Licence to Kill

For other uses, see Licence to Kill (disambiguation).

Licence to Kill
In the left of the picture stands a man dressed in black pointing a pistol upwards. An inset picture shows two women looking out of the poster above another man and a few images depicting vehicles and explosions. The name '007' appears in the top right whilst in the centre at the bottom are the words "LICENCE TO KILL"
Theatrical release poster by Robin Behling
Directed byJohn Glen
Written by
Based onJames Bond
by Ian Fleming
Produced by
Starring
CinematographyAlec Mills
Edited byJohn Grover
Music byMichael Kamen
Production
companies
Distributed byMGM/UA Communications Co. (United States)
United International Pictures (International)
Release dates
  • 13 June 1989 (1989-06-13) (London)
  • 10 July 1989 (1989-07-10) (United Kingdom)
  • 14 July 1989 (1989-07-14) (United States)
Running time
133 minutes
CountriesUnited Kingdom[1]
United States[2]
LanguageEnglish
Budget$32 million
Box office$156.1 million

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 CIA friend 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, 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 premise 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 US, 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.

  1. ^ "Licence to Kill". Lumiere. European Audiovisual Observatory. Archived from the original on 12 October 2020. Retrieved 9 October 2020.
  2. ^ "AFI|Catalog". Archived from the original on 23 May 2021. Retrieved 23 May 2021.