Not the best, not the worst, it was okay, quite entertaining, and I rather like Dalton as Bond, but like all the old Bond movies I have no intention of seeing this again.
It has its own title song by A-ha.
Before the title credits we see the 00 secion busy with a test from the Minnistry of Defence: they have to “penetrate the radar installations of Gibraltar” and the sas is ready to intercept them, and they’re using paint-bullets; it seems it’s only three 00agents. One agent betrays: he kills the other agent and two soldiers, I think. Bond gets in his car and they fight a lot and then I think the car full of ammunition blows up killing the agent… or he dies when the car hits the water… not sure now, but Bond gets away with a parachute… that he used already when they jumped off of M’s plane. So they landed and folded up the parachute? Neat :-)
Credits: “Timothy Dalton as Ian Fleming’s James Bond in The Living Daylights”
Plot in a few words: General Koskov pretends to defect to feed the MI6 false information: that general Pushkin is on a frenzy to kill all British and American agents, hoping they’ll stop him/kill him.
Koskov is working with an arms dealer and stealing state money.
More in details: Bond is in Czechoslovakia at a classical music concert. Saunders is head of Section V in Vienna and has persoally arranged for Kgb Koskov’s defection. Koskov contacted him first, though.
Koskov is supposed to be “under intensive Kgb surveillance” and Bond is there to check that nobody kills him before he can reach them.
At the interval, Koskov gets out from a bathroom window, and he looks up… Bond sees a girl, the pretty blonde cellist, at a window with a rifle, and he hesitates. Instead of killing her, Bond shoots the rifle.
Now Bond takes control, he has Koskov reach Austria via the pipeline, the “trans siberian pipeline” where Rosika Miklos helps them. Q is in Ausstria to receive Koskov and send him on a plane to Britain.
Saunders is angry that Bond “missed her deliberately” but Bond replies he only kills “professionals” and “that girl didn’t know one end of her rifle from the other” so “whoever she was, it must have scared the living daylights out of her”.
At a safe house Koskov feeds them his story against general Leonid Pushkin, his kgb superior, “Gogol’s replacement when he went over to their foreign service”. He says Pushkin hates their “new policy of détente” and has a secret directive: Smert Shpionam which means “death to spies”, it’s “an assassination program with list of targets, British and American agents” and it may start a war “unless Pushkin can be… put away”.
An assassin kills a milkman to enter the safe house with no problems; he kills a man in the kitchen then an agent sees him and calls “Green 4 to base..” and he can’t say more because he has to fight for his life, literally. It was unbearable that during all the long fight we could hear “Green 4 this is Control, where are you? Green 4 do you read me?” On and on and on, what kind of secutiry is that? Totally stupid and useless, one call was enough, no reply you immediately send someone looking for him, if you don’t know where he is you warn more people until he replies, if he does, or until he is found. In this case he will never reply becase in the end he loses. He fought very well and bravely though.
The assassin eventually replies in his place and Control buys every word he says of a ‘gas leak’ and calls for immediate evacuation, making it quite easy for him to take Koskov away with the emergency helicopter come for the injured.
The Minister saying “we’re the laughing stock of the Intelligence Community” is so right!
Bond doesn’t believe Koskov’s story, but since Smiert Spionom was found where 004 died (first scenes of the film) he’s ordered to ‘terminate’ Pushkin.
Moneypenny finds Bond’s cellist as requested, Kara. He shows up at her place pretending to be Koskov’s friend.
(I don’t understand why she was carrying a weapon around, it’s been days since that concert; Moneypenny finds she was iinjured ‘last week’.
She confirms that she only pretended to shoot Koskov, using blanks, to make “the British believe his defection was real”; they leave together with only a quick stop to retrieve her cello…
They are chased (the kgb I guess) and they use the cello’s case ot slide down on the snow, and the cello gets a bullet hole! Well, Bond didn’t yet know that cello was a famous Stradivari named The Lady Rose!
In Tangier, Pushkin cancels the order of weapons… Whitaker is a weapon fanatic, and an arms dealer, and is not happy to hear “you’ll return our deposit of $50 million within thte next 48 hours”. (Dollars? Why?)
Pushkin knows Whitaker and Koskov are ‘scheming’ but doesn’t know any details and neither do I, actually.
Did they simply want to steal State money? Or was there something more?
Bond and Kara are in Vienna. She calls Koskov “dear Georgi” and says she owes him everything, meaning her scholarship at the “conservatoire” and of course her cello.
Bond informs Saunders that Kara is just Koskov’s gilfriend and no kgb sniper, and Saunders agrees to help him without asking for permission first, since Bond is in a hurry.
Bond takes Kara to a concet, then to an amusement park where they play and laugh a lot, then Bond kisses her on the ferris wheel. Saunders gives Bond the papers for Kara so they can get out of the Country, Bond thanks him and then Saunders is killed by Necros, the assassin working with Koskov and Whitaker, as an incentive for the British to believe his story and have Bond kill Pushkin.
To stop these killings, Bond confronts Pushkin and they plan to fake his death. Of course the guards believe it like veryone ele so he genuinely has to escape, through the roofs of Tangier.
Two girls take Bond to Felix Leiter.
Kara calls Georgi and believes his story that Bond is a kgb agent using her to find him and kill him, so she puts something in Bond’s drink and Koskov takes them away. Koskov turns them in to soldiers stationed in Afghanistan for Pushkin’s murder and for being a defector (Kara).
Bond manages to free both of them (and also prisoner Shah) and now that she knows the whole truth, Kara is all mushy with Bond.
Kamran Shah is the leader of the Mujahideen, the Afghan Resistance, he’s “deputy commander of the Eastrn district”. it turns out Koskov is using the payment for the weapons to buy opium from Shah instead, more profitable, so he’ll still be able to give the weapons promised… something like that.
Now Shah gets his money, Bond hides to put a bomb on the Russian plane and when he’s discovered Shah and his men attack the camp to ehlp him. Kara keeps calling for James and enters the plane he’s on with a jeep.
Since they’re in it now Bond has to defuse the bomb, but he has to fight Necros first.
Necros falls out and the bomb is defused, but then Bond will throw it down on the bridge to help back the Mujahideen. The plane was damaged, and with no fuel they’re going down, so they get out on the jeep.
Whitaker will call that cargo of opium that Bond destroys “half a billion bucks”.
Bond kills Whitaker then Pushkin tells his men to put Koskov “on the next plane to Moscow, in the diplomatic bag”. Does that mean he’s killed?
Kara is tecnically a defector, but we see her playing her celo in France where Gogol compliments her. Kara now can “come and go as you like”.
Shah also shows up for her, and everyone believes Bond couldn’t make it, but of course he’s hiding in her room for a bit more ‘privacy’… after all he’s not interesting in her music or whatever she does outside that room, probably.
The end.
“James Bond will return”
James Bond is Timothy Dalton
Kara Milovy is Maryam d’Abo
General Georgi Koskov is Jeroen Krabbe
Brad Whitaker is Joe Don Baker
General Leonid Pushkin is John Rhys-Davies
Kamran Shah is Ara Malik
Necros is Andreas Wisniewski
Saunders is Thomas Wheatley
Q isDesmond Llewelyn
M is Robert Brown
General Anatol Gogol is Walter Gotell
Miss Moneypenny is Caroline Bliss
Felix Leiter is John Terry
ITA zona pericolo
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