See, that's the thing. I read (some of) the books (the first 3 or 4, I believe), so the only early Bond films that feel like Bond to me are Dr. No (to a certain degree), From Russia with Love, and On Her Majesty's Secret Service. I like Goldfinger, but that's where the campiness and over-reliance on ridiculous sci-fi gadgetry began.

The Living Daylights still has some of the campiness of the Moore era (as it was originally written for Moore), but overall it captures what Fleming's Bond was meant to be better than any Bond film that came before. Hell, the sequence with the cello sniper at the beginning is almost identical to Fleming's The Living Daylights short story.

Licence to Kill, to me, is the film we should have gotten after On Her Majesty's Secret Service, but with Bond going after Blofeld to avenge his wife's death. The death of Leiter's wife, to me, brought Bond back to his wife's death, and his rampage of revenge is (to Bond) the catharsis he never got against Blofeld.

Instead, we got Diamonds Are Forever, certainly the worst of Connery's tenure.

Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace do a decent job of capturing Bond as he should be, but he's almost too dark and broody. I see a lot of potential in the series now, with Quantum being the new SPECTRE, but Bond needs to take a cue from Dalton in The Living Daylights and lighten up just a scohch. (I say that word all the time, yet just realized I have NO idea how to spell it. Scoh-CH, with the "oh" being pronounced like the word "oh.")

And I don't have a problem with the tweaking of the Bond "formula" (gunbarrel sequence, etc). It's the current series trying to distance itself from the campy excesses of past eras.

However, I do agree that Quantum felt a bit too much like the Bourne movies and not enough like a Bond movie. Making a Bond movie without adapting any Fleming material is always a risky move - I hope they can do better with the next one.