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Licence to Kill (released theatrically in the United States as License to Kill, but sold for the home video market in the USA with the British spelling) is the sixteenth film in the popular James Bond series. Released in 1989 and directed by John Glen, it is the second film featuring Timothy Dalton as Bond.
The movie opens with Bond and his friend, FBI agent Felix Leiter, parachuting into Leiter's wedding. On their honeymoon night, Leiter and his wife are captured by agents working for Sanchez, a Mexican drug lord Felix had helped to apprehend. Just before this scene, Sanchez had been released in the melee by a turncoat FBI agent, whom Bond promptly dispatched. Leiter is bound and lowered into a shark tank; the shark bites off the lower half of one of his legs. Bond comes on the scene after Sanchez' agents depart; he finds Leiter barely alive and his new wife dead (the capture scene strongly implies she was raped before being killed).
M meets Bond and revokes his license to kill (his "double-0" designation) when he proposes to pursue Sanchez on his own; his employers don't see Bond's vendetta as vital to their operations. Bereft of official MI6 backing (but surreptitiously helped by weaponsmaker Q), Bond journeys to Mexico and works his way into Sanchez's circle, learning about his plans to make cocaine undetectable by chemically dissolving it in gasoline. The re-integration process will be available to those clients who can pay Sanchez's price. CIA agent Jayne Kennedy helps Bond to track down Sanchez and stop his plans.
This film also starred Talisa Soto, Robert Davi, Wayne Newton (as a cult leader), Benicio Del Toro, Everett McGill and Carey Lowell (as CIA agent Jayne Kennedy).
The film's title was to have originally been Licence Revoked; it was changed during production.
