BOND-A-THON: Skyfall

Let’s talk about the mythical “third Bond movie”. There is a school of thought which avers that the third outing is where an actor truly settles into the role, the formula really clicks together, God is in his Heaven and all is right with the world. This bunch of hogwash is based on the fact that Connery’s third Bond movie, ‘Goldfinger’, was when the producers really ramped up the whole “girls, guns, gadgets and globetrotting” ethos, while Moore’s – ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ – marked the point at which the filmmakers decided to stop trying to force him into the Connery mould and let him be more, well, Moore-ish. Oh yeah, and they went to town on the girls, guns, gadgets and globetrotting as well.

It’s a rule of thumb you can’t even apply to Lazenby and Dalton because, respectively, they only appeared as Bond once (mercifully) and twice (tragically). And let’s utterly confound the theory by pointing out that number three Brosnan was the god-awful ‘The World is Not Enough’.

Now let’s talk about a couple of things I’ve said on this blog previously apropos of ‘Skyfall’, the expectations attached to it, and its director Sam Mendes. Two years ago, in a rambling review of ‘Quantum of Solace’, I said this: “I came across an article on the net last week speculating whether Sam Mendes was on board to direct the next Bond film or just as a consultant and I groaned inwardly. Don't get me wrong: ‘American Beauty’ - belter; ‘Road to Perdition’ - handsomely mounted; ‘Jarhead’ - moments of brilliance. But nothing in the filmography that says "hey, you know what, that Sam Mendes bloke has got Bond movie director written all over him". I shook my head and thought, Great, first Marc Forster and now Sam Mendes ...”

Re-reviewing ‘QoS’ – which is only one letter removed from ‘PoS’ – nine days ago for this very blog-a-thon, I concluded: “ ‘Skyfall’ doesn’t have to do much more than be edited properly and have a coherent script to emerge as infinitely better than its predecessor. But, please EON, please please please, after a four year wait and with only a finite amount of times the now 44-year old Craig can reprise the role, please let ‘Skyfall’ be awesome.”

With regard to that first comment: please accept my apologies, Mr Mendes, you’ve turned in a damn good film. With regard to the second: although ‘Skyfall’ does a lot more than just deliver better editing and a coherent script, it stops just short of awesome. But damn good is more than acceptable, particularly after the shoddy and joyless place Marc Forster had taken the series.

‘Skyfall’ gets off to one hell of a bloody good start with Bond (Daniel Craig) in the middle of a mission that’s swiftly going tits up. He’s in Turkey where a generic bad guy has swiped a hard-drive containing the identities of a fuckton of deep cover MI6 agents. A car chase segues into a motorcycle chase (which pisses all over the motorcycle chase in ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’), in turn segueing into a fight on the top of a moving train (which pisses all over the fight on the top of a moving train in ‘Octopussy’), the whole thing concluding with a “wait a minute, this can’t happen in a Bond movie” moment akin to the ostensibly downbeat pre-credits payoffs in ‘You Only Live Twice’ and ‘Die Another Day’.

Following a pretty effective opening credits sequence (kudos to Adele for delivering the most appropriately Bondian theme song since Tina Turner kicked ass with ‘GoldenEye’), the focus shifts to M (Judi Dench). Notwithstanding that Dench’s M has come to redefine the character, the secret service hasn’t had an easy ride on her watch. Between the bad decisions motivated by personal feelings in ‘The World is Not Enough’, her mistrust of the 14-month imprisoned Bond in ‘Die Another Day’ and the revelation that a long-term member of her personal staff has been working for the enemy in ‘Quantum of Solace’, it’s kind of surprising M’s still has a job. In ‘Skyfall’, she faces some pretty harsh questions from the establishment with new intel chief Mallory (Ralph Fiennes) pressuring her to take voluntary retirement. Meanwhile, axe-grinding politician Clair Dowar (Helen McCrory) forces M to give evidence at an enquiry over a series of MI6 debacles culminating in a terrorist attack on HQ.

During all of this upheaval, Bond returns to duty albeit physically unfit, psychologically battered and borderline alcohol dependant. There’s a Metallica song that contains that lines “breaking your life / broken, beat and scarred / we die hard”. A pretty good description of the bad place Bond is in. And it doesn’t get any easier as he sets off in pursuit of Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem), a cyber-terrorist and an unwelcome blast from M’s past, who is orchestrating a campaign of revenge.

This is about all I can give away in terms of the narrative. ‘Skyfall’ is the most spoiler-laden Bond movie yet made, with a final act sucker punch that gives it real weight. It’ll probably be all over the internet within the next couple of days, but I’m honour bound to keep it under wraps. This also restricts me in terms of discussing the film on any deeper level.

Here’s what I will say: ‘Skyfall’ is at one and the same time a Bond film for the modern age (and manages to be so without the horribly misjudged Bourne-stylee crapola of its immediate predecessor) and the most regressive Bond movie in ages. Its modern age credentials take the form of a debate, which forms the backbone of the movie, of the purpose and relevance of MI6 – and therefore, by extension, of Bond himself – in an era where the geo-political map of the Cold War has long since been blurred and enemies of the state can literally be anywhere.

It’s no coincidence that, of all the Bond movies, ‘Skyfall’ spends the most time on home soil. Of the three major action sequences, one is chase/shoot-out plays out through London’s cavernous and sepulchral Underground system and then erupts into its crowded streets, while the denouement takes place in Scotland.

