Licence to Kill

Licence (British spelling) to Kill was an attempt to cash in on Timothy Dalton's more serious take on the James Bond character, and it ended up flopping a bit. At first I thought people just might not have been ready in the 80s for such a style for the series, but in truth the film's execution just isn't as good as it could have been. First off, much like Quantum of Solace, the story is about Bond going rogue to finish a mission. Here he's mostly driven by revenge, but since they didn't actually have the balls to kill off the Felix Leiter character even though they don't use him again anyway until after the reboot, his quest is a little more flimsily built on another who we never even met until this movie. He does some swimming and some infiltrating and some backstabbing and some romancing, but it's never quite as interesting as it could be with such a good concept as turning Bond back into a hard ass.

Instead of some grand, world changing scheme, Dalton is again facing off against a villain with a more personal plan of just making a buck. I gotta say, while eccentric personalities with secret bases in unlikely locations with plots to completely change the planet and set off nuclear weapons get old after a while, a drug dealer like Sanchez selling drugs and killing people who try to stop him is kind of boring. And really, the cop who let him go for a couple million bucks is the one he should have been pissed at, what do you expect Sanchez to do once he's free and has his captor at his mercy? He didn't even kill him! Still, drugs are bad, and of course Sanchez is dead and his entire operation is destroyed by the end of the film. The girls are okay despite one being best known for starring in the Mortal Kombat movies and the other getting her hair cut too short after her "look, I'm super hot now" makeover. As the last film for the second M, second Moneypenny, and fourth different Bond, it's not bad, but not as good as it could have been or should have been with the idea.

James Bond stats
Theme song: "Licence to Kill" by Gladys Knight
Foreign locations: Bahamas, Florida, Latin America
Bond, James Bond: 1:08:40
Martini shaken, not stirred: 1:06:15
Ladies seduced: 2
Chases: 3
Kills: 10
Non-lethal takedowns: 10