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Comments
As always a personal opinion not based upon any fact, Pierce Brosnans GE gave the franchise the boost it needed after two Daltons & six years of pause.
I doubt sincerely if Dalton would have welcomed by the general audience like the welcomed Dalton.
Dalton was just not a very commercial choice and his two movies showed that they clearly had no idea what to do with this version. One thing was made clear that Keatons Batman did better in its opening weekend than Daltons whole run with TLD.
At the end of the day the franchise is a financial enterprise and Dalton just is not a very hot commercial property, and that was the end of him.
Plus my point was not that it would have made more money, just that it would have been a better movie.
Like, that's the most perfect Bond movie ever?? Ho ho ho, that's the EASY choice, RIGHT?
;)
Well... that's mainly because it mostly IS the most perfect Bond film, I conjure.... B-)
That's true. One never got the chance to show his commercial chops (cut down too soon) and the other only showed his commercial chops (and never really showed critical ones) imho.
=D>
FRWL is just the best overall film from a literary POV IMHO.
But EON was not the only boss, so what they wanted is moot after LTK performance at the US BO.
Daltons third would have been ridicolous from what I gathered from the ideas of his "property of a lady" ideas. It would have made CR '67 look reasonable.
Daltons GE would never have been a better movie as LTK was already a poor movie as a Miami Vice wannabee.
Yup.
The man was robbed. Its impossible to have these conversations without "blaming" his departure on License To Kill of course, which is in fact one of my lower ranking Bonds, not because of Dalton, but because of a cheese factor no Moore film could ever touch. A semi-tractor whose frame suddenly articulates to get past some flaming wreckage? If it were anything other than a Bond I'd have written the movie off as a farce based on that scene alone (never mind the myriad other).
Goldeneye was good with Brosnan, but it and all his Bonds were a little too "machine gun" heavy for me if you know what I mean. I do wish Dalton had been given the same serious attention (and budget)...might have been spectacular.
I know where you're coming from with regards to LTK. Although I have always been a big Dalton fan, I also used to have my reservations about LTK, but have come to like it more and more over time. Dalts was indeed 'robbed' of a third. Not by Brosnan (although that's the way I like to tell the story) but by the disastrous 6 year hiatus. He'd have done at least one more if it hadn't been for the legal wranglings.
Although, as someone has said above, the story outlines of the Dalton's third outing that we've heard of sound a bit dodgy.
In the end, I think this is why they went with Brosnan, some people made the same assessment. And with all its flaws, I am glad we had the GE we ended up with in the end, with Brosnan and all. It did relaunch the franchise.
Sure, serve me a white Russian or I'll pee on your carpet. ;)
To be really honest the whole drug scene had been done to dead and way better by Miami Vice, the TV show that did change the face of tv series in those days [I recently re-watched the show and was struck about how dark and strong the show really was and how that was hidden by visual aspects of the show].
EON had different plans with the movie which fell through and they came up with a subpar revenge drugs movie with the main character that was called James Bond but could easily have featured Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Brucie, and the rest of the action tribe and it would not have been a very different movie.
EON was struggling with Daltons style, his first being much more aimed at the strengths of Brosnan or Moore and number two being a generic actioner.
And for me that is Daltons legacy: close but no cigar.
SO hence my position that Kevin did the franchise a favor by stopping them for so many years in legislation and then restarting the franchise afresh with a new but familiar face that guaranteed bums in the seats for 007. It is after all the movie business and not some hobby. EON let Dalton go with his head up but they knew it was the right thing to do.
To bad they failed to sit down with Brosnan and explain the new plans, but it was Connery all over again. They have a difficulty with learning things especially handling primadonna actors. [which all of them are probably]
If anything Dalton could have worked if he'd have gotten the 6 years gap before his first outing so the producers would have had the balls to get rid of all the Moore elements and go in a different direction.
May be they encountered a wobble with LTK in terms of the US box office, but they'd been there before with TMWTGG, and bounced back stronger than ever. Not saying that Dalton's third would have been another TSWLM, but it's not as if LTK lost money. Why assume EON couldn't have turned things around with Dalton?
But I am happy to acknowledge that when you look at Dalton's two films, Brosnan was commercially more successful. I also think it's fair to say, when you compare LTK with the Brosnan films, that the latter's 4 movies were simply aiming for a more conventional, commercial audience. EON weren't willing to rock the boat or take any risks. LTK takes Bond to places he hadn't been before - they were stretching the envelope a little, as they have done again with Craig. They never attempted that with Brosnan. We all have views on which Bond is better. Personally I think the two Dalton films are a more interesting and personally, entertaining, watch than the Brosnan films, which bore me rigid. TLD and LTK have faults, but give me those films, over timid, poorly written homages to the 1970s and early 80s any day of the week.
But the main point that I was disagreeing with above is the idea that there was some kind of creative reawakening during the Brosnan era. I dispute that 100%. The Brosnan era was all about a nostalgia ride - riffing off the Roger Moore era and ticking endless boxes. To the extent that for DAD they thought it would be clever to reference every single preceding movie. It was an era of almost total creative failure and lack of ideas. It may have been commercially successful, and perhaps when seen from one step removed you can credit those films with putting Bond on a stable financial path, but from a creative perspective it was a dire time to be a Bond fan. Poor scripts, stories, music. Just bad.