As to the regressive elements, most of them gel with overall aesthetic. Mendes finds a way to balance the fanboy imperative with his personal vision as a filmmaker. And with ‘Skyfall’ marking 50 years of Bond, he includes some nifty in-jokes to far greater effect than the horrible parade of references in ‘Die Another Day’. The Aston Martin DB is a case in point: brought quite literally out of cold storage and still boasting all the bells and whistles from ‘Goldfinger’, it’s a startling moment of discontinuity since Craig’s Bond won the thing at cards in ‘Casino Royale’ (which, in the current timeline, was essentially Bond #1) and yet its machine guns and ejector seat explicitly recall Connery’s third outing. (We’re back to the mythical Bondian rule of thirds again.)

Elsewhere, ostensible Bond girl Severine (Berenice Marlohe) is written in, bedded and written out even more perfunctorily than Gemma Arterton’s Agent Fields in ‘Quantum of Solace’. Bardem’s characterization of Silva sails very close to outright camp and, sad to say, a borderline homophobic scene reminiscent of the mincing Wynt and Kidd in ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ got the biggest laughs at the screening I attended. At least Silva isn’t out for world domination and presents a definite threat to 007, sparing us a return to the flamboyant but laughably ludicrous villains of the Moore era.

Q returns – kudos to Ben Wishaw for sweeping away all thoughts of John Cleese in the last couple of Brosnan movies – as does another staple of the franchise, while the baton is passed on in terms of … but that would be telling. In its concluding scenes, ‘Skyfall’ totally eradicates Bond’s past and joyfully re-establishes the expected tropes, a decision which seems almost contradictory. Indeed, there’s a puppy-doggish eagerness to evoke the Bonds of old in the very last scene that’s tonally at odds with the dark drama that’s occupied the preceding two and a quarter hours. There is, in other words, a sense of transition where I’d expected consolidation.

So, yes, perhaps the “third Bond movie” ethos holds true: just as ‘Goldfinger’ and ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ weren’t necessarily the best that Connery and Moore delivered but rather the clearest distillations of the formula, ditto ‘Skyfall’. Let’s hope that whatever comes next doesn’t relapse into the formulaic.

BOND-A-THON: Quantum of Solace

‘Casino Royale’ maintained fidelity to its source novel in many ways, not least in presenting Bond’s card table duel with underworld accountant Le Chiffre as his first mission following his promotion to Double-O status. I wonder if, for even the briefest moment, the producers considered reapproaching the other novels, this time in sequence, and reconfiguring them for a contemporary audience. Just as ‘Casino Royale’ replicated the mechanics and setting of Fleming’s novel but with a framing narrative centered around terrorism and high-level financial chicanery, did anyone consider the possibility of ‘Live and Let Die’ with Mr Big revealed as the man behind Le Chiffre (there isn’t a single Bond novel where “SMERSH” can’t easily be recast as “shadowy terrorist organization”) and Solitaire’s gift of prognostication an enigmatic and possibly genuine preternatural talent rather than the silly plot device of the Roger Moore film; or ‘Moonraker’ as a properly earth-bound adaptation but focusing on drones and stealth technology rather than Drax’s phallocentric rocket; ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ without the oil rig and concentrating on the greed/death/emptiness of riches subtext of the novel and with Tiffany Case as a proper romantic heroine despite her personal agenda – a sort of Vesper Lynd but without the coercion; or ‘From Russia With Love’ brought up to date with the Russian Mafia and prostitution rings; ‘Dr No’ as an acidly satirical comment on environmentalism (something the film under consideration today tries to achieve) with the guano mine retained but its claw-handed villain striving for a source of clean energy only with a dirty use in mind; or ‘Goldfinger’ played out against the worsening global financial crisis; ‘Thunderball’ updated in any way you see fit – as long as there are weapons of mass destruction, the basic plot remains timely; ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ with the events of the last half of the novel compressed into a punchily effective pre- and immediately post-credits bit of action, the hoods at the motel setting Bond on the trail of a more high-ranking villain; a less lachrymose adaptation of ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’ with subliminal messaging as a tool of media control instead of the daft hypnosis/sabotaged crops malarkey of both the novel and the Lazenby film; and perhaps collapsing ‘You Only Live Twice’ (retaining Dr Shatterhand’s grotesque and disturbing garden of death) and ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’ (retaining the brainwashing, M’s dichotomy and the redemptive suicide mission) into a single taut, angry and challenging narrative?

I’m guessing nobody did, but fuck me it would have been one hell of a direction to go with the newly revivified franchise!

This is what the producers did instead: in mid-2006, with ‘Casino Royale’ in post-production, the powers that be an EON Productions decided the follow-up would be a linear sequel, thus building on the Bond-Vesper relationship and channeling the theme of betrayal into a hard-as-nails revenge thriller. The story was based on an original idea by producer Michael G. Wilson and shifted the focus of the villain/nemesis from terrorist funds (the plot dynamic of 'Casino Royale') to environmentalism and water supplies. Roger Michell was approached to direct but with no script available refused to commit. ‘Casino Royale’ scripters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (Paul Haggis did some work on the denouement) were re-engaged to work up Wilson's concept. With ‘Casino Royale’ proving a commercial and critical success, the heat was on to get its still-untitled successor into production. The impending writers' strike further redacted the production schedule. Purvis and Wade essentially wrote the first draft under the gun. Forster came on board as director, citing that although he wasn’t a Bond fan he’d been impressed enough by ‘Casino Royale’ to agree. Nonetheless, he felt that film was overlong and wanted ‘Quantum of Solace’ - the title now having publically been confirmed, although having bugger all to do with the eponymous Fleming short story - to be shorter, tighter and faster. Forster, Wilson and Haggis heavily reworked Purvis and Wade’s script. Anyone sensing a too many cooks/spoiled broth ratio here? It gets worse: during filming, Forster engaged Joshua Zetumer (a writer of spec scripts who, at this point, had yet to see any of his work put into production) to undertake rewrites on a day-to-day basis depending on however Forster and the actors’ ideas on any given scene may have changed. A casualty of this approach was that Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) had his timely and intriguing subplot reduced, a damned shame given that Wright's performance in ‘Casino Royale’ revivified Leiter in much the same way as Craig made the character of Bond his own.

