Review of Licence to Kill

I have to say I love ALL the Bond films. It really amuses me how wannbe critics like to slam Roger Moore's films. True, he should have stopped at For Your Eyes Only and even though I loved Octopussy and A View To a Kill, he was wayyyy to old to do the part. Especially in A View To a Kill he had one of those plastic surgeries on his eyes and he looked really silly. When I first saw License To Kill in the summer of 1989 I was almost 20 and even though I liked it because I love Bond I was a bit disappointed at first. It seemed to me to be more of an episode of Miami Vice than a James Bond film. But after seeing it a few times over the last 19 years and reading Ian Fleming's books, I really love it! Spoiler after this... The tie in of Bond avenging his friend Leiter was perfect. Leiter's wife is killed literally a the evening of the wedding. This is personal for Bond because in On Her Majesty's Secret Service he loses his wife Teresa or "Tracy" as she liked to be called, to the same kind of criminal mind as Robert Davi's Sanchez. Ernst Stavro Blofeld tries to kill Bond for paralyzing him in a tree branch after their fight on the bobsled track. Instead of killing Bond the bullet kills Tracy. Then of course Bond had his revenge on Blofeld at the beginning of For Your Eyes Only, truly a great death for a villain! But these memories are Bond's sensitive side that he rarely reveals. And when Leiter's wife is murdered, it brings it all back and he just becomes a cold killing machine, of course with the Bond suave we all know! The scene where Sanchez dies is especially terrific when after they both get thrown off a gas truck and Sanchez is bloodied and soaked with Gasoline he asks Bond before he wants to kill him "you could have had everything" and Bond pulls out the cigarette lighter that Leiter and his wife gave him at the wedding reception at the beginning of the film. Looks at Sanchez and says "don't you want to know why?" and as Sanchez looks down he sees the inscription of Felix and his wife's name, realizes who he REALLY is and a second later Bond flicks the lighter on him and Sanchez screams and burns to death. Perfect ending for someone like that I thought! And as other posters have truthfully said, the song at the end is the best! All in all a very good Bond movie that stands the test of time!