ROBERT COTTON Sanchez is a good villain stuck with a bad scheme. Davi and Dalton are both good actors and there are moments between them where they are showing their craft. When Bond and Sanchez shake hands for the first time, you can see that both the characters and the actors know the significance of the moment. It's an acting choice that I always notice in the film. Sanchez' main fault is being a Miami Vice villain just as that trend was beginning to die out. He's a complex character built on single line responses (as many Bond villains are) but we're given little backstory to work with. Yes he's where he is, how did he get there? He owns a country, how does the rest of the world feel about that? What drives him? We don't know, we're only told that he is driven, that he has these things. It would have been far more interesting to be shown. Dario is wonderful. He's the first punk henchman that you seriously want to punch until that cocksure grin is wiped clean off. Great character, but I have to give this one to the actor. When he faces Bond down on the conveyor belt, he knows he's playing for keeps and for once, James Bond is in serious trouble. Great performance. BILL KOENIG Robert Davi´s Franz Sanchez is a nice villain (with a Fleming touch of mixed nationalities) who is superior to the material he has to work with. JAMES McMAHON Franz Sanchez - A minor Bond villain.  He feels small.  It's often been said before, but it's so true so I'll say it again, Sanchez is a perfect Miami Vice villain.  He feels too minor for Bond to take on. Dario - Notable only because Benicio Del Toro went on to become such a big name actor.  Otherwise,  . . .Dario who? DEBORAH LIPP I'm struggling with "Bondiness" here, because Sanchez is very much a Fleming character-very similar to the Fleming version of Scaramanga, for example. But he doesn't have the flare and specialness that we associate with "Bondiness." No bizarre deformity, no megalomaniac goal, no mad, mad scheme. He's just ... evil. And very well-played. Although LTK has a main villain that may be described as lackluster, or at least ordinary-he's just a drug lord, after all, albeit an incredibly successful one-his massive array of henchmen, co-conspirators, and sycophants more than make up for it. Dario is perhaps the least of these, although the performance by future Oscar winner Benicio del Toro is fantastic, he is little more than Sanchez Lite with perhaps a touch more sadism. But LTK also has Prof. Joe Butcher, the villainous preacher who uses his congregation to launder drugs, bilk the religious, and seduce young women. Beside the evil Evangelist is the evil Yuppie (Truman-Lodge), and the evil  military man (Col. Heller). In fact, LTK is making a specific comment on the evils of the 1980s, and doing it quite well!

ED WERNER I don't particularly like this movie. For the first time in any Bond film, I can't see the money on the screen. It is a poorly lit, grainy and dirty looking little film that feels more like a two part episode of Miami Vice than a Bond film (and I said that walking out of the theater on opening night, not after twenty other reviewers had said the same thing). However, the real bright spot in License To Kill is the villain, Franz Sanchez. You can almost like this guy, but at the same time you know he is capable of some very nasty things. Robert Davi is probably one of the better actors to be cast in a Bond film and really looks like he could be a drug dealer. He also has a very believable and strong relationship with his main henchman, Dario (played by a very young Benicio Del Toro). In fact, this is probably one of the strongest villain/henchman teams in the series since that of Goldfinger and Oddjob. The film doesn't work, but Sanchez and Dario definitely do! TOM ZIELINSKI Franz Sanchez - This is the experiment within the Bond series that just failed, but Robert Davi as Sanchez is not the reason.  He's a ruthless South American drug kingpin with big plans, and Davi is very good.  Cutting the heart out of your girlfriend's lover?  "He disagreed with something that ate him"?  Now that is ruthless, and elevates Sanchez to status of one the better Bond villains. Dario - Benicio del Toro in just his second screen appearance after his debut in Big Top Pee-Wee.  del Toro brings a menace to the role that is unforgettably effective.  I was amazed when Dario spits (spits!) on Bond as he struggles for his life, and then, satisfied smirk on his face,  he is shown cutting away the only rope that is keeping Bond from certain death.  That is great henchman stuff. PAUL BAACK Franz Sanchez is a truly interesting villain character in an atypical Bond outing. He commits some truly heinous acts -- he has an employee's heart cut out; he whips his girlfriend with a dried stingray tail; he feeds Bond's old pal Felix Leiter to some sharks; he explosively decompresses an untrustworthy minion; etc. But like the patron he sees himself as, he loves his men like family, and rewards their loyalty with his own. Robert Davi invests Sanchez with a degree of humor and dignity rare in a Bond baddie, although he's not afraid to go all crazy-eyed googly psycho at the end of the story, when 007 brings Sanchez's drug empire crashing down around him. Dario, Sanchez's seemingly favorite henchman, is interesting primarily in retrospect: Hey, that's Benicio del Toro as a young man there! Still, he gets off a couple of cool bits. He's every Anglo's worst nightmare of a Latino thug when he tells Felix that he and his crew gave Della "a nize honeymooooon." He's got a terrific battle with Bond involving a rock-crushing machine. And, I don't know if this was makeup or not, but he's got this red spot in his right eye that gives them a quite scary look throughout much of the picture. Very creepy!

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