The result of all this malarkey is that ‘Quantum of Solace’ is a complete mishmash. It weighs in with some intriguing concepts and possibly the most overt political imperative of any Bond movie. It flirts with exploring the Bond/M relationship in greater detail, but never quite finds a dynamic. It gives us the first Bond girl – Camille (Olga Kurylenko) whose relationship with 007 isn’t defined sexually – but arbitrarily throws Bond into bed with fellow spook Agent Fields (Gemma Arterton) only to kill her off in a manner that explicitly homages Shirley Eaton’s demise in ‘Goldfinger’, thus reminding us how casually disposable the franchise’s attitude to women is. It gives us a sequence of dusty, dirty, grubby and determinedly unromantic locations, as if Forster wanted to declare with every frame a commitment to moving away from the fantasy and lifestyle porn of the previous films, but renders each location title card in drastically different, almost comedic, lettering so that the film is riddled with establishing shots that look like something out of a spoof film.

But the worst problem with ‘Quantum of Solace’ is its action scenes. This is a James Bond film, y’all, so action scenes are kind of important. Forster makes the monumentally awful decision to steer it into Jason Bourne territory, but whereas the Paul Greengrass contributions to that franchise are shot through with pounding, hyper-kinetic action scenes, ‘Quantum of Solace’ just looks like it’s been edited by a speed-freak who’s been washing down amphetamines with quadruple espressos. Either that or the editing is a 102-minute exercise in trying to disguise Forster’s lack of facility in staging action. Whatever salvageable grace notes ‘Quantum of Solace’ might offer in other respects, it nosedives towards Shitsville every time it delivers an action scene.

It also makes the fundamental mistake of throwing the majority of its actions scenes at the viewer in the first half before struggling to marshal a mélange of disparate elements into something approach a plot as the hour-mark approaches. After which the pace slows to the point of tedium. 102 minutes – the shortest Bond movie – and yet its last 40 minutes are truly interminable. Approaching ‘Quantum of Solace’ for this review – it was only the second time I’ve watched the film – I wondered if it would improve (a) on a second viewing, and (b) shortly after watching ‘Casino Royale’ (my rationale: appraise the two films as a unified whole and see if the narrative peregrinations of the latter get ironed out). But I’m left with no change of opinion from when I originally reviewed it over two years ago. And exactly the same thing happened while I was watching it: round about the halfway mark, boredom set in and I simply didn’t give a crap what happened.

Martin Campbell, directing ‘Casino Royale’, was savvy enough to know which elements of the franchise still worked and which needed pruning back or doing away with entirely. Forster simply shitcans everything that makes a Bond movie a Bond movie. Somebody should have given him the Bourne reboot instead and enticed Campbell to continue the story he’d so brilliantly envisage in ‘Casino Royale’.

Only one thing emerges as solid gold in ‘Quantum of Solace’: Daniel Craig’s total commitment to his personification of Bond and his innate ability to take the character seriously. I ended my original review with the observation that “it’s a given … that James Bond will return. This time around, though, I have no expectations.” Since then, and with each of the various trailers and publicity stills I’ve seen, I have developed expectations. Said expectations have evolved from tentative anticipation to borderline pant-wetting excitement. ‘Skyfall’ doesn’t have to do much more than be edited properly and have a coherent script to emerge as infinitely better than its predecessor. But, please EON, please please please, after a four year wait and with only a finite amount of times the now 44-year old Craig can reprise the role, please let ‘Skyfall’ be awesome.

BOND-A-THON: Casino Royale

Looking back over Pierce Brosnan’s tenure in the tux, it’s clear that the franchise was on shaky ground in just his second outing, while ‘The World is Not Enough’ and ‘Die Another Day’ rammed the saga thoroughly into the doldrums. Something drastic was needed to get this back on course.

And here I needs must use a word I freakin’ hate: reboot.

‘Casino Royale’ takes the most drastic of all approaches in reinvigorating Bond. Not only does it give us a new actor in the role, not only does it have a pre-credits sequence that’s less than four minutes long and shot in black-and-motherhumping-white, not only do the opening credits feature not a single gyrating naked woman in silhouette … but ‘Casino Royale’ completely ignores the twenty films that proceed it, establishes a new timeline and gives us Bond at the start of his career. Just as ‘Casino Royale’ was Bond #1 in the order of the books, ‘Casino Royale’ wipes the slate clean and introduces itself as Bond #1 Version 2.0. If that makes any sense.

But director Martin Campbell (scoring two for two in the director’s chair – he was the driving force behind everything that worked about ‘GoldenEye’) and writers Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Paul Haggis are smart enough not to try to reinvent the wheel. Thus, the film retains the fast cars, high stakes gambling, prickling Bond/M relationship and sumptuous lifestyle porn that are the hallmarks of any halfway decent 007 outing. And it jettisons the dead weight that had dragged the series down: there’s no Q (sound the Hallelujah Chorus – John Cleese was a fucking insult to the memory of Desmond Llewellyn), no Moneypenny (Samantha Bond had started to make the role her own, but the scripts were fast becoming an insult to the character), no ludicrous gadgets, no monologue-loving uber-villians with a world domination agenda, and best of all no stupid one-liners. The film is, to use a fairly obvious one-liner myself, a Royale without cheese.

