The Living Daylights

(Here be spoilers if you are yet to see the James Bond movies...)

The Mission
007 (Timothy Dalton) helps smuggle a defecting Soviet General named Koskov (Jeroen Krabbe) into the UK but suspects it's a scam to help the opportunistic General turn rogue when it looks like the Soviets have kidnapped him back. Bond gets to the bottom of a bogus plot to wipe out the 00 division of MI6 and goes off the gird to investigate the General, uncovering scehems involving the sales of illegal arms and mass quantities of opium.

Jimmy Bond Yo!
Dalton's version of Bond introduces himself in a rather offhand manner and doesn't seem all that comfortable making wisecracks (Dalton delivers his first punchline, "better make that two" a little too casually), and after the lightheartedness of Moore's Bond he seems rather charmless due to the absence of humour in his performance. His quips throughout the film are mostly mirthless, suggesting his facetiousness is grounded in resentment that arises whenever he has to explain himself.

On the upside, this is a more understated and realistic 007, and Dalton is very much a no-nonsense Bond. His calm and collected manner does give way to fury when fellow agent Saunders (Thomas Wheatley) is killed, suggesting a new level of realism for the character. He also gets visibly exasperated on occasion, a quality that none of the other Bonds have ever exhibited.

Bond hesitates to shoot a female sniper, later stating that he only kills professionals. He's uncomfortable with General Koskov's gratitude and instinctively doesn't trust the defector. He lies to gain the trust of Koskov's girlfriend, Kara (Maryam d'Abo), and takes her to the opera and a fair rather than just putting the moves on her straight away - a combination of professional pride (having told M he wouldn't) and a genuine distaste for cutting in when she's still so clearly (and naively) in love with Koskov.

He's still a connoisseur of things like fois gras and fine wine, smokes, and has a regular room on standby for him at a hotel in Vienna. He can also tell a human heart from an animal's heart just by looking at it.

Villainy
The Living Daylights is diluted by some measure by having two lesser villains rather than one major one. Brad Whitaker (Joe Don Baker) is a rather jolly former American military commander turned mercenary and arms dealer in Tangiers. He likes toys and weapons tech but isn't exactly a formidable mastermind. He works in co-operation with a Soviet ally to exploit the cold war arena for his own personal gain.

This Soviet ally is Koskov, a decadent rogue General who wants to live a capitalistic life of excess. His 'grand plan' is to buy a huge shipment of opium from an Afghan group known as the Snow Leopard Brotherhood, and to make milliosn re-distributing it. He's cocky and comes across as a tacky version of Bond's connoisseur side.

The main henchman is Necros (Andreas Wisniewski), a Russian heavy who seems to always be wearing walkman headphones (it is 1987, after all). He's tall with blond slicked-back hair and a stereotypically poor East-European sense of fashion that almost exclusively favours pale denim.


Buddies and Babes
The Bond girl in The Living Daylights is Kara; an accomplished cellist and Koskov's Russian girlfriend. She's a delicate little thing, typically naive in the manner of some of the earlier Bond girls but with the added bonus of being portrayed by someone with some acting ability. There's also a new Moneypenny (Caroline Bliss), who bizarrely likes Barry Manilow. Now that she's played by a young actress once again the character flirts more hopefully with Bond.

Bond teams up in the field with a Soviet General named Pushkin (John Rhys Davies). The original intention was for this character to be General Gogol from the last five Bond films but that particular actor's health was too poor at the time for him to take on such a major role. Pushkin and Bond are wary of one another but their mutual dislike for Whitaker and Koskov sees them team up. Gogol himself makes a cameo appearance towards the end. CIA agent Felix Leiter (John Terry) also makes a long overdue appearance (his last film was Live and Let Die)... he's now a parachute jacket-wearing wally. He shares a drink with Bond and only has one or two scenes.

Bond finds an unexpected ally amongst the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, a rebel leader named Kamran Shan (Art Malik) who helps him destroy Koskov's opium deal. Bond repays the favour by blowing up a Soviet bridge, a pro-Afghan moment that calls to mind the unfortunate and misjudged pro-Taliban message of Rambo III.

Locations
The film opens on the rock of Gibralter, and even features the tiny country's famous tail-less monkeys. Some early scenes are set in the USSR but aren't actually filmed there - cyrillic script, classical music and Karl Marx posters are used to try and convince the audience otherwise. The rest of the film is set in snowy Vienna, sunny Tangiers, and the barren deserts of Afghanistan. Little time is spent capturing or iconising the exotic locations, indicating the series' increased sense of realism and understatement.

