WI: Third Dalton Bond film kills the franchise?

Dalton's Bond career was fundamentally harmed by Roger Moore not accepting the situation and moving more gracefully out of the way after Moonraker. They'd done Bond-as-sci-fi at that point, catching the late-Seventies wave, and it'd damn near ended up Carry On Moonraking, and really it was time for a change. That was done with scale and scope and feel with For Your Eyes Only -- which looks and 'reads' more like one of the Fleming short stories despite the slightly bizarre and clanky Bloefeld opening -- but at that point it was time for someone new. And depending on Dalton's filming schedule with Flash Gordon it should've been him right then. This was the peak of Ian Ogilvy's career, the late Seventies, but I think he would have seemed to much like a bargain-window Moore where Dalton would have brought a flavor to Bond that would've suited FYEO frankly better than Moore's. It leaves Moore at best batting .500 as bond (Live and Let Die despite its racist overtones was a solid effort and Spy Who Loved Me is the definitive Moore bond, but Golden Gun and Moonraker -- despite the game efforts of the always excellent Michael Lonsdale ["Look after Mister Bond. See that some harm comes to him."] -- was a hot mess. Besides being a genuinely skilled actor (especially if you've seen his early stuff from the late Sixties, just watch him in Lion in Winter) Dalton would've suited the Eighties milieu much better. And it would've gotten him a nice long run, probably three films (if not the exact same ones) before Living Daylights even shows up and a corpus that would allow him to be judged fairly among the Bonds. And I even have some time for Brosnan -- the first two were yeomanlike efforts, it's the drop off the cliff of the second two that puts him in a rather Roger Moore-like situation. Interestingly enough as a fan of the first (i.e. the good) season of Remington Steele, like Moore Pierce Brosnan always struck me as much better suited to play Simon Templar in a proper revival of The Saint, leaving Bond to actors like Dalton.

Setting aside the irony of replacing Sean Connery with an actor who was even older(!), I think Eon could probably defend keeping him for as late as For Your Eyes Only, which turned out to be one of his better efforts (and his last decent outing), even if we was getting a little past his sell-by date.

But otherwise, I agree. Of course, a new Bond was not enough; what was needed was better scripts than they were getting in the 80's. Dalton was/is an outstanding actor, and it was clear he wanted to take the character in a different direction from the detached one-liner-and-gadgets facade that Moore was comfortable living in; but he needed more to work with.

Brosnan was almost borne to play Bond. But he needed good scripts and good direction to thrive, and the only film he got that on was Goldeneye.
 
Sadly Dalton was whip-sawed by the end of the Cold War and having inherited a James Bond played for humor by Moore versus the darker more serious potential of the literary Bond, Dalton seems to have wanted to play Bond as the latter while the studio was still smitten with the former, I think Dalton could have re-booted 007 the way Craig has with Casino Royale, that was I think what Dalton had in mind but the scripts scrambled to find a villain in an era of "peace". I suspect 007 would get re-booted once the sinister action spy cum assassin movie is reborn, maybe we still get Craig and Casino, the character has a lot of traction and the "bad" Dalton films were only going to keep Bond under wraps for so long. I love Brosnan but his Bond suffered a similar fate, too much the gentleman, too much the high fashion that was how we knew the villain was gauche, frankly I see Brosnan as his generation's Cary Grant, good comedic actor, but like Moore too light to deliver the Bond we now know we want, a Daniel Craig brute who polishes nice. If 007 went dark after Dalton then I suspect Brosnan never gets Bond and the Casino Royale re-boot occurs instead. At least I would hope our dear Bond truly gets to live more than thrice, not counting Lazenby, who was almost our Dalton here.
 
Sadly Dalton was whip-sawed by the end of the Cold War and having inherited a James Bond played for humor by Moore versus the darker more serious potential of the literary Bond, Dalton seems to have wanted to play Bond as the latter while the studio was still smitten with the former, I think Dalton could have re-booted 007 the way Craig has with Casino Royale, that was I think what Dalton had in mind but the scripts scrambled to find a villain in an era of "peace". I suspect 007 would get re-booted once the sinister action spy cum assassin movie is reborn, maybe we still get Craig and Casino, the character has a lot of traction and the "bad" Dalton films were only going to keep Bond under wraps for so long. I love Brosnan but his Bond suffered a similar fate, too much the gentleman, too much the high fashion that was how we knew the villain was gauche, frankly I see Brosnan as his generation's Cary Grant, good comedic actor, but like Moore too light to deliver the Bond we now know we want, a Daniel Craig brute who polishes nice. If 007 went dark after Dalton then I suspect Brosnan never gets Bond and the Casino Royale re-boot occurs instead. At least I would hope our dear Bond truly gets to live more than thrice, not counting Lazenby, who was almost our Dalton here.

The success of Jason Bourne in particular really scrambled the expectations. Bond needed to be grittier, and the Craig films have delivered.

I don't think a reboot like that was possible in the 80's or even early 90's. But I do think Dalton, with the right script and director, could have delivered a quasi-reboot that would have been a real step up. The Living Daylights clearly wants to move in that direction, but it struggles to get there, thanks to a fairly silly plot. I think Broccoli was afraid to change up the formula that much. The Moore Era was rather silly and cliched, but it had delivered at the box office.
 
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