The trimmings around the edge of the movie are pretty good and sometimes outstanding. It's just the center of the film is a gooey mass of pure, unadulterated Sigh.
John Terry will probably always be my least favorite Leiter. He is THE weakest part of The Living Daylights and that's saying a lot when Joe Don Baker's Brad Whitaker is one of the two main villains.
For me, he wasn't featured prominently enough to make as much of an impression as Norman Burton. With Terry, they were casting in the right general direction, if not hitting the mark. My biggest gripe with DAF, actually, is that they didn't cast Jimmy Dean as Leiter...he would've been perfect.
And kind of physically resembled David Hedison in the following movie. So, yeah, that might have worked. "But what about his accent?" Have you not heard the differences in how Sean's Bond and Roger's talked?
Which means EVERY Bond film in any reality or timeline has gotten Felix Leiter wrong. I suppose one can sort of hear a twang of sorts in David Hedison's voice but it's not enough to make me go: "that guy's from Texas!" At least the entire franchise has been off the mark when it comes to that. Oddly enough one of the few things Never Say Never Again did right was Bernie Casey's Leiter. The best character in the movie in a lot of respects.
Casting of Felix was always a failure on more than one level. Not only did they rarely aim even close to the books, but they weren't even casting remotely the same type from actor to actor.
A shame Jack Lord was recast for Goldfinger but Jack would have quickly rivaled Connery as the main attraction of the series. Turning Felix into a schlubbier, older character was probably the only way the 1960s films could have avoided becoming the James and Felix Show. That said, yeah, they didn't even try to make them consistent although the Thunderball Leiter clearly took his visual cues from Jack Lord and Terence Young's Leiters were younger and more slim than Guy Hamilton's Leiters.
Then you have Joe Don Baker in Goldeneye and Michael Madsen in Die Another Day as Leiter-substitutes. I always assumed that they didn’t want to either have a crippled Leiter or to ignore the events of LTK & so it was simpler just to have new American spies for Bond to deal with. I think I remember Madsen in particular saying that he hoped to have a recurring role, but once Brosnan was recast & the series was rebooted, that was that.
Felix might have ended up in A View to a Kill but the creators realized they needed a sacrificial lamb from the CIA to die at the hands of Mayday so they came up with the character of Chuck Lee(David Yip). Still, it would have been nice if when Lee introduced himself to Bond in San Francisco he said: "Felix Leiter told me a lot of interesting things about you. It's a pleasure to be working with 007."
Rik Van Nutter was another case of aiming in the right general direction, but not quite hitting the mark. I was surprised to learn that he was a smidgen older than Connery, because in demeanor he came off like Bond's kid sidekick.
Jack Lord Lite. "Fine way to treat the CIA!" I could totally see Jack Lord's Felix blurting that out but in Lord's deeper voice.
It's kind of a shame that Jack Lord never got to play Leiter again, but then again if he'd started to break out as a movie star, we may never have gotten Hawaii Five-O. So I guess in the grand scheme of things, it worked out.