Lessons from The Living Daylights

The Living Daylights, Timothy Dalton's first Bond film (out of two), is just solid awesome and one of my favorite 007 outings (to be fair the Bond series as a whole leaves little in "middle ground films" for me; I either love a particular entry or hate it.) If SPECTRE is Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation; and, frig i don't know one of the brosnan era ones let's say tomorrow never dies, is M:I:II; then The Living Daylights is the first Mission Impossible movie: tense, and twisty, with a level of hip that's clearly there but ages much less poorly than its immediate sequel's.

Dalton's Bond is darkest and truest to the books; The Living Daylights is the only Bond story I've also actually read the entirety of (it's a pretty short one; encompassing the events of maybe the first four minutes after the prologue and title sequence. (They had to add a lot in the adaptation.)) Also there's this nonfiction book from when I was a kid, "How in the World?" from Reader's Digest, that had a behind-the-scenes exploration of how they did some of the stunts I'm about to describe, and it was just the coolest thing. So there's all that.

Anyway there's this really great sequence where Bond is escaping Soviet Russia with the assassin and cellist Kara Milovy, getting into this awesome car chase where he has to use his spymobile's gadgets in nifty ways. Using a side-mounted laser to cut a cop car's body from its axles, using forward-mounted missiles to blow up the blockade in front of them, pushing a shack onto a frozen lake and driving the shack around for a bit, getting a tire shot off and then using the bare wheel to carve a hole in the ice for a cop car to fall into, before lowering skids and skiing around like that until ultimately crashing into a snowbank, activating the self-destruct, and escaping down the mountain on Kara's cello case, using her Stradivarius as a rudder to steer.
It is delightful, just a treat.

And so like: why the aitch wasn't the car Moone drove around with for a bit a spy-mobile? I was thinking solidly in "Jason Bourne drives a hummer through a casino" mindset, when of course supernatural spy cars would in "real" life be equipped with all sorts of nifty rad magic gadgets and maybe I should have been keeping that in mind? But it's never too late.

As I was watching the car chase with the gadgets and all, I was thinking in my mind how I would have done it were I assigned to do the scene (and we can work off of that): have the powers established, have him go through them one by one, the way these things go; where each gadget gets used in the end and all are needed and none are forgotten about. Only, the last one doesn't get used in the way you think it's going to? Like there's a grappling hook, and instead of being used as a tow cable, it's used as a harpoon gun, or something?

I don't know, just a thought...