The Living Daylights/Awesome

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Bond and Kara crossing the Austrian border in a cello case.
  • Necros successfully infiltrates an MI5 safehouse by dressing up as a milkman. He proceeds to have a brutal fight with an MI5 Red Shirt, then uses a radio handset, adjusting his voice subtly, to warn everybody outside of a (false) gas leak. With the help of milk bottle grenades, he effortlessly kidnaps the target and escapes in plain sight by slightly changing his outfit to resemble a paramedic. Magnificent. While his theme music triumphantly blares in the background.
    • Made even better by the fact that it's only one part of one of the best Evil Plans in Bond movie history.
    • That Red Shirt himself is a Crowning Moment Of Awesome. A somewhat unimposing-looking, skinny middle-aged chap (presumably played by a veteran stuntman) who nonetheless almost succeeds in fighting the much younger, bigger and stronger The Dragon to a standstill. Hell, from the looks of things, Necros didn't even manage to kill the guy. Give that guy his own movie series!
  • Bond having a fistfight with Necros while hanging out the back of a cargo plane in midflight. While a time bomb is counting down. Yikes.
  • Kamran Shah and his followers' all-out assault on the Soviet airbase would be awesome... except that they're Expies of the Taliban. How... very awkward.
    • The Taliban did not exist until 1994, which would be 7 years after this movie was released. Kamran Shah and his men are Expies of the Mujahadeen, who at that time were our allies and fighting the Soviets. And while some of the Mujahedeen went on to become the Taliban, many more did not, and some of them in fact fought against the Taliban (albeit unsuccessfully) when they originally took over Afghanistan.
  • The Gilbraltar training exercise that opens the film. One of the most action-packed openings of a Bond movie ever (and of the few to directly tie into the plot of the movie), culminating in Bond driving an explosives-laden Land Rover off the mountainside (with screaming Mook left inside), parachuting out before it explodes, and then landing his parachute on top of a passing yacht where a bored sexy heiress yearning to bump into a "Real Man" is waiting with a chilled bottle of champagne.

Bond: (using the heiress' phone) Exercise Control, 007 here. I'll report in an hour.
Linda: (offering a glass) Won't you join me?
Bond: (thinks it over) Better make that two.

  • Pushkin gets one of his own at the end.

Pushkin: (after listening to Koskov plead for his life) Put him on the next plane to Moscow.
Koskov: Oh thank you, Comrade Gener-
Pushkin: In the diplomatic bag.

  • The only reason the villain's plot failed is because James Bond disobeyed his orders to kill Kara because he suspected that she was an innocent woman who was being set up, and was willing to risk a great deal of official displeasure rather than potentially kill an innocent person. We already know that Bond is a badass assassin, but a moment of character that clearly so illustrates the difference between James and the hired murderers he fights is awesome in and of itself.