With only one minor character, a Swiss banker, edging towards caricature, ‘Casino Royale’ is played dead straight. In the prologue, we see Bond (Daniel Craig) earning his Double-O status by undertaking two kills. The first is messy bit of business. The second sees him well on his way to becoming the mono-emotional assassin of Fleming’s novels: a “blunt instrument” as M (Judi Dench) puts it. We also see him, as his attempt to bankrupt accountant-to-terrorism Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) over the card table looks set to end in disaster, lose his cool. He makes rash decisions; becomes a victim of his own ego; almost fucks up the mission. Bond is challenged from all sides: by his unexpected romantic reawakening as spiky banter with treasury official Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) thaws into genuine affection; by Vesper’s refusal to be impressed with his outwardly brash demeanour; by M’s outrage at his heavy-handed tactics (a brilliantly executed action scene ending with an embassy stand-off sees Bond provoke a diplomatic incident); and, finally, by his own emotions. For arguably the only time since ‘From Russia With Love’, what we have here is a thinking man’s Bond movie. And by God it’s all the better for treating its audience as adults.

Going into ‘Casino Royale’ knowing that it’s a reasonably faithful adaptation of the book (or rather the middle third is: the first hour is entirely invented, ditto a Venice-set finale), it would have been understandable for aficionados to lay a small bet that the filmmaker’s wouldn’t go there with either the torture scene or the brutal final line (“the bitch is dead”). They’d have lost. Torture’s a big thing in Fleming’s novels: Bond takes a lot of pain, and usually in gratuitously extended sequences, in just about every book. The tendency is less evident in the films: there’s the “soften him up” moment from ‘Dr No’ and the keel-hauling scene in ‘For Your Eyes Only’, while Leiter gets ill-used in spectacularly gory fashion in ‘License to Kill’. ‘Casino Royale’ goes all the way with the patented Fleming nastiness, however, as a vengeful Le Chiffre, Bond at his mercy, goes to work in a manner guaranteed to induce wincing in anyone who owns a pair of testicles.

Misogyny is also a big thing in the Fleming bibliography, and indeed the film gives us a harsh delivery of a harsh line; it also throws in, as the inestimable Tim of Antagony & Ecstasy would describe in his own Bond marathon, the secondary Bond girl who ends up end – here the gorgeous but luckless Solange (Caterina Murino), dispatched offscreen by the bad mo’fo’s Le Chiffre is finagling funds for after Bond casually dallies with her then disappears in pursuit of bigger fish. However, the world of 2006 into which the film erupted was a different place, with different attitudes, to the world of 1953 into which the novel crept out (the Bond novels, it should be noted, were by no means an immediate success), and Campbell’s redresses the balance in a manner that ‘GoldenEye’ tried to but never quite succeeded in.

This is a good place to give Dame Judi Dench some serious kudos. She’d already made the role her own (no disrespect to Bernard Lee, but I rather think her M will be remembered as the definitive), but here the character’s importance is expanded and deepened. M’s relationship with Bond – a springboard for terse, almost argumentative scenes in the Brosnan films – actually gets explored here. There’s even room for some wintry humour. After causing chaos at the embassy, Bond visits M’s apartment. Without, one hastens to add, an invitation.

M: How the hell did you find out where I live?
Bond: The same way I found out your name. I always thought M was a randomly assigned initial. I had no idea it stood for –
M: Utter one more syllable and I’ll have you killed.

Speaking of humour, ‘Casino Royale’ acknowledges its imperative as an origin story by establishing how Bond took ownership of his Aston Martin (a card game, would you believe it?) and having him give a waiter specific instructions as to how he likes his vodka martinis, not in an attempt at sophistication, but as a stalling tactic at the card table when things are starting to not go his way. Later, ordering another after it looks like he’s ballsed things up good and proper, he responds to the barman’s “Shaken or stirred?” with a waspish “Does it look like I give a damn?”

Kudos, also, to Eva Green, a glamorous and talented actress playing a Bond girl who’s essential to the narrative and with whom Bond has a genuine and plausible chemistry. She’s not a sex object, not a damsel in distress, and quite definitely not a bimbo. Her scenes have depth and her performance is nicely pitched. Elsewhere, Jeffrey Wright easily slips on the laconic persona of Felix Leiter; Mikkelsen is gimlet-like and sinister as Le Chiffre without ever becoming a cipher; Ivana Milicevic ramps up the glamour quotient as Le Chiffre’s much put-upon girlfriend Valenka; and Giancarlo Giannini (best known for playing beleaguered cops in ‘The Black Belly of the Tarantula’ and ‘Hannibal’) is wry and likeable as Bond’s ally (or is he?) Rene Mathis.

And then we have Daniel Craig. When his casting was first announced, the internet was awash with outcry. “The death of 007”, one dissenter posted. “The name’s Bland – James Bland”, whimpered the Daily Mail. A website called danielcraigisnotbond.com was launched – inexplicably it’s still online, though I guess it’s not getting many hits these days. In short, Craig was not a popular choice.

Then the film came out. And a fuckload of people tucked in their napkins, broke out the condiments and ate their words.

If the blunt, hard-hitting pre-credits business didn’t establish him as the new Bond effectively enough, the film then delivers a full-throttle and often vertiginous free-running scene culminating in the aforementioned embassy impasse. It’s nine minutes of jolting, exhilarating action, showcasing Craig as a resourceful, athletic and frankly downright ruthless incarnation of Bond. If the first 15 minutes of ‘Casino Royale’ don’t make you nod, raise a vodka martini to the screen and happily admit “yup, Daniel Craig is James Bond”, then there’s probably no hope for you.

