Review of The Living Daylights (1987) by Hugh J — 10 Dec 2015

One of my favourite Bonds, partly for sentimental reasons (it was the first one I saw on the big screen), and partly because it's actually really GOOD, using a great little Fleming short as a launching point for a really thrilling, romantic, action-packed, espionagey, epic, topical (original) story that strikes a near-perfect balance between fantasy and realism, as well as between seriousness and humour. It's probably John Glen's best directing effort, but he's aided a lot by the script - and Timmy D of course.

Kara is realistically naive to the world of espionage, and, while her butt-kickin' heart is in the right place, it's good (in terms of character consistency) that she's really not great at beating up bad guys, yet has reliable common sense (and a handy cello case) to work with. Kara's sucess as a character is also largely down to Maryam d'Abo, who more than holds her own as the lone 'girl' in the movie (a first).

Necros is a fun henchman, well played by Andreas Wisniewski (though that Pretenders song gets pretty annoying). His death scene is my favourite of the series.

"What happened?".

"He got the boot.".

Classic.

Jeroen Krabbe is fantastic as the shifty Georgi Koskov, John Rhys-Davies is great as General Pushkin, and Art Malik is awesome as the play-acting Mujahideen leader Kamran (the enemy of Bond's enemy). The only character I have any kind of problem with is Whitaker, whose gimmicky, narcissistic pseudo-general thing is an unwelcome Moore-era hangover - but he's played by Joe Don Baker, which completely makes up for it.

And Tim? He belts the role for six, his relatively serious delivery of the silly one-liners making them funnier than the raised eyebrow of Rodge (or Pierce, for that matter) ever would have. Physically, he's got a sleek athleticism that suits the character just right. The only other actor who really had that was The Laze - and, let's face it, Tim could act George's head off.

As for the a-ha theme song, while the lyrics make absolutely no sense, the tune is pretty catchy; no View to a Kill, sure, but catchy.