10 Great Movie Stories Wasted On Terrible Sequels

The 007 franchise had started to lose its edge by the 1980s. The campy fun of the Roger Moore era quickly grew stale and approaching his 60th birthday, the actor was getting too old to play the world's most famous spy. Sadly his replacement Timothy Dalton's first appearance as Bond in 1987's The Living Daylights also failed to flatter, the lack of charisma from the lead man making his first entry a dreary affair.

With this in mind, producers made the bold choice to make a 007 film which was much grittier for its sequel. 1989's Licence to Kill saw Dalton's Bond going rogue after his good friend Felix Leiter is viciously attacked and Felix's wife murdered by drug barons. The scene is set for our beloved British agent to take down the bad guys, while no longer laboured by having to play by the rules.

This idea was much better suited for Dalton's more serious version of 007, while also exploring the more sociopathic characterisation of Bond from Ian Fleming's novels. The movie was seemingly ahead of its time, with a similar grittier tone that was eventually used throughout the Daniel Craig era.

Sadly License To Kill was mostly a bore, the plot bogged down in explaining how 007 isn't found out by the drug barons rather than a deep exploration of Bond's darker side. The treatment of Desmond Llewelyn's iconic Q is a lowlight, constantly berated and told to get lost by Bond despite the fact Q has gone out of his way to help his colleague.

But the seeds of what a Bond movie could be were present here but not truly fullfilled until the Daniel Craig era.