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Come on, what’s he going to do, parachute into the Kremlin, poison the man’s borscht and parachute back out? It makes no sense, but it ends up being the one of the most plausible concepts in the whole story.

To be fair, Bond actually does a mild amount of detective work over the course of the film, which is something we don’t see often. Dalton plays the character like a man who isn’t sure he wants to travel the world stabbing people for a living anymore, but knows he isn’t qualified to do anything else. I imagine in Bond’s line of work, repurposing your skills for the private sector is easier said than done.

I applaud the attempt to show us that facet of the man, and you can count me among those who think Dalton was ahead of his time. This is a guy who takes his job seriously but recognizes the toll it’s taken on him personally. So when he tracks down the mysterious sniper, he discovers her name is Kara (Maryam d'Abo), and that she’s little more than a pawn in a much larger scheme involving Koskov, Pushkin, and a guy named Brad.

That’s right. I hope this isn’t a spoiler, but the villain in this movie is a guy named “Brad”.

And he’s played by Joe Don Baker, who is a fine actor that couldn’t be more out of place here if they’d put him in a dress. While I’m on the subject, could they find no actual Russians to play Russians back then? John Rhys-Davies is also a fine actor, but the only thing more British than his name is his accent. Maryam d'Abo wins points for sounding like a Russian at least forty percent of the time, while losing them again for being the frumpiest of all Bond girls. That’s as nicely as I can put it, particularly since she and Dalton have about as much romantic chemistry as Bill and Hillary Clinton.

That explains the icy shudder I feel when Bond first leans in to kiss her, responding to her hesitation by awkwardly cooing “just let it happen”.

Probably not what they were going for. I know I said Dalton was a decent Bond, and he is. But his version of the man is so averse to humor that moments after slicing a police car in half with a laser, he mutters some nonsense about “salt corrosion”. Literally every time he has a chance to say something awesome the beat is there, but he just...doesn’t. It’s almost as though everyone else thought they were doing just another goofy Roger Moore film, while Dalton was the guy insisting everyone address him as “Commander Bond” in between takes.

And no dissection of The Living Daylights would be complete without mentioning the climactic third act, which actually includes a pretty cool action sequence involving horses and planes and explosions. But not only does it precede one the lamest deaths of the lamest Bond villains ever, it also sees Bond joining forces with the Mujahideen, Afghan “freedom fighters” who were resisting Soviet occupation at the time.

Since their rebranding, you might know them better as Al Qaeda. Yikes.

Hey, I wasn’t kidding when I called this movie “dated”. Still, The Living Daylights is a pretty solid action picture in its own right, despite that rather extensive list of flaws. It’s a pretty well paced story, the acting is better than the accents, and the action sequences are acceptable. Best of all, the extreme campiness of the Moore films was finally put to rest, never to be seen again.

Until it was.

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