The Living Daylights is a great film not just because it looks like a hundred million dollars but because it mixes up the general straightforward linear plotting of most Bond films, so instead of just stumbling into clues like he often does he has to actually investigate and use his wits, deceiving Kara about his intentions. Necros throwing “Smiert Spionom” [sic] tags out to spur Bond into killing General Pushkin is really clever and sets up a bit of a cat-and-mouse game of wits that hasn’t been seen since For Your Eyes Only (and then not done so well), and the both visual and thematic homage to The Third Man gives the film some additional depth. In terms of comparison to other Bond films, the only one really like it is From Russia With Love, with SPECTRE playing both sides to trick Bond into stealing a Lektor decrypter while getting vengeance upon him. If John le Carré ever wrote a Bond story, it would look something like this.
The opening “training mission” to infiltrate the radar installations at Gibraltar that turns into a bloodbath is a really great, unexpected setup for the plot instead of just being a throwaway cold open. Setting the inciting incident in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia really invokes the Cold War aesthetic that underpins the deception in the story. The Afghanistan scenes are beautifully shot even if they present a Mujahideen that is far from reality, and the cargo plane fight is one of the best fight scenes of any Bond film, combining a literal ticking clock, real physical danger, and a henchman that is just a match for Bond without being either so ridiculously overpowered that he has to be eliminated through some unlikely happenstance or easily dispatched. The thing people generally cite as a weakness—the lack of a strong single villain—I actually think is a plus from a storytelling point of view as the motivations don’t just boil down to a bunch of henchmen literally dying to serve one maniac threatening to destroy the world for extortion or ideology. And Bond doesn’t get all of the best lines for once; Pushkin telling his Spetznaz goons to send Koskov back to Moscow “…[beat]…in the diplomatic bag” is perfectly delivered by John Rhys-Davies (who can apparently play any ethnicity from Egyptian to Russian).
License to Kill wasn’t so much forgettable itself as just not really a Bond movie. Despite finally maiming Felix Leiter in the same way as in the novel Live and Let Die, a scenery chewing villain and drawing a couple of other scenes from literary sources, it just felt like a generic late ‘Eighties “lets go after drug dealers” staring Timothy Dalton. They tried to make it more ‘Bond’ by having Q show up with gadgets (even though Bond has been dismissed from the service) and some Korean ‘ninjas’ who want to keep Sanchez alive for ‘reasons’ but it really seems like a screenplay written for Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone. It also just looks really cheap in places; apparently they really went over budget in The Living Daylights with the location shooting, the tricked out Aston Martin chase, and the aircraft fight scene, and decided to curtail their costs by limiting locations on this film. Compared to the previous film and all of the Brosnan films this one just looks like it was filmed on a t.v. budget. It’s not a terrible film by any stretch, but also not one that I’d feel compelled to sit and watch if I caught the beginning of it.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is not only a great film (and not quite “post-Connery” as he came back after this film to do Diamonds Are Forever, although I think the overwhelming consensus is that he shouldn’t have) but it is one in which you can’t really imagine Connery in that role. It’s a very different film, and essentially a romance wrapped around a standard-issue Bond plot involving Bloefeld doing world-threatening Bloefeld things (“Virus Omega…total infertility in plants and animals! Not just disease in a few herds, Mr. Bond. Or the loss of a single crop. But the destruction of a whole strain. Forever! Throughout an entire continent. If my demands are not met, I shall proceed with the systematic extinction of whole species of cereals and livestock all over the world!) It’s also the first Bond movie where the ‘Bond girl’ is as quick witted as Bond himself, and where her death has real emotional depth, contrasted to, say, dispatching the Masterson sisters in Goldfinger without any real resonance, Paula in Thunderball, or Aki in You Only Live Twice.
I’m actually (pleasantly) surprised that you said TLD was the good one. Not because I disagree - I’ve always thought it was underrated - but because LTK is quite a departure and I thought it may have got a bit more love. I agree about the ‘no proper villain’ not being a problem whatsoever in TLD, and I think the basic villain motivation of ‘make lots of money’ is refreshing. The music is terrific and Dalton really does smash it for a first effort, must be the best debut of any Bond actor.
Much like you hear Brits talk about “their Doctor” for me “my Bond” was Pierce Brosnan. There had been that fairly long gap between Licence to Kill (which I was too young for) and Goldeneye, which was perfectly placed in its 1995 release for a thirteen year old me. And Goldeneye has the advantage of being a very good movie as well, definitely top five Bond movies, and managed to deal with the post Cold War pretty well when it came to needing to find a new plot that wasn’t either SMERSH or SPECTRE. Unfortunately, most of the following movies are pretty bad, but you can say the same about Craig, who I’d probably put second after Brosnan.
I think that’s the key to a lot of people’s favorite Bond. The Spy Who Loved Me is my favorite Bond film and I can’t justify it except to say I was 13 when it came out.
He remained a huge womanizer. Jim Jefferies has stories about when he cast Lazenby in his show Legit playing his father. When the cameras were off Lazenby would regale any one who would listen with tales of how many Bond girls he nailed. Jefferies soon realized he wasn’t talking about in the 1960s-70s. He was talking about the present day when they were all at least in their 70s. He would go to conventions and signings to hook up.
