The Living Daylights

Best Bond?

15th movie and the first with Timothy Dalton as Bond. This was my favourite 007-movie as a kid (well mostly due to being from 1987, the best year of them all) and now we shall see if it still holds up. Begins in Gibraltar when three 00-agents are sent in by parachute to test the security of Gibraltars military. Doesn't go that well when one is taken by the Gibraltar military and the other is killed by an intruder. 007 spots him and starts to chase him in an amazing chase scene down the serpentine roads and then see it flying over the edge and Bond escapes by opening his parachute and landing on some girls yacht. And then we're hit with the best Bond-song of them all, the living daylights by A-ha. Amazingly enough the overall soundtrack is amazing. The horns and synths work in fantastic combination for every action scene. And of course it's the sound of the blu ray-menu.

Following this we end up in Czechoslovakia where Bond is to aid the defection of General Koskov from the Soviet army. Apparently he is watched over by a female sniper that played the cello in the orchestra Koskov was watching. 007 guts feeling tells him that she doesn't appear as a Soviet assassin and just wounds her. After he gets away they send Koskov over the border in the natural gas tubes and back to England with a fighter jet that takes off from a roof. Koskov defects due to the new KGB-chief Pushkin that seems to have restarted a Stalin program called Smiert Spionem that was behind the death of the 00-agent in Gibraltar. Pushkin is supposed to be in Tanger for a conference and 007 gets the order to kill him since he is a threat to the west. 

Bond accepts the mission, but takes a detour back to Czechoslovakia in order to find out who the sniper is. Turns out it's Koskov's girlfriend and she followed Koskov's order. They escape to Austria where another agent is killed in Smiert Spionem so Bond and the girl goes too Tanger. Koskov have also been taken by what appears to be a KGB-agent but turns out works for an American arms dealer named Whitaker. The plot is that Koskov and Whitaker worked together and as Pushkin took over began looking into the affairs as embezzlement. So Whitaker wants Pushkin dead and Koskov try to get the British to do it. 007 meets up with Pushkin and he agrees to act dead to let the bad guys show their hands. And after escaping, meeting Felix Leiter again for the first time since Live and Let Die as they have been looking into Whitaker, he meets with Kara (the girl) and is put to sleep as the alleged KGB-agent and Koskov takes them to an airport and a plane en route to Afghanistan. With a case of diamonds.... are we in a diamond smuggling operation again? That's a bad omen.

Apparently they are using the diamonds to buy opium from the mujahideen and then sell it, for around half a billion dollars and then get more weapons. Bond gets some plastic explosives and intends to blow the plane up. He gets recognised and a shoot out happens, and then Kara with a group of mujahideen who's leader Bond saved from the Soviet army prison. After Kara and Bond escapes on the plane, and dropping the assassin Whitaker hired off the plane... and the plane crashed due to running out of fuel, they had back to Tanger to take in Koskov that returned to Whitaker. But Whitaker fights Bond with the latest technologies, but in the end the little gadgets from Q wins the day, and then Pushkin arrives taking Koskov to Moscow for defection. 

Maybe it's nostalgia but I still like it. It doesn't get boring, the music is great. The plot might not be the most dangerous for the world. Just some arms dealer that smuggles diamonds and opium and embezzles the Soviet Union. I really like Dalton as Bond in this and you get the Aston Martin and some other gadgets from Q. Today maybe the mujahideen is a bit bad after 9/11. It was also translated as Mission Ice Cold... not much ice here beyond the escape from Czechoslovakia. I also always thought living daylight meant some thing akin to living target, that wasn't apparently true.