The Living Daylights (1987)
Directed by John Glen
After a defecting Russian general reveals a plot to assassinate foreign spies, James Bond is assigned a secret mission to dispatch the new head of the KGB to prevent an escalation of tensions between the Soviet Union and the West.
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What critics compared The Living Daylights to
As Bond, Craig drew from Fleming’s novels but also from the darker performances in earlier movies, resurfacing the tenderness in George Lazenby’s portrayal of Bond—similarly smitten and later grief-stricken—in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) and the fury in Timothy Dalton’s take on the character—similarly determined to avenge Felix Leiter—in 1987’s The Living Daylights .
This is a long way from 1987’s The Living Daylights which arrived in during the AIDS epidemic, where the response of Timothy Dalton’s Bond was to keep the number of his sexual partners below three.
Timothy Dalton only got two turns as the character, 1987’s The Living Daylights and 1989’s License to Kill , and while he was closer in tone to Fleming’s literary iteration of Bond, it’s clear his cutthroat take wasn’t what audiences wanted after over a decade of Moore’s suavely comedic incarnation.
Skyfall is also the third film in the series starring Daniel Craig as Her Majesty’s favorite secret agent, a tricky position given that third films are often turning points in this franchise: While both Sean Connery and Roger Moore cemented their respective status as 007 with their third films, Goldfinger (1964) and The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), which were also the best films of their tenure, Timothy Dalton never made it to a third film after The Living Daylights (1987) and Licensed to Kill (1989) and Pierce Brosnan’s third outing as 007 in The World Is Not Enough (1999) suggested that the wheels were starting to come off the franchise (Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist named Christmas Jones—need I say more?).
Mr. Moore was succeeded, briefly, by Timothy Dalton in The Living Daylights (1987) and License to Kill (1989).
Disc one comes only with the movie, and disc two has two fairly typical featurettes, a Chris Cornell music video and a very enjoyable television special about the Bond Girls, hosted by The Living Daylights star Maryam D'Abo.
It’s a move that has always been a welcome one, resulting in excellent films such as “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”, “For Your Eyes Only”, “The Living Daylights” and “Goldeneye”.
This is never more apparent than with the cold open, which works to elaborate upon one of the greatest of all airplane stunts, originally seen in “The Living Daylights,” in which characters grapple and dangle from cargo netting.