I like or adore all three of those. Licence to Kill is my favorite of the three.
The James Bond Film Discussion Thread (With Bonus Lazenby!)
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GE would have made a more suitable Dalton swan song. It feels very different from the latter three Brosnan films, likely because it was originally supposed to be for Dalton.
Goldeneye was heavily promoted as a course correction after the unfair perception that Dalton was the "politically correct" Bond. It was crafted to kill the specter of Dalton and bring an unapologetically old-fashioned, "misogynist dinosaur" Bond into the '90s...so I doubt that they ever had Dalton in mind for it.
You could say Dr No, FRWL and Goldfinger also, but outside of those two groupings I don't think there's any run of three Bond films where at least one isn't average at best. The closest for me would be TSWLM, MR, FYEO, but much as I do enjoy Moonraker it isn't objectively a good film I guess.
Yeah Dalton's third film would have been very different to Goldeneye I think. I got a book for my birthday about all the unmade Bonds so really need to read that! (Or at least the Dalton related bits)
I always took GE to be very much a populist Bond, bringing back a lot of the tropes, such as wisecracks etc, that the Dalton movies, especially LTK, had shunned. Pierce was very much pushed as being a mix of Sean and Roger at the time and I think the film reflected his strengths. I can see some hints that TLD was written with a bit of the previous Bonds in mind (eg “he got the boot”) but I never really saw GE as having been designed for Tim.
Some scenes definitely but the bit where Bond says something along the lines of “if M fires me, he’ll be doing me a favour” strikes me as having been written for Tim.
Indeed, I recall reading from Dalton himself that he asked to have a lot of lines cut to better suit his Flemingesque approach.
Apparently and I haven't confirmed this but there was a concept for a female villain with cyborg technology to have been a Dalton nemesis in this third film had it ever gone into production. It's a laughable concept but given that the third Dalton film would have been shot and released around the time of or shortly after Terminator 2 I wouldn't be surprised. Arnold action movies and the Terminator were both back in vogue at the start of the '90s and Bond films tend to mimic the popular trends of their time.
As much as everyone made a big deal about M's "sexist, misogynist dinosaur" line showing the franchise turning a critical eye on itself, her remarks to Bond about "I don't want you running off on some kind of vendetta" and "Don't make it personal" are a direct rebuke of Licence to Kill.
I always took it that GE’s opening scene was set in 1986, because it was the year between Moore’s last film and Dalton’s first; not that I hold with the “james bond is a code name” thing but I took it to be deliberate that they chose a year when there was no incumbent in the role.
The female MI6 bureaucrat testing Bond at the start of GoldenEye is sometimes interpreted as being there to test his worthiness to serve in the ranks because of the events of the previous Dalton movie. He went rogue and disobeyed direct orders from the Hargreaves M so when Judi Dench replaced him she had Bond put through the ringer to make sure he wasn't going to be inclined to buck authority and run off on his own.
Licence to Kill was Mooreish leftovers? If anything, that film was tailored to how Dalton wanted to portray Bond — colder, more ruthless. Not that his Bond wasn't above tossing off an occasional quip or bedding both Pam and Lupe, but there was definitely a harder edge that we hadn't seen since TMWTGG (where they inadvisably tried to make Roger more like Sean), and then previously in the early Connery films.
The Living Daylights, on the other hand, was incredibly generic — it could have worked for Moore, it could have worked for Brosnan if he hadn't been dicked over by NBC, and it more or less worked for Dalton.
The Living Daylights, on the other hand, was incredibly generic — it could have worked for Moore, it could have worked for Brosnan if he hadn't been dicked over by NBC, and it more or less worked for Dalton.
The first drafts for GOLDENEYE were already being written in 1993 by Michael France, and Dalton didn’t depart until 1994. Even prior to that, there was a entirely different draft that was supposed to bring back the more fantastical elements even going as far as including a cyborg henchman.
Whether Dalton returned or not, Bond 17 was always conceived to be a course correction no different from how THE SPY WHO LOVED ME was considered a course correction after THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN and the same later with SKYFALL after QUANTUM OF SOLACE.
Not true. Moore was already done by the time AVTAK was finished. In fact, prior to writing TLD, Michael G Wilson and Richard Maibaum wrote a Bond Begins treatment that Cubby ultimately rejected. Then they started writing TLD, but it wasn’t written in mind for any actor (as the casting of Bond was very prolonged), so they wrote it in a way that would be a one size fits all for any actor.
