I think there is an unwritten rule in Bond films that the closest thing to actual nudity is in the opening titles.
I’ll also say Brosnan did a fine job with the torture/ bridge walk/M confrontation. When did Judi Dench come on? She might be the best Bond actor of all. Plus John Cleese.
Dench (as she is known in West End circles) and Samantha Bond as Ms. Moneypenny started with Brosnan in Goldeneye. Both were fantastic in their roles, and Dench was retained for the Daniel Craig reboot, in part I think just to fuck with people to try to puzzle fit continuity onto the Bond franchise, but also because she is the best ‘M’, even more than Bernard Lee.
The less about John Cleese as ‘Q’ (or “R’, or whatever he is supposed to be), the better in my opinion. Cleese is a fine actor but he plays the character with a broad Monty Python-inspired sensibility that just made those scenes interminable. Desmond Llewelyn was great because he played the character straight even when delivering the most ridiculous lines and explaining impossible gadgets to a terminally whimsical Bond.
Stranger
I mean, it’s supposed to be camp.
Yeah, it’s just a bit much. But then, he was in two of the worst Bond films ever made that were best viewed as high camp efforts at self-satire. I feel that if they were really aiming for that, though, they should have hired Terry Gilliam to direct and Eric Idle as the villain.
Stranger
side note here–I was always surprised the title “octopussy” got displayed on posters/marques
Since no one else has done it, I guess I’ll have to make the case for Barry Nelson. Sure, he’s an American, lacks charisma and charm, sucks in action scenes and doesn’t even drive a cool car. Considering his portrayal has virtually nothing in common with now-popular conceptions of the character, I really didn’t think he was that much worse in the role than Lazenby (though he might have been more convincing playing “Clarence Leiter” or a character from Archie Comics). All of which helped make his Bond off-model, non-iconic and dismal. Seen today, it’s a radical - nay - avant-garde casting choice that inspires bold thinking about others who could/should never play the part: Nic Cage, Steve Buscemi, Sally Field, etc.
Steve Buscemi would make an excellent James Bond….in a film directed by the Coen Brothers.
Stranger
The thing with Bond is, there are so many of the damn things (25 official films, and counting…well, hopefully counting…), and you can bet anything you like that there won’t be a single other person that entirely agrees with you on everything about them. It makes these sorts of discussions interesting. I’ve read everybody’s responses and enjoyed them all but by god, some of them I’ve thought ‘what the HELL are you talking about?!’ It’s great 
When we saw “James Bond will return in Octopussy” my friend quipped “the next movie will be X-rated!”
like Elliot Gould playing Philip Marlow
TIL that Roger Moore played James Bond in 1964???
Enjoy this spoof / short.
There’s a lot to like about The Living Daylights, but Maryam d’Abo’s character really brings it down. Georgi Koskov’s scheme starts with him pretending to defect to England, so he asks his girlfriend, the concert cellist, to aim a sniper rifle out the window of a concert hall to make his escape look more convincing. Does that make any sense at all? It’s not like he asked her to pick up his tux at the dry cleaner. How do you possibly explain a favor like that to convince someone to do it? She gets shot in the process, and it’s only due to Bond’s flawless instincts that she isn’t killed.It still takes her most of the movie to realize she’s up to her neck in deadly international espionage.
That is explained in the movie. Goldfinger doesn’t bring the bomb to the gold depository until after his men have taken control of the building. All the soldiers pretend to be knocked out by the nerve gas to lure Goldfinger in. It’s only after Leiter detects the bomb nearby that they counterattack. Otherwise, who knows where he might have detonated it.
Bear in mind she is supposed to be the Anna character (from The Third Man, to which this film pays copious homage) who is so in love with Georgi Koskov’s Harry Lime-esque swindler. Koskov has arranged a lot of things for her (a private apartment, the Stradavarius cello, perhaps her chair position in the Bratislava orchestra) so it isn’t so surprising that she would go to great lengths for him. What I actually find least convincing is her sudden switch on the airplane from poisoning Bond with chloral hydrate to giving him his keys (even though it turns out to be fortuitous as Koskov then turns on her). d’Abo was not a very experienced actress and it shows but I don’t think she kills the movie the way Olga Kurylenko does with Quantum of Solace or how bad Jill St. John is in Diamonds Are Forever (although nothing was going to save that movie).
But they let Goldfinger break into the vault, take the device down into it, and then have the chance to seal it up before counterattacking, leaving Bond to ineptly attempt to disarm it. However risky it might have been to try to take it in transit, they were literally three seconds from having the gold depository and much of Ft. Knox vaporized. Fortunately, Goldfinger is also incompetent, and apparently spent all of his spare time building this giant Ft. Knox train set and the retractable floor with a billiard table that turns into a control panel so he could brag off to the collection of gangsters, only to then gas them anyway. So, not only is he going to have the United States and the United Kingdom intelligence services looking for him (including the obviously more competent 008 who M is perennially threatening to replace Bond on assignments; “He follows orders, not instincts!”) but also the American Mafia and presumably their Cosa Nostra brethern. Even Argentina isn’t going to take him in. This guy isn’t going to be able to get a cappuccino without looking over his shoulder. I hope he likes chow mein because I don’t see any other countries being willing to harbor him.
Stranger
Cinematic Bond was simply the Marvel Comic Universe before any studio had the 'nads to make a movie from a comic book. And from before any adult would admit to wanting to read/watch comic books.
The drama is that thin, the plots that far-fetched, the feats that super-human, etc. Twenty years from now a Bond in mecha form is not inconceivable. Neither is some sort of retconned tie-in between MCU or one of the other comic franchises, and the Bond franchise.
That does not mean cinematic Bond hasn’t been both wildly successful and very entertaining for ~60 years now. But applying dramatic critical analysis seems (to this unskilled observer) like waxing all artsy-fartsy over an elementary school art show. Those kids’ work may be adorable, but it isn’t analyzable.
I measure the worth of Bond movies by how much fun I had while completely suspending disbelief no matter how hard I had to work at it.
YMMV of course.
Oh yeah, and any connection between cinematic Bond and book Bond pretty well ends at a sketch. By design.
I don’t really blame d’Abo as an actress. I just think the writers didn’t give much, if any, thought to her character.
There are a lot of characters in the Bond films that don’t make sense. Think of all the ground tehnicians who helped launch Drax’s space shuttles in Moonraker, and were going to die once he started spreading nerve gas. In some cases you can handwave it away; they probably didn’t know the whole extent of the villain’s plan, so they didn’t know they were working toward their own death, etc. It’s just particularly egregious in the case of Kara.
To be fair, the contradictions of that character didn’t jump out at me the first time I saw The Living Daylights. It was only in later viewings that I started to question why she did what she did. As someone here said, if you’re thinking while watching a James Bond movie, you’re doing it wrong.
This. She was supposed to play a musical prodigy who was otherwise a childlike innocent. One who sees nothing except the obvious and has lived a cloistered life in a safe world of ease, unworried about threats. The actress did that, and did it consistently.
How believable that was depends on how much you can accept the cartoonishly simple person she was asked to portray. While surrounded by violent scheming double-dealing people and organizations on both sides. The whole point was the contrast between her ingenue foreground and the world-weary cynical background.
She was also hella cute. 
Bond Vs Predator
Logan and Bond
On Starfleet’s Secret Service
Nightmare on Elm Street XXIV: Freddy v Bond
Or a three-way crossover Freddy v Bond v Terminator. They could have an epic quip-off.
Can we get a T-rex in there, somehow?
because…that would be AWESOME!