The Living Daylights (1987) - film review

In Bratislava, agent James Bond is tasked with protecting General Koskov, a KGB officer, as he defects to the West.  Having made it safely to England, Koskov informs the British secret service that the new head of the KGB, General Pushkin, has revived an old policy of killing western agents.  Koskov is then abducted, apparently by KGB agents, and Bond is instructed by his superiors to assassinate Pushkin during his stay in Tangier.  Bond’s suspicions that things are not what they seem are confirmed when he learns that Koskov has links with the illicit American arms dealer General Whitaker.  The latter has just received a large cash payment from Puskin to supply him with the latest in American military weaponry, armaments that will allow the Soviets to win the war in Afghanistan.  However, Pushkin no longer trusts Whitaker and demands that his money be returned.  As the arms dealer requires this money to buy a large consignment of opium in Afghanistan, he decides that Pushkin must die.  How fortunate that Bond should do the job for him...

Whilst it is generally not considered one of the better Bond movies, The Living Daylights did represent a serious attempt on the part of its production team to inject new life into the franchise and move away from the jokey comic book approach that marked Roger Moore’s tenure in the role.  The casting of Timothy Dalton, an actor with a much darker screen persona than Moore, certainly helped to re-instil a sense of realism and danger in the character, and the screenwriters did a reasonable job of reorienting the series back towards Ian Fleming’s original concept.  Out go all the bikini wearing beauties and tedious Carry On-style innuendo.  In their place, we have a gritty, far more respectable attempt at a Cold War action thriller.  

Unfortunately, the reset button wasn’t so much pressed as trodden on by a herd of elephants.  In their attempt to make a more serious kind of Bond film, production team somewhat overestimated the intelligence of their average audience (if your IQ score is less than 120, don’t even bother trying to understand the plot) and were a little too ruthless when it came to strangling all the jokes at birth.  The Living Daylights is impressive as an action movie, but you’d be hard pressed to find many people who thought it was fun.  A smattering of humour would have helped make the convoluted plot a little more bearable.  But no, the film soon feels as arid and featureless as the Afghan landscape in which the latter part of the action takes place.

It is customary these days to lump Timothy Dalton in with George Lazenby as an actor who failed to do anything with the part of Bond and is therefore best forgotten.  However, when you watch Dalton in his two Bond films it is apparent almost from his first scene that he was a much more interesting and dynamic 007 than Moore and Brosnan ever were.  Dalton’s misfortune was to enter the Bond franchise at a time when it was way overdue for a major overhaul and the production team were not quite certain where to take the series.  If Dalton had been given a script with the quality of the early Bond movies, and a supporting cast to match, he might well have earned himself the mantle of the definitive James Bond.

The Living Daylights has two central weaknesses - an absurdly overcomplicated plot which runs all over the place without much logic, and cast of undistinguished and uninteresting actors, most of whom looks as if they’d rather be elsewhere.  Maryam d’Abo looks like a deadweight around Dalton’s heels and deserves to be considered the dullest of the Bond girls, just as Joe Don Baker probably rates as the dullest Bond villain.

© Steve Chandler 2010

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