I like most of the Bond movie's and i can see positives in all the portrayals of our favourite spy. I enjoyed Moore's first 5 movies (Moonraker got silly, but it was still fun) After seeing Dalton's gritty and reckless take on the Bond character, i remember thinking that he should have replaced Moore before he made 'Octopussy' and 'A View to a Kill'

Dalton's Bond is probably the closest to Fleming's original idea, and it's only the Connery level of charisma that is lacking. The living Daylights is a fine addition to the genre and it's an action packed thrill ride with a gritty edge.

7/10 Nice one Timothy

I first saw this in the early 90s on a vhs.

Revisited it recently.

This the fifteenth in the Bond series and the first of two to star Timothy Dalton as James Bond.

In this movie Bond is assigned to help a KGB General to defect and facilitate his escape via Trans-Siberian Pipeline across the border to the West.

Later Bond is directed to kill the new head of the KGB who is responsible for reviving the program 'Smiert Spionam', meaning 'Death to Spies'.

Bond takes it upon himself to forestall further killings of agents after learning that his colleague 004 was assassinated cos of this program.

In this movie Bond has to deal with Brad Whitaker, an international black market arms dealer from the United States who always wears a US military uniform but his actual military career is a failure, so he turns to arms dealing to organize his own personal military force.

Bond also has to deal with Georgi Koskov, a deceitful, mastermind and sociopathic Soviet general in business for himself, who is playing both sides of the Cold War.

Bond faces Colonel Feyador, a commander of a Soviet airfield in Afghanistan and his sadistic prison guard.

Bond also deals with an anonymous assassin during a training exercise but the most dangerous enforcer Bond has to deal is Necros which means death. Necros is an international mercenary and former KGB agent in the employ of General Koskov and Brad Whitaker.

With the exception of Kell Tyler, the Bond in this movie is basically monogamous throughout the entire film, with the sole other Bond girl, Maryam d'Abo.

But this movie has Rubavitch (Virginia Hey),the stunning mistress of the new KGB head whose partial nudity is witnessed by Bond n a guard. Lucky fellas man.

This one has a fast paced pre-title sequence where skydiving British agents are tasked with penetrating radar installations atop the Rock of Gibraltar as part of a Ministry of Defence training exercise and the agents are stalked by an assassin.

This one also has an action packed climax n the aerial scenes are tension filled.

Connery's personality n voice and Moore's jocular approach will always be missed but Dalton did a good job in portraying the no nonsense serious tone.

The only weak thing in this movie is the villain, General Whitaker, a phony general who plays with toy soldiers and never seems truly diabolical.

I expected a Enter The Dragon style confrontation where the General hides behind the statues n i at least expected some insult shown towards the statue of Hitler.

While this is nothing brilliant, this could have been much worse. Out of the two films Timothy Dalton did, this is the better of the two as I personally disliked Licence to Kill. The plot is nothing special, the script is thin, the pacing is pedestrian and the film is overlong. Conversely, the locations are superb and very picturesque, the music is brilliant, the action is credible, the direction is decent and the acting from Dalton, Jeroen Knabbe(the Soviet general),Maryam D'Abo(as the beautiful Czech cellist) and Joe Don Baker(as the arms dealer) is not bad at all if not superb. Overall, it is decent but not extraordinary. 6/10 Bethany Cox