License To Kill

Taking a further step into the gratuitously edgy, Dalton's second and unfortunately final outing as 007 features Bond's best friend Felix Leiter (a character so wallpaper I can't remember a single thing he's done in any of the other films he's been in) having his wife raped and murdered and an arm and a leg chewed off by a shark. The villain also beats his mistress with a whip and at one point a Klansman dropkicks a puppy into a gas chamber (OK I made that one up). Despite this, it's still a pretty good movie, if you look at it as Bond Vs Scarface in much the same way that Moonraker was Bond Meets Star Wars.

We need to bring back this aesthetic too.

The Bond Girl this time is Pam Bouvier, who is pretty much the ideal modern (2019) heroine, except that she's good looking and likeable. But she can kick ass(tm) and don't need no man(tm), except for Bond of course because this is still sort of a Bond film (they weren't totally not Bond films until Cr**g). She even backsasses Bond constantly like a Twitter thot, and yet there's a charm to it, very much unlike a Twitter thot, perhaps because it was the 1980s and dystopia still seemed very far away.

This scene where she demonstrates "shaken not stirred" is a perennial favourite.

The best stunt involves a car on fire shooting off a cliff and narrowly missing a plane, but Bond also does a wheelie in the cab of an oil tanker and waterskies without skis, and the baddy has an iguana, so personality abounds in general. The atmosphere is very much 80s/90s actioner though, with a bar brawl, credibly sleazy goons and big orange fireball explosions. There's even a cult leader/televangelist who works as a front for the cartel out of a cool temple, which borders on heavy-handed social commentary but is fine because he's actually pretty funny.

Spilling over that border like a caravan of human traffickers, however, is the gleefully reactionary vigilante plotline, as Bond is explicitly out for personal revenge and is in theory wanted by the British government, but by the final scene all is forgotten, possibly because they realise they'll need Bond to stop a nuclear war or something next week. If I'm being fair I would give a Cr**g joint shit for this, but it's different because in the pre-Cr**g days Bond actually did save the world on the reg so he can pretty much get away with the odd unsanctioned murder spree.

nothin personnel...ese...

The Living Daylights

Concluding the brief but fondly remembered (by me) 80s pop-rock era of Bondkino, The Living Daylights is also the first outing of Timothy Dalton in the role. Universally forgotten and ignored by pop culture bloggers and general audiences, Dalton was notable for being Craig before Craig, except better in literally every way. His Bond is terse, serious, brooding, edgy and grimdark. Crucially however no one else is, including old friends like Q, amiable villain Brad (this is, in fact, his name), and undisputed series Best Girl Kara the cellist, who is a qt3.14 and uniquely marriage material among Bond thots.

PROTECT

The plot involves a defecting Russian general, because it is the Cold War once more, except this time with an appropriately nervy sense of suspicion and mistrust, like it's actually the Cold War and not the friendly sport it's mostly been portrayed as heretofore. There's even an hilariously cringily poorly aged subplot in which Bond teams up with the Mujaheddin to fight the bad old Russkies, which either makes him Rambo 3 or a contemporary Democrat.

Well boys, we found it: the most horrifically badly aged joke of all time.

The action in the Dalton outings is extremely good and real-feeling, but still makes use of fun gadgets such as a car that slices other cars in half with lasers. You know, something fun, instead of having a nerd in glasses lecture us about how gadgets are silly and not grimdark enough, like in the Cr**g joints. There's also tits for, I believe, the first time ever in a Bondkino, which seems odd somehow but that's how it is.

Hilariously, Bond ripped off her robe to create a Bugs Bunny tier distraction for the guy he's knocking out in the corner.

Though overshadowed by 1996's Goldeneye and, sadly, 2005's Casino Royale, The Living Daylights was a nice, refreshing change of pace in its day, and in the Berenstein timeline where 9/11 never happened and there is no Jihad, it's probably fondly remembered and viewed in flying cars on autopilot to this day.

A View to a Kill

Notable for Duran Duran, A View to a Kill is also the second instalment in Bond villains doing absolutely nothing wrong, as nominal baddy Christopher Walken's plan is to destroy Silicon Valley, thus ensuring no Zuckerberg, no Jack and no McInternet as we know and loathe it today.

Because no actual person is as based.

His defeat is therefore the second most unwittingly tragic ending to a Bond film after Moonraker, in which Drax planned to wipe out the dysgenic hordes and replace them with models, saving the environment and bringing up the average human from a 5 to like a 7. I mean honestly his perfect specimens weren't actually that great, but whatever, it's the thought that counts.