This brings me to another canny thing about ‘Casino Royale’. It delivers several barnstorming action/chase scenes in its first hour, establishing a contemporary narrative around terrorism and corrupt financial shenanigans in order to bring Fleming’s original story into the modern world, then has the unruffled self-confidence to stage a huge chunk of its running time around a bunch of people sitting around a card table and a man and a woman gradually falling for each other. Campbell proves himself a smart enough director to know that the pounding intensity of Act One is enough to present Craig as Bond fully formed – and the amazing thing about his performance is how economically and immediately he settles upon a characterization of 007 – after which the audience’s investment in the character is a guarantee of their continued interest through a long running time (two hours twenty minutes), entire swathes of which are devoid of conventional action movie tropes.

As I said before, a 007 movie for adults. And, in my personal pantheon of all things Bondian, second only to ‘From Russia With Love’ as the outright best of ’em.

BOND-A-THON: Die Another Day

I’m only guessing, but I reckon the first script conference for ‘Die Another Day’ went something like this.

The writers: Okay, here’s the deal. It all went a bit OTT in ‘The World is Not Enough’, so what we want to do is really scale things back. Shit-can the gadgets, ditch the one-liners, keep it real.

The producers: Sounds good. Did you get the memo about the invisible car, by the way?

The writers: Uh, I think we missed that. But, hey, what we propose is this: subvert the audiences’ expectations. Have a gritty, down ‘n’ dirty pre-credits set piece that ends with Bond being captured. Totally pull the rug out from under the viewers.

The producers: Cool. Great attention-grabber. Can you work in the invisible car by the half way mark?

The writers: Uh, the emphasis is supposed to be on Bond living on his wits. We want to keep the gadgets to a minimum.

The producers: Absolutely. Invisible car, watch that shoots a laser. That’s two by our reckoning. Oh, and you know what else would be really cool? An ice palace!

There are a lot of things wrong with ‘Die Another Day’, not least that it acronymizes as ‘DAD’, but the thing I have the most problem with is the god-damn stupid motherfucking invisible car. When I watched ‘Die Another Day’ for the purposes of this review, I played the DVD through the laptop, headphones on, rather than insult the TV with it; and on several occasions Mrs F had to break off her RPG and ask me to rant a little quieter and make with less profanity. By the end of the movie, her astute observation was: “Anyone would think you had issues with the invisible car.”

And you know what, dear reader? I do. The invisible car is a god-damn stupid motherfucking concept on many levels, the most obvious being that it brings to mind Wonder Woman’s invisible plane. You know, the one that looked like this:

Keep that image in mind. Now here’s 007 (Pierce Brosnan) in his invisible car:

To my mind there are only three differences: (i) ‘Wonder Woman’ was made nearly thirty years before ‘Die Another Day’; (ii) ‘Wonder Woman’ had a notably smaller budget than ‘Die Another Day’; and (iii) despite her epic cleavage, Wonder Woman looks considerably less of a tit than Bond in a straightforward comparison of these two images.

Yes, I have issues with the car.

I also have issues with the shitty CGI in the scene where toffee-nosed uber-villain Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens) cuts loose with a giant laser, melting vast swathes of tundra as Bond dangles off an ice cliff. Bond escapes this combined fiery-watery fate by surfing his way to freedom. These are some choice examples of the images the paying audience is fobbed off with:

What makes it worse it that ‘Die Another Day’ opens with a surfing scene that’s dramatic, atmospheric and kicks off one of the absolute best pre-credits sequences in the entire Bond canon. I’m tempted to call it ‘The World is Not Enough’ Syndrome, except ‘TWiNE’ gives us a world-class pre-credits sequence then nosedives into redundancy, like a priapic sybarite suddenly experiencing brewer’s droop. ‘Die Another Day’ gives us a frankly pretty damn impressive first three quarters of an hour: Bond’s hovercraft duel with Korean warlord Colonel Moon (Will Yun Lee) and subsequent capture – awesome! Bond’s torture, imprisonment and exchange for the terrorist Zao (Rick Yune) – awesome! Bond’s less-than-victorious return to MI6, the revelation that he’s been implicated in a terrorist outrage and M (Judi Dench)’s fears that he’s been brainwashed (a nod to the opening chapters of the novel ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’) – awesome! Bond breaking ranks from MI6 and going renegade in order to clear his name – awesome! Bond hooking up with American operative Jinx (Halle Berry) as he pursues his own agenda without sanction or back-up – awesome!

I remember sitting in Nottingham’s Showcase Cinema ten years ago, rubbing my hands in gleeful delight as the first third of ‘Die Another Day’ played out, convinced that even the trademark Brosnan pout wasn’t a drawback and that I was watching the most pared-down, focused and hard-edged Bond since Connery was sipping the martinis.

And. Then. It. All. Went. Wrong.

No: it didn’t just go wrong. It went disastrous. It went cataclysmic.

How bad? Well, I think I’ve already mentioned the invisible motherfucking car and shit-awful surfing scene. In addition, there’s the horribly conceived ice palace – the most obviously studio-bound bit of tundra since John Sturges’s production designer painted the floor white and arranged some bits of polystyrene at strategic angles for ‘Ice Station Zebra’ in 1968. There’s a tediously contrived fistfight between the randomly shifting patterns of some laser beams. There’s a cluster of dreadful performances, from John Cleese as the new Q (he was introduced as Desmond Llewellyn’s protégé in the previous film but wasn’t as egregiously annoying as he is here) to Toby Stephens who doesn’t so much chew the scenery as go ‘Man vs Food’ on its ass, while Michael Madsen mopes around in the background, mumbling and waiting for the cheque to clear. There’s a denouement that made me die a little bit inside to watch.

