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After the camp super-heroics of Roger Moore's run, "The Living Daylights" is refreshingly down-to-earth… A pure back-to-basics action-adventure spy drama which mostly delivers.
When a defecting Russian officer informs British intelligence of a rogue KGB campaign to assassinate western agents, Bond is swiftly dispatched to sort things out. But when the officer is snatched back, Bond begins to doubt what they have been told and finds himself in the middle of a plot unfolding across Eastern Europe and North Africa.
Unlike several of the previous episodes, this is a film with at least one foot squarely set in the real world. There are no vast subterranean bases, no plans to rule the world and a remarkable shortage of huge fluffy white cats.
In this flick, Bond is played in a more realistic style and is much closer to Fleming's original take on the character. Dalton is very much the professional agent - suave, intelligent, occasionally brash, and tough as nails under the surface.
But while this push for reality makes the film more intelligent and adult than most of its predecessors, it also makes it much less fun. The villians aren't larger than life (in fact they are mundane entrepreneurs), the threat they pose is far from world threatening and Bond's love-life is more relationship than romance-based. Fight scenes are conducted in grim silence and in the most swift and expedient fashion, and the occasional 'witty' touches are restricted to the odd exploding milk-bottle, radar rake, and the redoubtable Desmond Llewelyn's Q branch.
Without the humour, "The Living Daylights" seems more like a dumbed-down Le Carr adaptation than a true Bond film.
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