007 days of Bond: The Living Daylights

After over a decade of over-the-top Roger Moore antics, not to blame him, but his era was chock full of writers who just didn't "get" it, it was nice to get back to the basics with Timothy Dalton's Bond.

Dalton's Bond was the first attempt at bringing Bond back to the literary Bond in over 20 years. The film does suffer a bit from the previous era, as the script was written with Moore in mind. There are sequences in the film that are silly, almost mind-boggling odd, mainly a sequence where Bond and Kara are going down a mountain in a Cello.

Maryam D'Abo, while not the typical "striking" Bond girl that many like to attribute to the series, is none-the-less a solid pick in this movie, not bumbling and "damsel in distress" like Tanya Roberts was in the previous outing, which at the very least is a nice change.

Perhaps the weakest part of the entire film is the climax, as Joe Don Baker does not prove to be much of a super-villain. This happens to be the thing that separates this film from many of the other ones, as the main villains are "non-existent" when it comes to screen presence - but in many ways this works to it's advantage since the characters had become so exaggerated that something would have to give at some point. Either the characters would become such a joke that the film would implode, or the writers would realize that the "world domination" plot just wouldn't work.

I can only imagine how this film would have been if Pierce Brosnan had got the job. Scarier things have happened.