Licence to Kill

Skippable, and the hardest film in the series before 2006. Felix Leiter is maimed by a shark and his wife murdered on their wedding day, Bond resigns when MI6 refuses to act, and the rest is a personal revenge operation against a drug cartel with no official support.

It was too much for its audience. The British certificate was raised, several sequences were trimmed for violence, and the box office was the weakest of the modern run. The problem was partly timing: this is a 1980s American action film with Bond in it, closer to its contemporaries about cartels than to anything in its own series, and viewers who wanted a Bond film found one that looked like everything else.

On its own terms it is tightly made. Robert Davi's Sanchez is the best villain of the decade, a man whose single operating principle is loyalty, which is precisely what Bond exploits. Benicio del Toro, then twenty-one, is genuinely frightening in a small part.

The tanker chase through the mountains at the end, with articulated lorries on two wheels and a wheelie, is the best stunt work of the era. Six years passed before the next film, through a legal dispute over the studio rather than any decision about Dalton, and he had left by the time it cleared.