Timothy
Dalton's second, and sadly final, turn as James Bond pushed the
character into even grittier territory than before. LICENCE TO KILL
finds our hero going rouge in order to infiltrate and destroy the gang
of a drug lord played by Robert Davi, this in retaliation for the brute
act of feeding Felix Leiter to a shark and murdering the fellow agent's new
bride. Bond's adventure takes him to Mexico, where
he manages to appeal to the enemy by posing as a private enforcer. This
exchange includes the great line where Davi asks Bond if he's a problem
solver and Bond responds "More of a problem eliminator." More a revenge
story, one could almost see this one as a Mike Hammer vehicle rather
than a Bond. This adventure is a pretty radical departure from the rest
of the series, but it is in many ways the truest to Fleming. The title
sequence features a lot of cameras because the guy who did the sequence
wasn't aware that the iconic Bond opening represented a gun barrel and
not a camera! It was following this release that James Bond fell into
some sort of legal trouble which kept the franchise grounded for years.
By the time the matter was settled, Dalton was doing other projects. It
was now the 1990's, and a new Bond was about to appear...
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