The Living Daylights

With "The Living Daylights" begins a new, albeit short, new chapter. Personally, I've nothing against Dalton. Sure, he's a different kind of Bond. But that is true for every Bond actor. They all brought their own take on the role. But I have to say he's rather dry in his portrayal and he's missing, like they say, panache. The humorous Bond one-liners are not really hitting it home. Maryam D'Abo is not selling it for me. She's a rather atypical kind of Bond girl, the innocent type. And her acting his rather bland. And it felt like even the writers didn't know what to do with her as she really has no purpose. The plot is more grounded, more realistic. No megalomaniac, evil genius with a devilish master plan. It would have been OK had the "villains" in this story not have been caricatures. Now the stunts are in typical Bond fashion and are once more exciting to watch. Overall an OK to watch flic, but not really multiple times. A good "6"

I will say this Bond movie is an above average entry into the series and the weakest of the five John Glen directed. I will say that the highlights of this movie are the soundtrack, with The Pretenders songs being the standout pieces over the titular theme along with Dalton's performance as an edgier Bond. The negatives here are a rather pointless use of Felix Leiter as he serves absolutely no purpose to the plot whatsoever and you can almost tell the film was hastily rewritten at times to accomodate for the recasting of Bond from Pierce Brosnan to Timothy Dalton. I also feel like that with the film having three people trying hard to fight for screen time in their villanious roles, the main villain gets lost and you would be forgiven for thinking Koskov or Necros were the main villains given the amount of dialogue and screentime they have is quite immense when compared to Whitaker.