And there are endless – endless – references to other Bond movies. ‘Die Another Day’ was released forty years after ‘Dr No’ and was the twentieth film in the franchise. As such, it was obviously deemed a sterling idea to reconfigure the script as a join-the-dots exercise in homage. Thus we have: Jinx emerging from the sea in a Honey Ryder style bikini right down to the knife belt and a reappearance by the Duke of Wellington portrait (‘Dr No’); Rosa Klebb’s shoe inexplicably showing up in Q’s lab and a potential blackmailer filming Bond in a clinch from behind a two-way mirror (‘From Russia with Love’); Jinx almost eviscerated by a laser, an ejector seat fired from Bond’s Aston Martin and a fight in a depressurising plane (‘Goldfinger’); the old jet pack in Q’s lab, an oxygen mouthpiece used by Bond in a diving scene and a clinic wherein a villain’s appearance is changed (‘Thunderball’); a disused section of the underground commandeered as a secret service base (‘You Only Live Twice’); Bond temporarily buried under an avalanche (‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’); diamonds used to finance a satellite with destructive capabilities (‘Diamonds Are Forever’); Bond using a big American handgun at one point (‘Live and Let Die’); M maintaining and office on board a ship and a satellite that can harness solar rays (‘The Man with the Golden Gun’); a union jack parachute and a similarity in design between the ice palace and Stromberg’s undersea lair (‘The Spy Who Loved Me’); a sword fight through an opulent building in which a fuckload of expensive things are inordinately trashed (‘Moonraker’); the theme song artiste (Madonna) appearing onscreen for the only time since Sheena Easton (‘For Your Eyes Only’) and actually graduating to a speaking part here; the crocodile submersible and mini-jet in Q’s office (‘Octopussy’); Bond surfing in the Antarctic (‘A View to a Kill’); Bond as sniper and a protracted fight in a transport plane, vehicles being jettisoned out of its rear cargo hatch (‘The Living Daylights’); and Bond going rogue after M rescinds his Double-O status (‘Licence to Kill’). Recyclings from Brosnan’s previous outings include a falling chandelier that kills an antagonist – reminiscent of the metal sectioning that similarly finishes off a bad guy in ‘GoldenEye’ – as well as a timer being set for three minutes; the replication of the car park chase in ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’ around the different levels of the ice palace; and the sprinkler system that activates after Jinx booby-traps the clinic in Cuba, akin to the aftermath of the bomb attack on MI6 headquarters in ‘The World is Not Enough’. Additionally, the gadget-laden watch Q issues Bond with is described as “your twentieth, I believe”.

Some of these homages are, to be fair, quite neatly done and – ironically – the best of them has nothing to do with the movie franchise (the character name Colonel Moon, an inversion of ‘Colonel Sun’, the first Bond continuation novel after Fleming’s death). Mostly, however, they are as subtle as Oddjob lobbing his steel-lined bowler hat at a statue. Cumulatively, they leave you feeling bludgeoned by the filmmakers’ commitment to self-congratulation over aesthetic development; their determination to rake over past glories rather than striving to create a new classic. We’d have to wait four years for that.

BOND-A-THON: The World is Not Enough

Really, there was no reason for ‘The World is Not Enough’ not to have been awesome: a reasonably timely plot about oil pipelines and terrorism, a couple of tip-top set pieces, the return of Robbie Coltrane as Russian mobster Valentin Zukovsky from ‘GoldenEye’ (providing some much required comic relief after the po-faced shenanigans of ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’), a gorgeous and talented actress (Sophie Marceau) raising the Bond girl stakes, and Robert Carlyle on villain duties. And if was ever an indicator that Bond might not prevail, it was in putting him up against fucking Begbie!

And yet ‘TWiNE’ isn’t awesome. ‘TWiNE’ in fact describes a plunging arc from promising to tedious to several increasingly stygian levels of awful, culminating in a pun that you can see coming from the moment the actual Bond girl, Dr Christmas Jones (Denise Richards) is introduced. You see, the filmmakers were jerking your chain with Sophie Marceau and it’s Denise Richards in a tank top, a pair of shorts and a petulant expression – kind of like an extremely poor man’s Lara Croft – who gets to run around with 007 and save the world. Dr Christmas Jones is a nuclear physicist, by the way. Played by Denise Richards. Forgive me if I’m labouring the point, but they fucking cast Denise Richards as a nuclear fucking physicist called Dr Christmas fucking Jones.

Oh, yeah. And they gave Michael Apted the directing gig. Apart from ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’, ‘Gorillas in the Mist’ and some good character-based TV work, much of Apted’s output has been curiously pedestrian and there is nothing on his CV to mark him out as an action director.

Anyone watching the film for the first time, however, would think from the opening sequence that they were in for a treat. At nearly quarter of an hour, it’s the longest pre-credits sequence in the franchise and rather than being its own for-the-sake-of-it mini-movie it sets the stage for the story proper. In its depiction of an incendiary device triggered inside the MI6 headquarters, it establishes a theme of attack from within that recurs through the film. And it culminates in a speedboat chase along the Thames. Which, as it progresses, treads a thin line between cool and stupid, but that was always the appeal of the Bondian pre-credits sequence. ‘TWiNE’ strikes the right balance and, as Garbage’s theme song – not as memorable as Tina Turner’s ‘GoldenEye’ but a vast improvement on Sheryl Crow’s ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’ – kicks in, there’s no doubt that you’ve just sat through a kick-ass, supremely entertaining opener.

Enjoy it, cherish it, feel good about it. Because – apart from a bit of business where helicopters with massive chainsaw blades slung underneath them cut through the buildings and gangways of a harbour – it’s the only solid action scene Apted delivers. And it’s the first and last time ‘TWiNE’ is entertaining.

