Timothy Dalton had a rough entry as James Bond in The Living Daylights. This is a largely uninspired installment, from its tasteful yet tacky girls-and-guns opening credits sequence to its amorphous villains to a third-act geopolitical angle involving Afghanistan that has not aged well, particularly from a British-American perspective. It’s too bad, because Dalton showed promise. He’s both smug and smoldering, with a pair of fox’s eyes that director (and Roger Moore-era carryover) John Glen zeroes in on during some of the more arresting moments. Still, Dalton fails to generate much chemistry with Maryam d’Abo as a cellist caught in the midst of British-Soviet spy games, though that might be because the movie is more interested in her instrument as a prop than her as a character. This includes a chase down a snowy mountain in which Dalton and d’Abo ride in her open cello case. Moore would have carried the moment off with aplomb, but Dalton seems a bit above it. The Living Daylights marks one of those moments when the Bond franchise was awkwardly caught between two eras.
