Why Timothy Dalton Is Secretly The Best James Bond

https://whatculture.com/film/why-timothy-dalton-is-secretly-the-best-james-bond?page=4

In the opening moments of The Living Daylights, Dalton's Bond separates himself from the actors that preceded him, by disobeying a direct order to assassinate a female sniper and then voicing his willingness to face the consequences. Dalton's performance makes 007 cynical, resigned, and very much anti-Moore.

The film around him works wonders to amplify his take on the character.

Unlike the extravagance of the later Moore years, as entertaining as they may have been, The Living Daylights offered a much more dramatic, unflinching spy story. With limited gadgets and fewer egomaniacal antagonists, it allows Bond to face-off with a relatively simple arms-dealing conspiracy.

In it, Bond travels to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets with the Mujahideen, allowing the Bond franchise to make the kind of strict political statement it had long avoided with apolitical villains and sweeping generalisations about the Cold War.

This blunt and evocative approach to the world of Bond helped Dalton lean into his more weathered, cold allure. What followed was a film few were truly ready for: Dalton was tired and brutal, vulnerable and verging on completely humourless.

For people accustomed to Moore's take, it was a major twist, but it still managed to pack a punch at the box office, beating out the previous two Bond flicks worldwide. It made the idea of another Dalton movie a sure thing.

But no one could prepare themselves for what came next.

https://whatculture.com/film/why-timothy-dalton-is-secretly-the-best-james-bond?page=5

The Living Daylights had been popular, its blunt grittiness proving to be a welcome departure from what audiences had previously grown accustomed to. Two years later, Dalton returned for License to Kill - not just his final Bond film, but his best and most thematically daring.

In it, Bond learns that his close friend Felix Leiter has been attacked, and his wife has been raped and killed. Vengeful, Bond leaves the MI6 and becomes a rogue agent, a man desperate for retribution.

The first Bond film to not be named after a Fleming novel, License to Kill also landed an age 15 rating in the UK, the only time this has happened in the series.

And it's easy to see why. Clashing with Robert Davi's drug lord Franz Sanchez, Dalton takes what made him great in The Living Daylights and dials it up to eleven. He's a meaner, colder, more uncompromising assassin than ever before, driven by his rage-fuelled emotions and unrelenting in his single-minded mission.

With License to Kill, Dalton proved to be a Bond no one was really ready for in the 80s. His lack of humour was an issue for many, his increasingly violent edge an off-putting deal-breaker for many more. Some saw his greatness straight away, but not enough to make a dent in the legacy of Connery or Moore.

Unfortunately, Dalton never got a chance to return to the role. A seemingly endless legal dispute between MGM and Eon Productions was ignited after License to Kill was released, and by the time it ended in 1994, Dalton was done with the role and declined to return, his tux being filled in GoldenEye by Pierce Brosnan.

But his influence didn't end there.

https://whatculture.com/film/why-timothy-dalton-is-secretly-the-best-james-bond?page=6

Some twenty years after Timothy Dalton finished up his cruelly short-lived tenure as Bond, the franchise was in dire need of a new look once more. Pierce Brosnan's last outing, Die Another Day, had turned the movies into a laughing stock, and Daniel Craig was brought in to add a stripped-down level of grit to the waning series.

Craig proved to be a perfect fit for the role, bringing Bond into the 21st century with a level of vulnerability, humanity and ruthless proficiency that hadn't been seen since Dalton. With his performance, a new generation of critics and audiences were found drawn back to Dalton's portrayal of the spy, realising just how ahead of his time he was.

For five films, Craig gave the performance of a lifetime, changing the fabric of the series forever with a spy who was as painfully human as he was a mean bastard, and a killer as much as he was a tragic romantic.

But even so, it was Dalton who perfected this image first, his films proving that Craig was stood on the shoulders of a giant throughout his run.

With Craig's tenure finally over and the Bond franchise ready for a new generation of moviegoers, it's worth remembering that without Timothy Dalton, we may never have made it here, and that with his performance he gave fans the greatest iteration of James Bond anyone's ever likely to see.

He was, and forever will be, the best of the best.