I've considered tackling The Living Daylights once or twice, which I think is the best of the two Dalton installments though I enjoy both of them tremendously in spite of their flaws, but I wouldn't try Licence to Kill. That film was too low budget, too cheap looking to really feel like a Bond film. It looked and felt like any number of low budget action movies coming out in that time period, but unlike some of those films Licence to Kill had to overcome John Glen's fairly bland direction style so it never really had a chance to rise above those budget limitations. Though to be fair the truck chase at the end of that movie is phenomenal. One of my favorite action pieces in the franchise. But yeah, I just don't know that there's enough there to work with when it comes to LTK in order to fix it.
Living Daylights on the other hand had budget enough to overcome Glen's directorial shortcomings and a much better story to tell but suffered from the fact that they didn't know who the next Bond was going to be and thus wrote a script that played like a half-committed Roger Moore picture as you suggested. The fact that they wanted to do, and filmed, a magic carpet ride sequence of sorts points pretty blatantly in my opinion to them assuming they'd have Moore back. And unfortunately it suffers from indulgence as I think all the Bond films post Goldfinger do. It's just too long, and it drags like crazy just prior to the climax. But I think if somebody went in to that film with a clear idea of what they wanted to do in order to fix those problems there's a great movie in there. Would be more of a trim the fat project than anything else I think.
There's a lot of things I want to do with the Bond franchise. I'm working on a Quantum of Solace fix right now, which I started sometime last month, to try and fix some of the incomprehensible editing and trim or remove as much of the meaningless, unnecessary, and in one case plainly dumb action scenes and just generally slow the film down and let it breath. It wants so desperately to be a quieter character piece but keeps getting rudely interrupted by loud, obnoxious action sequences as if audiences are unable to pay attention for longer than 4 minutes if something doesn't go boom. So I got that going, but it won't be done for quite sometime.
I also want to tackle Dr. No soon. I love that movie to death, but I've always wanted to make it feel just a LITTLE closer to the rest of the franchise. Give it a pre-titles sequence, a proper gun barrel opening that doesn't get interrupted by a credit for Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, improve the pacing, and pair down the INCESSANT use of the Bond theme. I actually just recently completed a test for Dr. No recently that I was mostly happy with.
