- For a long time, the Timothy Dalton movies were seen as a Dork Age, with Licence to Kill being so gory and violent that many felt it barely resembled a Bond film. Nowadays, however, the Dalton movies are seen as prototypes for the Daniel Craig era, having had the bad luck of hitting about twenty years too early. In addition, the Bond that Dalton portrays is much closer to the Bond that Ian Fleming wrote: a stone killer and a womanizer with a hinted-at lust for violence. (Well, okay, all the Bonds are womanizers, but whereas Connery is the archetypal Bond-As-Playa and Roger Moore's just... well... Roger Moore, Dalton comes across as a sexual predator.) Craig himself can be seen as a Dork Age by the Moore or Brosnan fans since the plots had no science fiction plots by the villains for monetary gain which is seen as a detractor to some.
(Emphasis added)
I don't even. What? WHAT?
Dalton's Bond sleeps with four women across two films, tops. We'll ignore Yacht Lady from The Living Daylights, because she exists solely to wear a bikini and demonstrate that this Bond's as magnetic as Roger Mortis was (you wanna talk sexual predators, take a look at The Incredible Suit's Roger Moore Paedograph, but be warned that you'll never be able to watch For Your Eyes Only the same way... I guess I should make it clear that I'm not saying Roger Moore's a pedophile, but rather that his James Bond slept with women about half his age).
I can see how Bond, just as written in the script, might come off as a sexual predator in The Living Daylights vis a vis Kara Milovy - he's pretty clearly putting the moves on her just to figure out what her criminal boyfriend is up to. But to end the analysis there is to ignore Timothy Dalton's acting (I know, lead actor in a Bond film actually doing some "acting," what is this world coming to). I joked in the OHMSS thing that Dalton was a nerve le Carre immigrant mainly because le Carre's protagonists always seemed to end up getting screwed over because they couldn't keep it in their pants; Dalt!Bond suffers a similar (but nowhere near as permanent) fate by dragging Kara along with him after he's done (ahem) pumping her for information. What's doubly weird is that elsewhere on the site, TvTropes says that the romance with Kara in TLD is one of the rare times in the franchise that it's more than just a token romance (you have to scroll all the way down to, um, "Token Romance").
Then there's General Pushkin's squeeze; at one point in the film, in order to distract Pushkin's bodyguard, Dalt!Bond rips off her nightie and makes her stand there topless. It's a pragmatic, if decidedly nasty move,
Dalt!Bond isn't exactly a saint to either of the two women in Licence to Kill - weirdly, the script decides to suggest that Bond's not overjoyed about a CIA pilot throwing herself at him. But the one time he's rough with Pam is when he... um... throws her on the bed, holds her down and sticks a hand up her skirt (to get at the pistol she keeps in her garter-holster) when he thinks she's betrayed him. Again, context kinda matters. He's not doing any of that to have sex with her but rather to deal with what he thinks is a threat.
With Lupe... well,
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