A solid effort, and I liked Dalton as Bond, but there’s one plot hole I’ve never been able to get around. Bond is sent to protect Koskov during his defection. He sees a sniper aim a gun at Koskov, but rather than kill her, he just shoots the gun out of her hand. It later turns out that she wasn’t a real sniper, she is Koskov’s girlfriend just posing as a sniper to make his defection seem more real.
So, how exactly did he persuade her to do that; how do you convince your girlfriend, a world-class cellist, to point a sniper rifle out the window of a concert hall during the intermission of her performance?
“Kara, honey, would you do me a favor?”
“Do you want me to pick up your tuxedo at the dry cleaner’s before the concert?”
“Uh, not exactly…”
And now that I think about it a little more, why wasn’t there a real KGB sniper sent to stop Koskov’s defection? It’s been quite a few years since I’ve seen it. I know the defection was a ruse, but I can’t remember who all was in on it. If Koskov could plan a defection in complete secrecy, then there’s no need to have Kara pose as a KGB sniper. If plans for his defection became known, then there should have been two snipers trying to stop it; Kara, and a real one from the KGB.
How tall would Gibraltar have to be irl to accommodate that scene? The car leaves the road, and as it’s falling Bond defeats the guy and has time to put on the parachute and still has altitude to deploy it. And having deployed it, still has enough altitude to glide out to a sailboat out in the straight. And it’s apparently far enough out that the beautiful woman in the boat doesn’t hear the car crash, and I assume (but don’t remember for sure), explosion. I think if Gibraltar was about a mile high it would be about right.
I love TLD. It was quite the change from the sad AVtAK. (and I’m on record as liking Moore more than Connery). Dalton’s Bond seemed like someone who would be the kind of guy for the job. We didn’t see that again until Casino Royale. (I so wanted Pierce Brosnan as Bond…until we got him)
One thing: at the time, they made a BIG DEAL that Bond no longer slept with every woman he saw. I guess it was supposed to be the New Bond. But as noted, he slept with the woman in the pre-credits sequence. Did the reviewers spend too long in the popcorn line?
One thing that didn’t age is the Mujahideen. Not only do we have the Oxford-educated terrorist with a heart of gold, but now we all know they become the Taliban. Plus, they show up in London dressed like, well, Mujahideen, including weapons, and don’t expect to be shot? How did they get to England? “Excuse me, would you like to check those weapons?” “No, we’ll carry them on.” “OK”.
The C130 sequence, while not totally unbelievable, really pushed it. And of course, right after they slide out the back of the plane, it goes over a convenient cliff. Did Speilberg direct this?
I don’t blame Dalton for making Bond “too serious”, it had to be the writers who decided to take away the humorous touches and sense of sophistication that sets Bond apart from other action heroes. The best moment of the sort was when the bikini girl on the boat said to her friend on the phone, “I wish I could find a real man around here” and then Bond parachutes in.
That said, I do like The Living Daylights for what it was, a very complex tale of multiple double-crosses. But I like my Bond with a twinkle in his eye and a double-entendre on his lips. Whether or not Dalton is to blame, I’m glad we got that back when Brosnan took the role.
Afraid this was a consequence of the producers expanding on a very simple Fleming short story, where essentially Bond is sent, as in the film, as a “sniper sniper”, as it were, to spot the Russian sniper. He is eying up an attractive cello player who turns out to be the sniper, but in the short story’s case she is a legit KGB assassin. The problem in the film is as you say, when she is shown to be a patsy, it doesn’t really work, although to be fair Kara is pretty ditsy, so who knows!
I am a big fan of Dalton in this, and LTK, he never got a fair crack really, with the studio in such financial mess in the early 90s. Ahead of his time. And TLD is a cracking spy story, way more grounded than most of Moore’s.
To be fair, it’s his reserve chute, so he did already have it on, but yeh definitely (yet another) Bond-suspension-of-disbelief moment! I do love the little detail of Dalton kicking out the window of the jeep to get the air flow through in order to inflate his chute, that is a great little touch and quite subtle.