The man's aesthetic sensibilities were unimpeachable regarding set design, but he had yet to discover thicc girls.

Walken should also have survived for the simple reason he has a blimp. Blimps are cool and all villains should have blimps, and I should have a blimp.

The movie ends in a climactic hand-to-hand fight on the Golden Gate Bridge, which is a cool location and fun setpiece, but throughout the movie you're more worried Bond is going to die of old age because based Moore was like 200 years old at this point.

MY SPIIINE

The Moore era in general is overly maligned for its campiness. In reality the camp tone set in with George Lay-Z-Boy's cringe Carry On-esque antics in On Her Majesty's Secret Service and went into overdrive in Diamonds are Forever, so Moore really just inherited a well-established tone and rolled with it. Nevertheless he sold tense and dramatic moments such as the nuke-disarming in The Spy Who Loved Me excellently, and his Bond is a great character unto himself even if his actual films were all over the place in terms of quality. And this is what Bond should be: a consistent character who can find himself fighting Voodoo gangsters one week and metal-toothed giants the next, and retain much the same attitude of bemused detachment. Only one man has imbued a Bond with edge, grit, vulnerability and realism and not sucked utter balls, and his name is Timothy Dalton (up next).

Never Say Never Again

While Roger Moore was swinging through trees in Octopussy, Sean Connery came back one last time to play Bond in a competing, non-Eon film. This transpired because of the courts ruling that screenwriter Kevin McClory owned the rights to the plot of Thunderball and the characters of SPECTRE, Largo and Blofeld who appeared therein. While being tied down to the format of a remake naturally limits the new ground to be broken here, to McClory's credit he did do this with it:

Any movie starring Kim Basinger's cameltoe is alright with me.

Sweaty Baesinger aside, this is literally just Thunderball in the 80s, with Bond playing Largo at a goofy ass vidya gaem and jumping a horse off a tower, which has some truly amazing effects.

OH NO I AM FALLING OFF A TOWER ON A HORSE

Look at it it's BLUE

Perhaps the biggest wasted opportunity here is to bring some closure to Bond's endless fight with SPECTRE. Blofeld appears (played by Bergman favourite Max Von Sydow) but doesn't do anything, while another, but boringer, iteration of Largo is the main villain. Why even use Blofeld if he has no impact on the plot? McClory only had the rights to this one plotline so it's not like he was being saved for a sequel. It would have been easy enough to have Blofeld fly out to meet with Largo to oversee the success of his plans only to run into Bond one final time, and would have given him a more fitting sendoff than the gag death of his stand-in in For Your Eyes Only.

What a waste.

This is really a footnote in the series because while it's decently entertaining, it's mostly nothing you haven't seen before, so here are some more pictures of Kim Basinger.

Octopussy

Octopussy is perhaps the only James Bond film in which the cold open is better than the rest of the movie. Bond is in Cuba to blow up some technobabble, is captured, escapes, flies a small plane back through the building with a heat seeking missile on his tail and escapes through the smallest gap in the closing doors leaving the missile to blow the hapless commies to hell. He then rolls into a filling station. This has nothing to do with the rest of the movie.

This stunt is cooler than everything in the last twenty years' worth of movies combined.

The other best part of the movie is where the villains are pursuing Bond on a hunt through the jungle and he swings through the trees yelling like Tarzan. This is amazingly hilarious because Bond is completely just fucking with them in the most retarded way. I will never not laugh at this because it is the funniest thing I've ever seen.

Then again, since Roger Moore's stuntman looks absolutely nothing like him, maybe this is just Tarzan.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Octopussy, except for the fact that its title is a pun on octopus and vagina, which makes it sound like hentai, is the clash of tones. In the background is a tense, dark Cold War plot involving clown murder and an amazingly hammy Soviet general trying to get a nice war going by blowing up a nuke in a circus, while in the foreground is Bond larping as Tarzan and doing this:

BASED.

Each of these tones is ill-served by the other, and I wonder whether the two villains are really all that necessary, because General Ham & Cheese is much more fun than his partner in crime Kamal Khan and gestures manically in front of a doomsday map out of Doctor Strangelove, in this fucking amazing set right here:

If the Sovs had cool ass revolving panels like this I'd be unironically m*rxist-l*ninist.

a e s t h e t i c   af

This actor has the best body language ever.

Fortunately the movie ends with Bond hopping on the back of a plane as it takes off and scaring William Shatner by perching on the wing.

weeee