The Living Daylights (1987)

And so we reach Timothy Dalton's first outing as James Bond, and how much better is this than recent fare?! The answer: a hell of a lot. This is one of the most exciting Bonds so far, and the best since For Your Eyes Only. Gone is tired old Roger Moore (and Lois Maxwell, sadly) and in his place is a more serious, although witty, 007 in Dalton. 

Right from the exciting pre-credits sequence, and killer a-ha title track, The Living Daylights hits the ground running and rarely lets up. One minute Bond is sledging down the Austrian Alps on a cello case, the next he's on horse back and riding with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. First a Russian agent is defecting, then he's not, then he's involved with an American arms dealer, next comes the faked assasination of the 'good' Russian, and suddenly Bond's involved in a trade of diamonds for opium... Maybe I was tired tonight, but I found the double-crossing and the politics of the plot a little tough to follow at times! That's no bad thing though - A View to a Kill stretched a simple plot over 2 hours, and here so much plot, and so many bad guys, are packed in you've got to concentrate to keep up. 

There were a couple of flaws to be found - the new Moneypenny made little impression, as did the new Felix Leiter (he was better in Never Say Never Again!). There was some humour to be found - I know Dalton's accused of being too serious - and after the farcical lows Moore occasionally plumbed it was nice to see a straighter secret agent, after all he's regularly put in some very serious situations. 

Maryam d'Abo's cello-playing Bond girl, Kara Milovy was an improvement on Stacey Sutton and Domino from the last 2 films. Neither completely useless nor an action hero herself, she was as likely to hinder Bond as help him, and she really comes into her own towards the end when she rides to 007's rescue and helps pilot a plane out of Afghanistan. It's refreshing to see Bond calm down with the ladies too - he only beds Kara and, we presume, the woman who's yacht he lands on at the end of the pre-credits sequence. 

There's a lot going on in The Living Daylights, and Bond covers a lot of countries and enemies (it's particularly interesting to watch the Afghanistan scenes today in light of more recent developments there, since the US helped the Mujahideen fight the Soviets in the 1980's) and it's entirely to the filmmakers' credit that it doesn't turn into a jumbled mess. Instead Timothy Dalton's debut proves to be incredibly exciting and modern (compared to A View to a Kill anyway) and an excellent taste of things to come.