The Living Daylights

1987 James Bond movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: A crazy arms dealer wants to start World War III, and James Bond has to stop him!

Timothy Dalton is really dull, and the arms dealer played by Joe Don Baker, a former "Worst Acting of the Year" award winner on this blog, isn't much more interesting. The main villain Koskov is even duller. And the thug has a great name--Necros--but really doesn't do it for me either. The Bond girl is really plain, and there's very little style here. The movie does have a ton of twists and turns, a solid spy story, and plenty of action scenes in a story that has Bond globetrotting and making all kinds of interesting friends. It's a stronger spy story than the typical Bond movies, and it's bookended by a couple creative and exciting action sequences, the opening taking place on Gibraltar and the story ending big with some fisticuffs inside and just on the outside of a crashing airplane with a bomb on it. My favorite moment in this one is the demonstration of the Ghetto Blaster, a gadget that will forever keep this one in the 1980s. This isn't a terrible movie, but it could have been a whole lot better.

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