whats wrong with "the living daylights" ?i find it a good bond film

i ve seen this movie a couple of times on tv, and had it on vcd long ago, i think this is a good bond film full of cold war intrigue and mystery, i like aswell the romance btw bond and kara milovy, especially the part where they go out and the director shows us quite a bit of romance btw them, it certainly reminds of scenes from on your majesty s secret service, although here bond doesn t marry kara.
the locations where exotic and the intro sequence was down right amazing.
tell me guys what do u think is wrong with this film and why did critics not like it. for me timothy dalton gave his own character a signature with his two outings, and love me some cold war action.

I like all the bits you mention as well. I think maybe the most significant issue is that it has very weak villains.

Jeroen Krabbé's Koskov is ultimately much more interesting than Joe Don Baker's Whitaker, who I just found incredibly boring. Krabbé's like that in Robin Hood too – an unusual character and very good to watch.

GoldenEye has similarly weak villains – I think that tends to happen when there isn't just one main adversary to contend with – but flourished purely because it was so fresh and with a distinctly different energy.

In both Living Daylights and GoldenEye, the issue with the villains is justified in that there has to be a decoy villain (Whitaker/Ourumov) to cover for the twist that the true villain is a good guy turned traitor (Koskov/Trevelyan). GoldenEye handles it a little better, though.

As for why critics may not have liked Living Daylights, I thought the most common complaint was that it was such a shift in gears from the "fun" normally associated with the Connery/Moore installments (which was a similar complaint with OHMSS). They arguably refined the "serious" take on Bond with the Craig films while the Dalton ones are comparatively rough.

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It has a lot more impact on Bond for one thing.

I think also there wasn't enough of a break from the usual setup to re-energize the series. A new Bond wasn't enough. They still had the same title sequence approach which was looking very tired and the music was pretty samey even with the pop injection. And John Glen was still directing. Licence to Kill started to get away from the feel of the Roger Moore films but GoldenEye came over like a proper reboot, to the extent that it could almost have been from a different franchise.

After watching The Living Daylights again, I think it's one of the lesser Bond movies for me. Not sure if I would put it in my bottom 5, but close.

The problem for me is that Bond and Kara have no chemistry at all. Bond is a coldblooded spy/assassin, especially the way Dalton plays him, and Kara is such a happy naive school girl, and plays the role, like a Cinderella type. Not that there is anything wrong with this necessarily but I think it would have worked a lot better for Moore's Bond.

I did some research and read that the script was originally intended for Moore, which would have made more sense. But I feel that the way John Glen had D'Abo play it, just didn't work. Why would this Bond feel romantically interested in this school girl type?

Bond is also annoyed by her a lot of the time, like the way she goes back for the violin, or the way she thinks they are free in the Soviet base, and Bond feels annoyed having to correct her, or the way he gets annoyed with her, not being able to drive into the plane, or operate the plane, etc.

He just seems annoyed with her most of the time, so because of this, the romance scenes feel forced and don't work for me. This one scene here where she says "you were fantastic! we're free!"



The way she says all over-acting and wide, eyed is so cringeworthy, I just can't get past it.

I also felt Brad Whitaker and Koskov were kind of lame villains, and Whitaker's average war museum, is by far the least interesting of all the Bond villain layers. Necros is also the most bland of all the Red Grant copycats.

I never liked the two films Dalton did but not because I thought he was bad for the role. My main complaints haven't changed much, I didn't care for the attempt to make a more P.C. Bond. He drank less, didn't sleep around nearly as much and wasn't the slightly sexist Bond at all anymore. I'm not saying those are great qualities but they were Bond and they did change some of those things back. Also I like the somewhat cartoonish villains, world domination by a madman etc. I hated how it became drug dealers and the like, thats more Tom Clancy than Ian Fleming.