Review of The Living Daylights (1987) by Tom B — 09 Oct 2010

Timothy Dalton never really seemed like a "real" Bond. You watch him for a few minutes in previews and there's nothing deadly about him. He seems like, by Bond standards, just some guy. Not quite a man of action, not quite a seducer, not quite a cultured aficionado of the finest the world has to offer. Well, at least the tux seems to fit.

But taken as a whole dose, he's not that bad. This movie is over 20 years old but I'd never seen it all at once. Dalton always seemed, seen in bits and pieces, to be going through the motions in the stunt scenes, and he seemed more to be pleading his case with his leading ladies rather than being irresistible to them. Is this supposed to be escapist fantasy or not? Why is he trying to talk girls into liking them?

But in the context of the film, it's not quite as puzzling why they've chosen to set Bond up the way they have. They have everyone questioning his judgment in the early going, but it turns out to be to his credit. As signature bits go, Dalton could have hoped for more from them--being the Bond who seems like he might not be too on the ball but coming out OK in the wash isn't exactly a trademark to hang a career on. And where's Dalton today? Making a nice living, no doubt, but not exactly enjoying the ethereal firmaments to which stardom might have catapulted him after taking this role.

Jeroen Krabbe is a cool choice for the defector. Ironically, they have him play it a little loose, often aiming for the laugh, and a few years later he showed treachery and superciliousness to great effect in The Fugitive. Those were the right things for that role, to be sure, but they would have been a great choice here as well. The fact that they had him play it in almost a sitcom style in a couple scenes seems like a really strange choice in retrospect.

Of course, TLD suffers from the burdens that eventually caused the Bond series to implode under its own sillness--lack of credible villains, and lack of coherent stunts and action. The way they chose to direct Krabbe is part and parcel of the villain problem, but, even in this movie, it's hardly the most egregious offense. That would be the offense committed with the casting and direction of Joe Don Baker. He has a great blustery menace to him here, as he always does. He has a great blustery menace to him, though, even when he's smiling. It's no testament to anybody's ability as a filmmaker that they managed to get that across using him here.

Baker's greatest villainy here is criminal goofiness. They play many of the scenes at his hillside "lair" with an unbelievable level of schtick. He poses as a statue to prank a visitor. He plays with toys. They're custom military toys, but...still. They're toys. He wears a beret. Not villainous. At all. Certainly not supervillainous.

While we're on this subject...what happened at EON Productions in the late 70s and through the 80s that they felt compelled to have random collections of people standing around in swimsuits dancing with no music playing? I mean, that's one thing at a dance club. In earlier Bond films, if you wanted people on camera dancing, you damn well set your scene in a dance club, or Carnaval, or at least some place that had a dance floor in a place where it made some sense that someone might install a dance floor. In Moonraker, people in swimsuits dance at the tram station that takes people up to Sugarloaf. People in bare feet and swimsuits, thousands of yards (and hundreds of vertical feet) from the nearest beach, hanging out and boogieing when Bond and Jaws go by. Huh? Same with TLD. International arms dealer's lair...has a swimming pool. His assassins go sit by the pool and they...have lunch. Where they're joined by several scantily clad young couples. Huh?

Anyway, the comic aspects of the villains aside, the plot holds together very well. The characters are mostly convincing, and their choices and actions make perfect sense just about all the time. There are interesting shades of gray to some of them at times, which is cool for a Bond film.

But the stunts. Oy. The stunts. Some are fine, and at least they tend to stitch together the plot in lucid ways without having to resort to howling moments of exposition in dialogue or elsewhere. But, still. You ask Bond to run away from bad guys by sitting in an open cello case and sliding down a snowy hill--with someone else in the other side of the cello case, at that--and that's what people are going to remember about your movie.

Aren't filmmakers supposed to have some pretty serious egos? Don't they worry about having people at parties finding out who they are and what they've done and asking "so...you're the guy who put JAMES BOND in a CELLO CASE? What were you thinking?" Evidently they don't worry about these things. Is this because they know that to be a great film artist requires the courage of their convictions? Let's hope that's the reason.

But they do deserve some credit for putting together an entertaining movie and holding the plot together far, far better than most high-profile action movies of the period did. Even other entries around this one in the Bond series can get pretty wacky at times--way wackier, for example, than that silly cello case scene. (They finish the cello case chase with a merry quip, by the way. Just to leaven the seriousness of it with a bit of levity.).

In fact, the whole defection sequence is beautifully handled, from the nab through the border crossing through the debriefing and on from there. You know in the early going that you're (mostly) in good hands with this one. And they deliver on the promise of their early deftness. Finales in Bond films can be rather perfunctory, and this one's no exception, but hopefully, by then, you've had enough fun that you're just relaxing and soaking in the final bits. In this case, you are.