Well for me, The Spy Who Loved Me, had a good idea in it (the Bond woman wanting to kill Bond, cause he killed her lover), but had a poor execution. I feel they didn't really explore it enough, and we know that she is not really going to kill him and they didn't deal with it that much, I felt.
I do question how much they could explore it that much further without it dragging down the whole film, and that's assuming there's that much more depth to it in the first place. They introduce it so she works as a pseudo-antagonist to Bond who poses a threat even as she is essentially forced to co-operate with him, plus it really only takes one scene for them to actually address the basic conflict there as Bond defends his actions as just being part of the job and also self-defence. Also, it says a lot that Bond would still go back to rescue a woman who swore to kill him once their mission was over even if we the audience know that she won't kill him because it's a Bond movie.
I also felt the villain could have been better, and the action scenes, could have been better as well. I also felt like it was too much the same as previous ones, such as a deadly sea creature in a hidden trap, which we saw in three previous movies before. It felt like a standard entry, even as far as standard entries go.
Deadly sea creatures (or, to slightly broaden the definition, underwater fights with creatures) are a Bond staple that kept going, though - Bond fights an anaconda in
Moonraker, sharks in
Licence to Kill, etc. Can't argue too much with the villain, though "rich megalomaniac" makes up like half the Bond villains in existence so there's only so much complaining you can do about them.
The Spy Who Loved Me, also suffers from a lot of cheesy, and possibly cringe-worthy dialogue exchanges between Bond and Anya, talking about sharing bodily warmth, and "what should we use for a band aid", and bad lines like that.
This kind of thing is par for the course for Bond movies. Does
The World is Not Enough also suffer for having lines like "I thought Christmas only came once a year"?
As for the Living Daylights, the movie had two significant problems for me. I felt that Dalton and D'Abo had no chemistry, and I didn't buy the cold blooded assassin falling for this woman, who really came off as such an innocent naive, school girl of a person. I just didn't buy that he would go for her at all, especially since he seems annoyed by her a lot, and it just felt forced to me.
Bond's a spy, not an assassin. The whole reason he goes through with protecting D'Abo's character is because he recognises that she's an innocent who's being set up as the patsy in the villain's plan. He's not a sociopath - even if he does get annoyed with the particulars, he doesn't let it stop him from doing the right thing. This is a series where most of the women he encounters fall for him (and/or vice versa) almost instantaneously, which I'd argue feel even more forced that a romance that actually takes a whole movie to develop - of course, that kind of instant romance is what you learn to accept if you want to enjoy Bond movies to the point where a prolonged romance feels "wrong" for this kind of movie.
I also didn't like the villain, Whitaker and he was perhaps the least interesting villain of the series for me so far, cause his main quirk is playing with miniatures, in a very average war museum.
He works well as a sort of mockery of American militarism at its most pathetic - his whole introduction sees him build himself up as a glorious war veteran only for John Rhys-Davies' character to immediately knock him down to size by citing his actual history as a soldier that exposes him as a hollow hypocrite and failure as a soldier. He can't hack it as a real soldier, so he pretends to be one by obsessing over actual wartime legends while playing arms dealer to the Soviets, the Americans' sworn enemy. I figure that's a solid enough background, especially since he has to share villain duties with at least two other guys.
The reason why I like Die Another Day is that it's just a lot of fun, with a good girl and villain. I thought the villain was given a better backstory than usual. I also didn't mind the invisible car as much as a lot of people, and thought it was fine for an over the top entry as well, especially when compared to Moonraker.
The reason why I rank The World Is Not Enough so high, is because I felt it had one of the best stories in the series. Renard is possibly my favorite villain in the whole series, and I love his background with the reverse stockholm syndrom, and how it fit into the plot. He is given deeper background, compared to any other villain possibly.
Are they given a better backstory or just *a* backstory? Like I said before, a lot of these villains tend to be one-dimensional anyway and the main thing that distinguishes these two from either the "rich megalomaniac" or "terrorist" is a surprise reveal about their backstory, but I do question if just having a twist is enough to make a good background (for Renard, maybe, but not for Graves). This seems like a common thread for the Brosnan era - three of his four villains involve a plot twist in their backstory (the third being Trevelyan from
Goldeneye, whereas Carter is the standard evil rich guy). It's not like Blofeld becomes a better villain when he reveals that he used to be Bond's foster brother in
Spectre - that development just plays as an absurdity more than anything.
And even though Never Say Never Again is not part of the EON company, it's still a Thunderball adapation starring Sean Connery, so I count it as a Bond movie, based on that. I really like the two villains in it, and I felt that Connery did a great job with a lot of good lines and moments, so that's my reason for liking that one.
Spoof or not, the '60s
Casino Royale is still an adaptation of
Casino Royale the book. You either count both or count neither.
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. Certainly without it we'd never have had Casino Royale or Daniel Craig.