Gadgets and Tricks of the Trade
The main gadget on display in The Living Daylights is a gas-emitting keychain that activates when Bond whistles Rule Britannia. It explodes if he wolf-whistles. His car is equipped with rocket launchers, skates for ice-travel, laser beams, bullet-proof glass and rocket propulsion.

As handy in a jam as ever, he manages to throw a Russia agent off his tail by dressing Kara's cello case like a person and leaving it in a phone box. He also uses said case to bobsled down a snowy hillside away from Soviet agents and to safety on the other side of the border, and spontaneously strips a woman to distract a KGB agent. Most impressively, he helps Pushkin fake his own assassination so that they can entrap Whitaker and Koskov.

Licence to Kill
Bond spectacularly puts an end to an enemy agent in the prologue by driving said agent's car off a cliff and then parachuting out. He later cuts the laces on Necros' boot as they both dangle on a net from the back of a plane, causing the Russian hencman to fall out of his show and to his death. He also crushes Whitaker with a concrete column in the weapon salesman's office.

Shag-Rate
It's implied in the prologue that Bond reaps his rewards with a female tourist when he parachutes into a boat off the coast of Gibralter. For most of the remainder of the film he seems unconcerned with romance, though he eventually hooks up with Kara in an Afghan tent and does it with her again at the film's end.


Quotes
BOND (on being requested by Koskov to help him defect): Why me?
OTHER AGENT: He's under the impression you're the best.

BOND: Stuff my orders, I only kill professionals. That girl didn't know one end of the rifle from the other.

Q (demonstrating an exploding stereo): Something we're making for the Americans - it's called a ghetto blaster.

BOND: Just taking the Astin Martin out for a quick spin, Q.
Q: Be careful 007, it's just had a new coat of paint!

WHITAKER: How do you like my pantheon of great commanders?
PUSHKIN: Butchers.
WHITAKER: Surgeons. They cut away society's dead flesh.

PUSHKIN: It's the first time I've ever been grateful that 007 is a good shot.

KARA: What happened?
BOND (after unlacing Necros' shoe, causing him to fall out of plane) He got the boot.

How Does It Rate?
Timothy Dalton makes his debut as the 4th actor to play James Bond, distinguishing himself by playing against the more comedy-informed performance of Roger Moore. The use of recognisably 80s music and a renewed emphasis on realistic espionage initially helps establish Dalton as a new Bond for a new era, confident and modern and strictly business. But whilst The Living Daylights starts out fairly strong it eventually starts to lose its way and the combination of a serious Bond with a serious plot just makes it all too dry.

After several films exploring the peripherals of the cold war and the villains who exploit it, The Living Daylights initially seems to be finally pitting Bond against sanctioned Soviet operators. Of course, the plot eventually twists around to reveal that Koskov is the real villain - a Russian turncoat with a capitalistic weakness for expensive living. I'm unsure what kind of comment is being passed there, but it's an interesting variation on the rogue Russian General idea that we already saw in Octopussy.

The stuntwork is completely believable, better than ever and nothing short of fantastic. There are a few inventive and memorable moments such as the explosive automatic door that cuts Saunders in half and the image of Bond and Kara riding a cello case to freedom, making this the better of Dalton's two Bond films. But overall it just becomes unneccessarily complicated, there's a bit where Bond takes a car out for a spin and then suddenly he seems to be in another country. As much as I like the idea behind villains like Koskov and Whitaker, their plans seemed to be all over the place, and the resulting confusion actually made me yearn for the days of Bond going up against a singular super-villain who had a singular super-plan.

It's a shame because I like Timothy Dalton as an actor, but he seems misused as Bond - like the scriptwriters were too half-arsed to let him make a mark. You only need look at that last poster to see the potential for Dalton as 'the most dangerous Bond ever', but it just doesn't really happen. It's underwhelming.

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DIRECTOR: John Glen
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson, based on the characters created by Ian Fleming.
KEY ACTORS: Timothy Dalton, Maryam d'Abo, Jeroen Krabbe, Joe Don Baker, John Rhys-Davies, Art Malik, Andreas Wisniewski, Robert Brown, Thomas Wheatley, Desmond Llewelyn, Geoffrey Keen, Walter Gotell, John Terry, Caroline Bliss

RELATED TEXTS:
- The title and a key part of the plot of The Living Daylights is taken from a James Bond short story by Ian Fleming of the same name.
- James Bond previously visited North Africa in the films Never Say Never Again and The Spy Who Loved Me.
- Timothy Dalton would only play James Bond in one other film, Licence to Kill.