Everybody has their first Bond.
Roger Moore was mine, and I wasn’t about to shake off that sentiment overnight when Timothy Dalton was introduced in 1987’s The Living Daylights.
In fact, I first discovered 007 by way of Cannonball Run, where Moore was playing a satire of a satire of himself – but I was young enough to confuse the parody for the real thing and fell in love with the idea of his suave british super spy before I’d ever seen an actual Bond film. By the time A View To A Kill rolled around in 1985, I was finally deemed old enough to start watching, and Moore’s quippy confidence became my baseline for what Bond was supposed to be.
So Timothy Dalton felt like a wrong turn.
Where was the cocky raised eyebrow? The one-liner after the kill? The slapstick? Moore had spent over a decade turning 007 into a charming uncle who happened to shoot people between puns, and audiences had been trained to expect that. So did I. Dalton walked in looking like he was actually haunted by the job, and there was no visible connective tissue, no transition. It was like someone swapped out my funny uncle for a surly traumatised war vet.
The two Dalton outings left me uninspired at the time.
And after 1989, it seemed like the whole idea of a slick super spy was the stuff of satire and deconstruction – If Looks Could Kill, True Lies, and eventually Austin Powers. Bond felt like a relic whose tropes were up for grabs.
But here’s the thing I came to understand in time…
Dalton was never the problem.
Bond itself was becoming culturally irrelevant by the late 80s. Lethal Weapon came out the same year as The Living Daylights, and it was basically the anti-Bond – Mel Gibson was unhinged, depressed, wearing a mullet, and he just felt reckless. Meanwhile Dalton’s over there being competent and professional. The Stallone/Arnold superhuman action star was more in line with the blustery guns-blazing decade than a middle aged spy whose idea of a death-defying spectacle was a blue-screen ski chase. The spectacle arms race had left Bond behind.
So Dalton arrives with this harder, more Fleming-authentic take – and it’s exactly what Bond needed to stay artistically viable. He was doing the work to drag 007 back to his roots, the blunt instrument with a license to kill rather than a license for fun. But Fleming’s Bond had become a stranger to a lot of us by 1987. Moore’s version had strayed so far from those roots that audiences couldn’t identify Dalton as the same character. That faithfulness came across as a deviation.
It took Goldeneye to temporarily reset Bond as a post-Cold War spy, and Brosnan seemed to bring the best elements of Bond’s past together, including Dalton’s edge. That’s when I started incorporating the Dalton era into my personal headcanon.
And with distance, I can see what he was actually doing – he was well ahead of the curve. The grim, grounded, almost Frank Miller-esque take that felt out of step for fans soon became the dominant mode for action heroes. Craig’s entire tenure stands on the foundation Dalton laid. The vulnerability, the brutality, the sense that killing people leaves a mark, that was the Dalton era.
He wasn’t the wrong Bond. He was the right Bond at the wrong time. -Pop
Licence to Kill arrived on home video today in 1990, after a July 14th 1989 theatrical release.