Licence to Kill (1989)

I thought that The Living Daylights was excellent and wondered how on earth Licence to Kill match the thrill and adventure of Timothy Dalton's first outing as 007. It turns out that he turned in a movie just as great and modern as the last, albeit with less gags and more bad language, not to mention two of the goriest death scenes in Bond history. 

The entire plot of LTK involves Bond's personal mission to avenge the mauling of his ally Felix Leiter and the murder of his brand-new wife by drug baron Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi). This movie deviates from the traditional Bond formula by making 007 a rogue agent, acting on his own against not a world-conquering megalomanic but a very real Latin American drugs czar. There's still room for a cameo from M - set up in a very devious way to make the audience think that Bond is about to come a cropper from Blofeld - and Moneypenny (the same poor Lois Maxwell imitation from Daylights), with a wonderfully extended part for Desmond Llewellyn's Q.

Carey Lowell plays the top rate Bond girl Pam Bouvier who doesn't scream once, doesn't cause any disasters and can hold her own in any fire fight and fly any plane that's required of her. She really is a Bond girl for the eighties. Her flip side is Talisa Soto's Lupe Lamora, a more traditional damsel-in-distress type who never-the-less helps Bond out and manages not to meet a sticky end - unlike Benicio Del Toro's henchman, who ends up minced alive. Eurgh. 

Dalton plays a very driven 007, and it's fun to watch him tear up Sanchez's drugs operation from the inside. It's a shame that the poor box-office performance of this more serious, more adult Bond curtailed his time playing the secret agent. At least he went out with a bang in a frankly astounding final 20 minutes as oil tankers exploding, filling the screen with flames, as Bond pulls wheelies with tanker cabs and dodges stinger missiles. I think both Dalton and Lazenby were lucky in that they made 3 great movies between them and neither hung around long enough to make any Moonrakers to sully their score cards. And so on to Pierce Brosnan and Dame Judi...