The Living Daylights

Year of Release:  1987

Director:  John Glen

Screenplay:  Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson, based on the short story "The Living Daylights" by Ian Fleming

Starring:  Timothy Dalton, Maryam d'Abo, Joe Don Baker, Art Malik, John Rhys-Davis, Jeroen Krabbé

Running Time:  130 minutes

Genre:  Action, adventure, spy

British secret agent James Bond (Dalton) successfully engineers the escape of a Soviet defector (Krabbé) to the West.  However shortly afterwards, the defector is apparently kidnapped by the KGB from a secret safe house in Britain.  Bond is assigned to find him and bring him back, however the defection and the kidnapping turn out to be more complex than at first appears, and Bond finds himself trapped in a complex web of treachery involving arms deals, diamonds and drugs, in a chase that leads from London, to Bratislava, to Vienna, to Tangiers and to the deserts of Afghanistan.

This is the fifteenth film in the James Bond series and the first of two films to star Timothy Dalton as 007.  A fan of the original Ian Fleming books, Dalton had intended to make his Bond closer to the literary source, as a sometimes ruthless, serious, damaged and more realistic character, which came as a surprise after the more lighthearted, comedic approach of his predecessor in the role, Roger Moore.  This may be why Dalton has always been poorly regarded by fans of the Bond films.  It's true that his approach was a shock after the Moore period, and he lacked the charisma of Sean Connery.  However, Dalton really wasn't bad in the role.  The problem was the films themselves.  The Living Daylights starts as a straightforward spy thriller, before becoming more and more ridiculous as it goes along, and the plot becomes ever more confusing.  The main villain, an American arms dealer played by Joe Don Baker, comes across as a petulant childish character who plays with toy soldiers and whose lair is a tricked-out army museum, although the henchman, a muscular assassin called Necros (Andreas Wisniewski), who has a talent for impersonating voices and prefers to strangle people to death with his Walkman does make an impression.  Maryam d'Abo plays Kara, a cellist who is swept up by Bond's adventure and later swept up by Bond.  She starts off as an interesting, ambivalent character whose loyalties are uncertain, but who is always sympathetic, but by the end she has become the typical "Bond girl" who doesn't really have much to do except tag along with Bond.  There are some good set pieces, with the standout being a chase with Bond and Kara in a gadget-packed Aston Martin, which ends up with them using a cello case for a sledge.  The theme song, by Norwegian pop group A-ha, isn't bad.  This is far from being the best Bond film, but it is nowhere near the worst either.  It's entertaining, and does have some really good parts.  The problem is that it doesn't hang together and feels like several different stories shoved into one.  It's too humourless to be funny, but too ridiculous to be really serious.

"Oh, James!" Timothy Dalton and Maryam d'Abo in The Living Daylights