| Franz Sanchez | |
|---|---|
| Character from the James Bond franchise | |
| Affiliation | Sanchez drug cartel (Self-employed) |
| Portrayed by | Robert Davi |
Franz Sanchez is a fictional character and the main antagonist in the James Bond film Licence to Kill. He was played by Robert Davi. The character is based on Pablo Escobar. Davi spent weeks studying Colombian culture and music before taking on the role. [1]
Sanchez is a South American drug lord of mixed parentage (as his first name indicates, one of his parents was German) whose empire is based in Brazil. He specialises in cocaine. He has an elaborate infrastructure for transporting his drugs - initially using submarines and later finding a process for dissolving cocaine in gasoline for covert transport. He also finances a televangelist, Professor Joe Butcher, in order to use his show as a contact point for his distribution network. Befitting his wealth, he lives in lavish style, with multiple homes and a base where his drugs are processed hidden beneath Butcher's remote meditation institute. He has a pet green iguana with a diamond collar, which perches on its master (in a manner similar to Ernst Stavro Blofeld's cat). He is uncommonly brutal in dealing with those he perceives as disloyal to him; Sanchez brutally whips his girlfriend, Lupe Lamora, with a stingray-tail whip as a punishment for infidelity. It is also implied that under his orders his henchmen remove the heart of a man she has slept with.
In Licence to Kill, Sanchez is pursued by Bond's old friend Felix Leiter, a former CIA operative who is working for the DEA. With Bond's help, Leiter captures and imprisons Sanchez. However, after bribing a DEA agent with two million dollars, Sanchez escapes from prison and arranges an attack on Leiter on his wedding night. His henchmen invade the Leiter house, kidnapping Leiter and raping and killing his new wife, Della. Sanchez then feeds Leiter to a shark- which devours Leiter's right leg below the knee and badly wounds his arm, although doctors speculated that they could save it- and returns him to his home with a warning note: "He disagreed with something that ate him". (This is based on a plot development in Ian Fleming's novel Live and Let Die.)
M orders Bond to back away from the case; Bond promptly resigns from MI6 and pursues Sanchez to Isthmus City seeking revenge, infiltrates Sanchez's organisation in order to destroy it, presenting himself as a renegade ex-agent and providing Sanchez with false information that other members of his organisation have turned against him, simultaneously providing alibis for his own attempts on Sanchez's life and prompting Sanchez to take out his own men.
Although Bond's true agenda is exposed while he is visiting one of Sanchez's underground facilities, he is still about to set the complex on fire and, when Sanchez attempts to escape with a convoy of his Maserati and petroleum tankers filled with his cocaine-gasoline blend, pursues and destroys them one by one. Bond then catches up with Sanchez and causes the last tanker to wreck with both of them on it. Just as a fuel-soaked Sanchez is about to kill him with a machete, Bond sets him on fire (using a cigar lighter Leiter had given to him at the beginning of the film, providing Sanchez with the missing information about Bond's reasons for going after him in the first place), and Sanchez stumbles in agony into the wreck, dying in the resulting explosion.