I watched Remington Steele and really wanted Brosnan as Bond. Until we actually got him. He just doesn’t look tough enough. He looks like he could break if he gets hit too hard. But hurting my opinion is that his films are IMO uniformly stupid. Other than Skyfall, no modern Bond films have such a ridiculous and ultimately weak basic plot as the four Brosnan films.
I voted Lazenby in a close race, but I think in general Dalton plays Bond more like what I think Bond should be like. I would have preferred Clive Owen as a replacement, but alas.
And I do NOT think Connery is the Bond GOAT. If it wasn’t for nostalgia (or the “13 year old” factor) I think more people would see it, too. Connery movies were stupid, but it was a different stupid. The 60s were a weird, wacky time, and those movies reflected that. But Goldfinger, Dr No, and You Only Live Twice are really dumb.
But From Russia With Love it one of the all time best. I think that’s true for all Bonds (except Lucky Lazenby): they all have one great or really good film and a bunch of weak sauce crap that we try to like but deep down we know, say, The Man With the Golden Gun, or Diamonds are Forever, or License to Kill, or The World is Not Enough, or Spectre, are really not that good.
I have my own reasons for wanting Pierce Brosnan to do well, and he just pulled back into second place in my poll, for which I’m happy. For a long time he was running third among the also-rans
At least You Only Live Twice is dumb in a really fun way with ninjas, ‘Little Nellie’, a volcano lair with some really clever and classic Ken Adam set design. (The stupidity of trying to make Sean Connery look Japanese is such high camp I can’t even work up much outrage out of the ‘yellowface’’; he ends up looking like a Romulan from the ‘Sixties-era Star Trek show.)
Diamonds Are Forever, on the other hand, is just dismal; between the clearly aging Sean Connery, the Las Vegas setting so tacky that you can viscerally smell the stale cigarette smoke and feel the need to wash after finishing the movie, Jill St. John as the worst-bar-none Bond girl and a correspondingly hammy performance by a miscast Charles Grey as Blofeld, and the “alimetary” joke that Bond gives Felix when the latter asks how he smuggled the diamonds, it is just dull as ditchwater. Only Mr. Kidd and Mr. Wint are even interesting to watch (as cringeworthy as their roles are as a pair of foppishly gay sociopaths). Coming after the innovative On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and trying to revert to form in the dumbest possible ways, it is such a disappointment. (For those who love on Goldeneye, I’m sorry to inform you that movie substantially riffed on the same plot just with an addition of some post-Cold War elements and a betrayal of Lienz Cossack subplot that fells like it was pulled out of a Len Deighton novel and awkwardly injected into this ridiculous film even though Sean Bean plays it well.)
Goldfinger is really most notable for Bond just being terminally incompetent throughout the entire film. He almost dies in the cold open because he doesn’t listen to the other agent’s advice to head to the airport, gets both of the Masterson sisters killed through his ineptitude, fails to effectively use and ultimately destroys the tricked out Aston Martin by driving it into a wall, manages to get caught, escape, get caught again, be rescued at the last minute by raping Pussy Galore out of her lesbianism and into betraying Goldfinger (who, for some reason, the Army permits to break into the Federal Reserve Gold Depository instead of, you know, stopping him and disarming the Chinese nuclear device before it is locked in the vault), and then when he’s finally done failing upward through this movie, being caught one more time by Goldfinger and Pussy, who apparently decided that working for an insane kleptocrat who just tried to nuke North Central Kentucky was a good gig after all. It literally makes no sense except as an episode of Archer. If it weren’t for the classic Shirley Bassey theme song and climbing out of a wetsuit sporting a white dinner jacket, it would be totally forgettable.
But, at some point, when you can’t tell a genuine Bond film from one of the many spoofs, it might be too much eyerolling to survive. The Venn diagram overlap of 60s Bond films with Derek Flint and especially Matt Helm is pretty large.
To be fair when it comes to Connery’s Bond being incompetent, the character does some really stupid things in the books too. Inter alia, he ignores obvious signs of impending doom, blows his cover, gets his playmates killed, and takes his eyes off the ball in general.
I voted Brosnan for a couple of reasons–Michelle Yeoh for one, plus in one movie (maybe the one where Denise Richards was playing the “nukular fizzisist” so convincingly) there’s a scene where Bond is being tortured by the female villain who is of course clad in a dressing gown. Her gown falls open, and my dear, quiet wife @Alpine announces to a full theater that dropped dead silent for a second, “SNATCH SHOT!”
You’re thinking of The World Is Not Enough with Sophie Marceau as the main villain. I don’t think you actually see anything in that shot but it is clear that she is supposed to be naked under the gown.
In The Living Daylights, there is a scene where Bond is interrogating General Pushkin about Koskov and Pushkin alerts his bodyguard by pressing a button on the watch. Bond grabs Pushkin’s mistress, strips the robe off of her to distract the guard when he enters the room, and then the view switches to behind and to the left of her where you can clearly see side boob and nipple for several seconds. (There is not, despite internet rumors, any scene where there is a ‘full frontal’ shot of the mistress, and she is clearly wearing panties and a garter belt; but the scene is edited in some VHS, LaserDisc, and tv prints.) That’s pretty tame by European standards but surprising for an American “PG” rating as it isn’t just a couple of frames that a reviewer happened to miss.
