The Single Greatest Thing In Each James Bond Movie
10. Licence To Kill - The Dark, Haunting Tone
License to Kill, which is still the only Bond film to get a 15 certificate in the UK, really was ahead of its time.
It was widely criticized for being a very dark and violent revenge thriller, but viewed with modern eyes, the film's brutal tone is in fact its greatest strength. It makes the movie a powerful, haunting and frequently disturbing thriller that takes both the character of Bond and the series itself to places it had never gone before.
Few of the pre-Craig films have this level of pathos or show such a broken, vulnerable Bond, and this is why License is such an interesting movie to watch. Therefore, it's infuriating that it was so often attacked for its tone; perhaps the world just wasn't ready for a darker James Bond yet? After all, the Craig films have basically done just what this movie did all those years earlier and they've, rightly, been praised for it.
Granted, License still isn't one of the very best Bond films - its uneven pacing and terrible Bond Girls are definite issues - but thanks to its solid action, masterful villains, another commanding lead turn from Dalton, and most of all, its haunting and powerful story, it still sits comfortably in the mid-to-upper tier of Bond flicks.