The bizarre thing is, the film desperately wants to be entertaining. The script kicks out what must be per capita the most puns in any Bond movie. Quizzed by nuclear physicist Jones on the nature of his relationship with another woman: “We’re strictly plutonic.” Asked by a voluptuous accountant if he’d like to check her figures: “I’m sure they’re perfectly rounded.” On a Q branch prototype that disguises a flamethrower as a set of bagpipes: “I suppose we all have to pay the piper some time” (Q goes a pun too far by replying “oh, pipe down, 007”). Whilst sliding on a pair of sunglasses while some upgraded gadgets are being demonstrated: “New specs, Q?” Things hit rock bottom when Bond offs a crooked head of security and takes his place on what turns out to be a mission to appropriate a warhead. “Where’s the other guy?” someone challenges him. Bond’s reply: “He was buried with work.” As a one-liner, it’s neither elegant or funny. It’s not apposite, since the dead guy isn’t shown being interred. And Brosnan’s delivery is horribly forced. In its own small way, it’s incredibly emblematic of ‘The Word is Not Enough’.

The plot, which doesn’t so much unravel as twist itself into a series of ugly knots, doesn’t help matters. SPOILER ALERT. Bond recovers a large quantity of cash being laundered by Swiss banker Lachaise (Patrick Malahide); the moolah is returned to rightful owner, industrialist Robert King (David Calder) – a pal of M (Judi Dench). It’s booby-trapped, however, and the resulting explosion kills King. Bond pursues the assassin and is injured. At King’s funeral, Bond meets King’s daughter Elektra (Marceau), who vows to continue his work in building an oil pipeline across Azerbaijan. Bond looks into Elektra’s background and discovers she was the victim of a kidnapping plot by international terrorist Renard (Carlyle) but escaped his clutches. M, it turns out, had advised King to withhold paying the ransom while she investigated. Bond realises that, converted from American dollars to pounds sterling, the laundered money he recovered (i.e. the booby-trap he inadvertently delivered) corresponds to the ransom amount. He takes it as a message and concludes that Renard was behind the attack on King. M despatches him to act as personal bodyguard to Elektra. By circuitous means, Bond realises that she was the instrument of her own father’s death and has faked various attacks against herself and her company, including an aerial attack by paragliders and the destruction of a length of her own pipeline. Bond suspects Stockholm Syndrome and fears that she’s in league with Renard. He’s proved correct, except that it’s Elektra who’s controlling Renard, not vice versa. A bullet lodged in his brain, the wound inoperable and the shell slowly moving through the medulla oblongata, Renard is essentially a dead man, and happily throwing away the last slivers of his life in carrying out Elektra’s plan: to destroy Istanbul (the point at which the three pipelines in competition to Elektra’s converge) and thus facilitate Elektra’s supremacy as supplier of oil to the west. The means of Istanbul’s removal from the map: plutonium from a stolen warhead introduced into the reactor of a hijacked nuclear submarine. As a sort of bonus, Elektra also plans M’s death as vengeance for not rescuing her from Renard (which seems something of a redundant point given that she’s turned him into her own personal Euro-psycho-puppet).

I’ve described the insane what-the-fuckery of the plot in such detail in order to make my point. Which is this. Imagine you’re Elektra. Let the whole M thing go – why, after all, start fucking around with MI6 when you’re pulling a whole bunch of seriously illegal shit that you’d rather not bring to attention of an intelligence agency – and your motivation is basically: I want to get rid of the rival pipelines. As I see it, your options are: (a) buy out the competition; (b) pay some mercenaries to blow up the other pipelines just as yours is reaching completion; or (c) – the, ahem, logical choice according to writers Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Bruce Feirstein – seduce a psychotic terrorist who might drop dead at any moment to help you steal a plutonium warhead, acquire a submarine with nuclear reactor capacity, set your operation back several months by blowing up a length of your own pipeline, risk death by a stray bullet while some hired guns pretend to kill you, work out your issues with daddy by blowing the poor sod to kingdom come and keep the whole nefarious plot on course while MI6’s finest are all over you.

Am I the only person who sees options (a) and (b) as doable but expensive, while option (c) is basically stupid, riddled with the potential for failure, and financially ruinous. I mean, seriously, how the fuck much does it cost to bankroll the theft of a warhead and a nuclear motherfucking submarine? (SPOILERS END.)

Granted, suspension of disbelief goes hand in hand with the Bond aesthetic. Hey, I’m a guy who’s down with a fully kitted-out secret base in a volcano, for Pete’s sake! But the plot of ‘The World is Not Enough’ (and the illogic behind it) goes beyond suspension of disbelief. In a world of corporationism, where hostile takeovers are entirely legal, where financial chicanery, bribes and corruption are an accepted part of the way business is done, the idea that you’d have to destroy Istanbul in order to get an unfair advantage over the competition is not only ludicrous, but a concept that would have your average CEO – a cohort of bought-and-paid-for politicians in his pocket and the dirtiest lawyers in the business on speed-dial – pissing his pants at the waste of time and effort in achieving a fairly simple outcome.

I’ve struggled with ‘TWiNE’ writing this review: excepting the speedboat chase, I can find little or no reason not to rank it firmly alongside previous franchise low points ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’, ‘Moonraker’ and ‘A View to a Kill’. Actually, being fair, I can find two reasons: (i) it’s the final Bond movie to give us the marvellously wintry interplay between Bond and Q (at least as played by Desmond Llewellyn; the character returns in ‘Skyfall’ in the person of Ben Wishaw); and (ii) I know that’s it’s followed by ‘Die Another Day’ and the sins of ‘The World is Not Enough’ suddenly take on a forgivable hue in the knowledge of what’s to come.

