Dalton's Performance

I like Dalton too, but yeah I agree that I think it's silly to pretend he is the only real bond actor. Dalton's fans tend to be quite defensive of him and I can kind of see why, as his films were not that popular compared to Connery's or Moore's or Brosnan's or Craig's. Dalton is good and ranks about 3rd in my book of the Bond actors, but I think it is important to recognize the brilliance of the other actors as well.

As a Dalton fanboy let me try to turn this around for you. Timothy Dalton's performance as Bond just does it for me, he's everything I would look for in the character. It helps that his two films are two of my favorite movies in general, not just in this series. I'm also on board with the notion that he should have started earlier, with AVTAK and that he would have made GoldenEye even better than it already was.

But with all that said, he's not THE actor. He's just one of them. The best one, yes, but I don't allow my love for him to "cancel out" the others. All of the actors were great Bonds and every one of them has a film in my top 10 for this series.

So not all Dalton supporters are blinded by their fanboyism. You shouldn't let those people take away from his films and his performances because you'd be doing yourself just as a big a disservice as the fanboys do by shutting out anything he wasn't in.

Dalton's performance is good. He is terrific in the action scenes. But the Bond character has been changed as he takes over in this film. Bond becomes too drippy with women. It's almost a caring full-on romance with the cello player. That's not the Bond that I want to see.

I love Dalton but I even saw Lazenby as one who really captured Bond from the novel.

Really though, Dalton is a close second as Bond actors in my book and should've been in Goldenye :)

I'm quite a fan of Dalton's Bond, and probably carry on most that he didn't have at least one more movie. Also, I'm more of the mind these days that it's not Roger Moore that bugs me as much as the writing treatment of his movies - it's like they were suspicious of Bond's sophistication and decided to play to the hooting yobbos in the cheap seats. 'For Your Eyes Only' showed how well Moore could play him with a mature script (speaking of, his apparent age here actually works in his favor IMO - when he runs up several flights of steps I think 'wow, he's doing better than I could there!')

I don't hate Dalton OR Moore. I just think the timing and the way things worked out was very unfortunate. In some alternate universe Moore would have become Bond in 1969 and stayed Bond until Moonraker. Then Dalton should have been Bond from Four Your Eyes Only up until License to Kill.