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 licences. 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.
Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
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