Frankly I found his portrayal of Bond to be as close to the literary character as anyone got. Living Daylights simply nailed it. Licence To Kill was certainly over the top in spots but it too captured some of the spirit of Fleming's style. Bond is out there solely on his own trying to infiltrate the organization on his wits alone type of stuff. Connery may be the default best but Dalton deserves some serious recognition. Surely he and his films are more in line with quintessential Bond than Moore, Lazenby, Pierce and Craig?
Dalton's Bond was more ruthless and cold-blooded than any previous characterization. I think he's been unfairly overlooked. Same with Lazenby.
Probably because he was only around for two films and they're not exactly the most consequential in the grand scheme of things. I personally really like The Living Daylights and Timothy Dalton as Bond, but it's hard to compete with actors who did it first, did it longer, or helped reinvent the franchise.
For me, Connery is the best James Bond Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan then Daniel Craig. I just never could get into Dalton as Bond not sure why...
I think The Living Daylights is the absolute bottom of the Bond barrel. The opening sequence was cool with Bond parachuting onto the ladies boat after escaping the plain. But the rest of the movie was awful, imo. I think Licence To Kill is good. Still, I'm glad they switched to Brosnan for his run.
I think if he had done a 3rd Bond film perhaps he would have been remembered more fondly, I think Pierce Brosnan hitting the ground running with Goldeneye and having a similar look stole his thunder a little. You combine that with the amount of people who just prefer Connery and there isn't a lot of room left over for his films which almost feel like a test run for the direction Bond eventually went in. I think as I've gotten older I've gotten more of an appreciation for Dalton's Bond though I only have License to Kill on Blu-ray and I haven't been in much of a rush to buy The Living Daylights. I guess Amazon have bought Bond now so maybe that could be a reason to subscribe to Prime.
Timothy Dalton's getting more appreciation for returning to the character from the Fleming novels. It's acknowledged that the intensity that he brought to the role influenced Daniel Craig.
Dalton could nail a 'grizzled older Bond' taking on some kind of "Equalizer' type role. Still has the physicality and gravitas.
Why? Because of crap scenes like this: Thank god they flashed their passports as they crossed the border
I like "License To Kill" a lot. I think Dalton gets short changed because everyone knew Brosnan wanted it but could not get out of his "Remington Steele" contract and then finally did get it.
he seemed not very suave enough for the Bond people had come to expect- he was a little more slimy/lizard like. I agree that "License to Kill" was good but "The Living Daylights" is terrible
Living Daylights seemed to capture the pacing of the early films and the Fleming novels. There's for sure a measured pacing to it. Adds some grandeur to the film. The director like to occasionally take time for you to soak in the atmosphere.
Simple; with only two 007 films total, & during what's considered a low point in the franchise's history, (& I mean overall, not because of Dalton), he never really got fairly evaluated. Personally, I find him & Craig to have come the closest to capturing the character as Fleming envisioned. The low point for me is Brosnan. He's terrible as Bond.
Ha! Well it’s not just that but the whole scene. Poor/laughable special effects, continuity errors (such as Bond’s car crashing head-first in to a snow bank but they merge seconds later with no snow bank to be seen), the four soldiers look almost like puppets as they move ‘in sync’, the notion a cello case would actually move like that down a hill side, the bizarre effort to ‘throw’ the cello over the checkpoint gate, etc. And yes the passport thing again. Let’s see, you’re being chased by about 10 military troops with automatic weapons - instead of laying as low as possible how about you fish around in your pockets to pull out a passport as well as holding up your arm to show it to the checkpoint guard. This is only a couple minutes of the film. Someone could write a book on the other 2+ hours with similar observations easily.
Yes, clearly a nod to the Moore era of wry and ridiculous humor. Like daintily tossing a fish out of a Lotus submarine after driving up on the beach. Like . . . when did you have your windows down, bub? How'd that work out?
I can cut almost every James Bond film for its use of humor as that’s IMO an integral part of the series but Living Daylights is such a bad film in almost every regard I dismiss the humor here.
Dalton's getting put on blast for one scene. Meanwhile, Roger Moore had to dress up as a clown, had a naked 16 year old figure skater in his hotel room bed when he was like 56, and then the a dislodged fire ladder in his last Bond picture.
I don't think he was a bad Bond; he just had the misfortune of being the star of two of the lesser efforts in the series.
I liked Dalton's take on Bond. I really liked License to Kill, even though the drug lord villain is kind of a dated concept more akin to a villain in a Chuck Norris movie, but the whole thing was executed really well and Dalton was great, IMO. However, my wife didn't really like Dalton but loved Brosnan. Dalton may have been a bit intense and edgy to some women viewers after 10 plus years of Moore, but that's only based on my observations of my wife's opinion, but I do wonder if more women felt similarly. I would point out that Dalton was closer to the literary Bond, but that doesn't matter to somebody who hasn't read any of the Fleming novels.
