  • Grand L. Bush as Hawkins, a DEA operative who opposes Bond's vendetta.
  • Benicio del Toro as Dario, Sanchez's personal henchman.
  • Alejandro Bracho as Perez, one of Sanchez's henchmen.
  • Guy De Saint Cyr as Braun, one of Sanchez's henchmen.
  • Diana Lee-Hsu as Loti, a female Hong Kong narcotics agent working with Kwang.
  • Rafer Johnson as Mullens, a DEA operative.
  • David Hedison as Felix Leiter, a former CIA agent now with DEA and a close friend of James Bond.
  • Don Stroud as Colonel Heller, Sanchez's head of security who is actually a mole for the CIA
  • Priscilla Barnes as Della Churchill, Felix Leiter's wife.
  • Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as Kwang, a Hong Kong Police narcotics agent sent to infiltrate Sanchez's heart of operations.
  • Pedro Armendariz as President Hector Lopez, the president of Isthmus.
  • Wayne Newton as Professor Joe Butcher, Sanchez's middleman and TV evangelist for Olimpatec Meditation Institute.
  • Christopher Neame as Fallon, an MI6 agent sent by M to arrest Bond, dead or alive
  • Roger Cudney as Wavekrest Captain
  • Jeannine Bisignano as Stripper, working in the Barrelhead bar.
  • Claudio Brook as Montelongo, the manager of the Banco de Isthmus and legitimate front for Sanchez.

    Production

Shortly after The Living Daylights was released, producer Albert R. Broccoli and writers Michael G. Wilson and Richard Maibaum started discussing the sequel. The film would retain a realistic style, as well as showing the "darker edge" of the Bond character. For the primary location, the producers wanted a place where the series had not yet visited. China was visited after an invitation by the government, but the idea fell through partly because the 1987 film The Last Emperor had removed some of the novelty of filming in China. By this stage the writers had already talked about a chase sequence along the Great Wall, as well as a fight scene amongst the Terracotta Army. Wilson also wrote two plot outlines about a drug lord in the Golden Triangle before the plans fell through because of Broccoli's concerns that the Chinese government would censor the script. The writers eventually decided on a setting in a tropical country while Broccoli negotiated to film in Mexico, at the Estudios Churubusco in Mexico City. In 1985, the Films Act was passed, removing the Eady Levy, resulting in foreign artists being taxed more heavily. The associated rising costs to Eon Productions meant no part of Licence to Kill was filmed in the UK, the first Bond film not to do so. Pinewood Studios, used in every previous Bond film, undertook only the post-production and sound re-recording.

Writing and themes

The initial outline of what would become Licence to Kill was drawn up by Wilson and Maibaum. Before the pair could develop the script, the Writers Guild of America went on strike and Maibaum was unable to continue writing, leaving Wilson to work on the script on his own. Although both the main plot and title of Licence to Kill owe nothing to any of the Fleming novels, there are elements from the books that are used in the storyline, including a number of aspects of the short story "The Hildebrand Rarity", such as the character Milton Krest. Felix Leiter's mauling by a shark was based on the novel Live and Let Die, whilst the film version of the book provided the close similarity between the main villain, Mr. Big, and Licence to Kills main villain Sanchez. The screenplay was not ready by the time casting had begun, with Carey Lowell being auditioned with lines from A View to a Kill.
The script—initially called Licence Revoked—was written with Dalton's characterisation of Bond in mind, and the obsession with which Bond pursues Sanchez on behalf of Leiter and his dead wife is seen as being because "of his own brutally cut-short marriage". Dalton's darker portrayal of Bond led to the violence being increased and becoming more graphic. Wilson compared the script to Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, where a samurai "without any attacking of the villain or its cohorts, only sowing the seeds of distrust, he manages to have the villain bring himself down". Wilson freely admitted that the idea of the destruction-from-within aspect of the plot came more from Yojimbo and Sergio Leone's remake of that film, A Fistful of Dollars, than from Fleming's use of that plot device from The Man with the Golden Gun.
For the location Wilson created the Republic of Isthmus, a banana republic based on Panama, with the pock-marked Sanchez bearing similarities to General Manuel Noriega. The parallels between the two figures were based on Noriega's political use of drug trafficking and money laundering to provide revenues for Panama. Robert Davi suggested the line "loyalty is more important than money", which he felt was fitting to the character of Franz Sanchez, whose actions were noticed by Davi to be concerned with betrayal and retaliation.
The United Artists press kits referred to the film's background as being "Torn straight from the headlines of today's newspapers" and the backdrop of Panama was connected to "the Medellín Cartel in Colombia and corruption of government officials in Mexico thrown in for good measure." This use of the cocaine-smuggling backdrop put Licence to Kill alongside other cinema blockbusters, such as the 1987 films Lethal Weapon, Beverly Hills Cop II and RoboCop, and Bond was seen to be "poaching on their turf" with the drug-related revenge story.