I think both TLD and L2K (We have no idea how far ahead these things sit in the pipeline.) were both initially molded for Brosnan. The both have this veneer of urban chic that certainly wasn't present for Moore and really didn't fit Dalton well either. (Though, he made it work.) But it was perfectly suited for ol' Remmy Steele. And this 'sheen' persisted throughout Pierce's tenure but was gone by Craig. However, the darker tone of the latter was absolutely tailored to Dalton after the fact.
I also don't think it's a coincidence that this stretch represents the most feminist-positive run the franchise has ever been. I'd even include TWINE here as I've always felt the issues with Christmas have always been unfairly put on Richards and not the writing and -- more importantly -- the directing. I've long felt Apted is Bond's worst director -- and deserves a lot more of the negativity that's thrown Tamahori's way. TWINE had ALL of the pieces in place to be one of the all-time greats, and he just utterly failed to deliver. But I digress.
*Though to keep things apropos, I will say that none of these women -- even Michelle Yeoh doing Michelle Yeoh things -- compare to the sheer awesomeness of Dame Diana kicking a dude's ass while the actual Bond theme plays in 19 fucking 69.
And I'll add that the huge regression with this during Craig's tenure has been my single biggest issue. Though I haven't seen it yet, I hear No Time is a little better depending on who you ask (Movie Bob doesn't seem to think so.), so we'll see. Brining in a woman to do a script pass certainly couldn't have hurt, though.
Though, I'm not so sure about that anymore, either. I've always felt Goldfinger was really overrated. I mean, sure it's still a solid, fun adventure, but its place within the zeitgeist as the de facto "best one" is wholly unearned. But I watched t about a year ago for the first time in about a decade And the whole scene with Blackman in the barn made me really uncomfortable. Not only is it the franchise's absolute low-point as far as Bond misogyny goes, but it's also laced with a rather heavy dose of implicit homophobia. And its existence really brings down the rest of the film for me.
I also don't think it's a coincidence that this stretch represents the most feminist-positive run the franchise has ever been. I'd even include TWINE here as I've always felt the issues with Christmas have always been unfairly put on Richards and not the writing and -- more importantly -- the directing. I've long felt Apted is Bond's worst director -- and deserves a lot more of the negativity that's thrown Tamahori's way. TWINE had ALL of the pieces in place to be one of the all-time greats, and he just utterly failed to deliver. But I digress.
*Though to keep things apropos, I will say that none of these women -- even Michelle Yeoh doing Michelle Yeoh things -- compare to the sheer awesomeness of Dame Diana kicking a dude's ass while the actual Bond theme plays in 19 fucking 69.
And I'll add that the huge regression with this during Craig's tenure has been my single biggest issue. Though I haven't seen it yet, I hear No Time is a little better depending on who you ask (Movie Bob doesn't seem to think so.), so we'll see. Brining in a woman to do a script pass certainly couldn't have hurt, though.
Yes. Those would be the original three.
Though, I'm not so sure about that anymore, either. I've always felt Goldfinger was really overrated. I mean, sure it's still a solid, fun adventure, but its place within the zeitgeist as the de facto "best one" is wholly unearned. But I watched t about a year ago for the first time in about a decade And the whole scene with Blackman in the barn made me really uncomfortable. Not only is it the franchise's absolute low-point as far as Bond misogyny goes, but it's also laced with a rather heavy dose of implicit homophobia. And its existence really brings down the rest of the film for me.
Absolutely, and it was very much promoted at the time as being specifically tailored for Tim, to capitalise on a positive response to his more hard-edged take in TLD. Unfortunately, with hindsight, I think he probably would’ve fared better with a more generic/classic movie. But any Bond film was likely to struggle at the American box office in the summer of Batman (see also Star Trek V and Ghostbusters 2).
The Summer of 1989 was THE busiest and most exciting Summer in film history. Any film that wasn't Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade or Honey I Shrunk the Kids was going to be fighting to stay relevant. If Ghostbusters 2 and Star Trek V suffered serious downturns in box office sales and worse critical response than their previous installments then Licence to Kill was in trouble from the start. It was a gritty, revenge-driven Bond who barely quips and rarely smiles or laughs in a drug lord story set in "the real world."
I adore LtK. It's #6 on my most recent compiled list of favorite Bond movies. But it was doomed to be shut out in the Summer of 1989.
I adore LtK. It's #6 on my most recent compiled list of favorite Bond movies. But it was doomed to be shut out in the Summer of 1989.
Dalton's Bond was ahead of his time; they just needed to put him in suspended animation for 20 years so he could star in Casino Royale. 
Dalton is a better Craig Bond than Craig's been. There. I said it. And I'm not the first.
I don't Craig could pull off this scene better than Dalton did.
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