I’ve read that, but it was decades ago. It’s a good vignette for Bond.
I think I read one review of this movie that referred to her as Bond’s “insipid squeeze”.
To be fair to the movie, the plot hole I described above didn’t leap out at me the first time I saw it. I don’t know what got me thinking about it, but once I did, I just couldn’t reconcile how Kara could have done what she did, and still been so naïve about everything else.
It’s far from the worst plot hole in a bond film.
One other small thing I like about TLD is that it’s one of the times I’ve been to the location of a Bond film. I was in Vienna about 20 years ago and went to the Prater, the amusement park bond goes to with Kara.
I’m not sure I follow you; if she weren’t otherwise naïve, then, sure, it’d arguably be pretty weird that she’s so naïve just this one time, to move the plot along or whatever; but if, as you say, she’s so naïve about everything else — okay, she’s naïve about this, too?
I was trying to find a word that made a distinction between “innocent” and “stupid”. Her boyfriend asked her to aim a rifle out the window of a concert hall, and she did it. I don’t know if that’s stupid, or overly-trusting, or exactly what to call it. But afterwards, she acts like nothing unusual happened. “Is Georgi meeting us in Vienna?” She talks about him as if he just popped down to the newsstand on the corner for a magazine and a pack of gum. That’s what I meant by “naïve”.
It’s been ages since I’ve seen this movie; maybe these holes aren’t quite as bad as I remember.
I guess my take on it is: she thinks that he’s faking his defection (because that’s what he told her); and so, on The Night Of, she’s ready to fire some blanks (because that’s what he told her to do), and, some time later, she expects to meet up with him somewhere (because that’s what he told her would happen).
Whether you want to call that stupid or trusting or naïve or gullible or something else, I don’t think I’d say that you’re wrong; but I do think I could say yep, she sure is at each step of that.
(Y’know, given the other retro Cafe Society thread of the moment, I’m now imagining an ‘80s flick where it’s Woody Boyd who keeps getting talked into doing stuff, and winds up thinking he’s in love with 007…)
Thanks to the AIDS crisis Dalton couldn’t fall back on the thing that set Bond apart from most other action heroes; fucking half the female characters in the film.
The Living Daylights is pretty Bond-like, but Licence to Kill is definitely in generic action movie territory (drug dealers hurt my buddy so I’m getting revenge).
It really is a hot mess, mostly because it had multiple people writing and re-writing the script, some of whom wanted it to be a comedy and others (ironically including Peter Sellers) who wanted it to be serious. And then Sellers left before his filming had finished.
QoS has grown on me over the years - I think when released it suffered from being a poor relation to the previous (excellent) Casino Royale (2006), but really it does have all the elements of a classic Bond film, and then some. I particularly like the way Bond disposes of Greene at the end, and the scene in the opera house is a masterpiece, in my view (I guess it helps if you love Puccini’s music).
Respectfully disagree, but each to their own! Some of the camera work and editing is laughably bad, half the time in the action you don’t know what is going on or who is doing what to whom. Definitely trying to follow the Bourne style but failing miserably unfortunately. Took me about 3 or 4 watches before I understood what was going on plot-wise at the beginning with Camille, the Geologist/assassin, Greene etc.
Agree about the opera scene though, best thing in the film.
Anyway, slight hijack there sorry, we were talking about Dalton and The Living Daylights haha.
I think the problem with QoS is that the villain’s plan makes no sense and wouldn’t even work. And in conjunction with Spectre it makes less sense. But we’ll save that for when the time comes.
As for TLD, on thing that hasn’t been mentioned is the car. I think personally that is one sharp looking A-M. Even though it was an 80s car the styling hearkens back to some 60s designs, including to me the Avanti. I like it better than the “007 gadget car” of the Connery (and later Craig) years. Though the CR A-M was pretty slick. The BMWs of the Brosnan years were just sorta meh (even though I don’t hate the invisible car of DAD).