BOND-A-THON: Tomorrow Never Dies

Not that producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson weren’t under enough pressure as it was to recreate the success of ‘GoldenEye’ at the box office, but when MGM head honcho Kirk Kerkorian decided that he wanted the next Bond movie to open coterminous with their public stock flotation, the race was on to get ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’ into production. Bruce Feirstein, who had contributed to the ‘GoldenEye’ script wrote a screenplay inspired by his background in journalism. With Martin Campbell passing on directing two Bond films back-to-back, Roger Spottiswoode was offered the gig. Spottiswoode brought in any number of other writers to work on it. With the script still not finalized as shooting began, Feirstein (to whom sole writing credit was finally given) was brought back on board for a final rewrite.

I can only assume that this too-many-cooks approach accounts for a couple of dreadfully contrived scenes, borrowings from previous Bond movies and the regressive portrayal of the villain as a power-crazed egomaniac who thrives on monologues. Media baron Elliott Carver delivers at least three monologues during the less-than-two-hour duration (‘TND’ is the shortest Bond movie in three decades), a tendency to verbiage that recalls Blofeld. But the differences are crucial: Blofeld’s nefarious schemes are aimed at world domination – Carver is out to sell more newspapers and get some exclusive broadcasting rights; Blofeld was variously played by Anthony Dawson, Donald Pleasance, Telly Savalas and Charles Gray, all of whom provided a sinister, threatening or otherwise dangerous characterization; Carver is played by Jonathan Pryce who, quite frankly, doesn’t.

Pryce was always at his best playing Everyman – much put-upon individuals striving to cope with the vagaries and machinations of a life that’s spinning out of control around them. Think of his turns as Sam Lowry in ‘Brazil’ or James Lingk in ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’. His attempt at a super-villain is just that: an attempt. And, I’m sorry to say of an actor much of whose filmography I like, a fairly pitiful one at that. Secondary villain Dr Kaufman (Vincent Schiavelli) isn’t much better, delivering swathes of crass dialogue in a Cherman akzent zat iss so bad you vud zink he wass audishunink for an epizode ov ‘Hogan’s Heroes’, ja. Tertiary villain Stamper (Gotz Otto) is all muscle and sneering countenance and gets to say things like “I owe you an unpleasant death, Mr Bond,” again reminding us that other actors did this kind of thing much better way back when.

One final thought on the disappointing villainy issue before we move on: Anthony Hopkins was offered the role of Carver, but passed. Imagine: Hopkins, post-Lecter, in full on scenery-chewing mode as a Bond villain. That would have been fun to watch.

Because, by and large, ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’ is low on fun. For a franchise built on wholly unrealistic narratives, newspaper-baron-starts-shooting-war-in-order-to-report-it arguably represents the most ludicrous story ever to come out of an Eon Productions script conference. I mean, come on, Carver, at least do it properly and hold the world to ransom! And yet every frame of the film strives for a serious tone, Roger Elswit shooting everything in a dull and muted palette. The man’s a master, no doubt – he’s Paul Thomas Anderson’s go-to guy, fer Chrissake – but he’s not a good fit for a Bond movie, where the aesthetic needs to be bigger, bolder and more sweeping than your average actioner.

It’s ironic, too, that such a determinedly po-faced work boasts some really stupid moments, such as the over-egged scene between Bond and Kaufman when the latter, briefly, has Bond at a disadvantage (the script’s contrivance to restore things to Bond’s favour, is risible) or Bond driving his car by remote control from the back seat at irresponsible speeds through a multi-storey car park. And on the subject of automotive action, between ‘GoldenEye’ and this film, it’s pretty fucking sad to see 007 only driving his Aston Martin during routine work and having to rely on a BMW for the chases and the gadgets. Keep it British, Q old chap.

In terms of Bond girls, ‘TND’ showcases the series at its best and worst. Michelle Yeoh as martial arts operative Wai Lin is a kick-ass action heroine in her own right, easily Bond’s equal, and not at all impressed by his louche, sardonic attitude. On the other hand, Teri Hatcher is wasted in a thankless role which adheres to the casual misogyny of Bond of the ’70s, ie. glamour girl who dallies with Bond, imparts some useful information and promptly gets killed off.

Other things annoy: much is made, early on, of Bond’s facility with languages – mainly to facilitate a gag about Bond being a “cunning linguist” – yet there are two teeth-grating moments that demonstrate the opposite. One has Bond at a car rental agency in Hamburg and all Brosnan has to do is deliver the line “mein bureau hat ein auto reserviert”; he stumbles over it so badly I’m amazed nobody thought to redub in post-production. The second sees Bond faced with Chinese characters on a keyboard, whereupon he gives up and lets Wai Lin do the typing. Oh Bond of “I took a first in oriental languages at Cambridge” in ‘You Only Live Twice’, where are ye?

Action-wise, we get a solid pre-credits sequence that, while only tenuously connected to the actual narrative, nonetheless establishes a conflict between M (Judi Dench) and death-or-glory naval chief Admiral Roebuck (Geoffrey Palmer) that informs Bond’s extremely time-bound mission later on, introduces a satellite tracking thingy-ma-jig that falls into Carver’s hand, and delivers a lot of shooting and explosions. Which is always a good thing in a Bond movie. Elsewhere, there’s a full-throttle motorbike/helicopter chase through the streets (and buildings) of Bangkok. It’s the film’s only real high point.

Other set pieces are less effective. An attack on a British naval vessel suffers in comparison with similar scenes in ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ and ‘For Your Eyes Only’. The climactic confrontation between Bond and Carver occurs on a stealth ship, the design and narrative purpose of which recall Stromberg’s floating submarine base; however, ‘TND’ delivers a smaller and much less exciting payoff. I remember that a review in Empire magazine referred to it being less a high octane thriller than “medium octane”, and that line sums up ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’ perfectly. And the curious thing is why. At nearly double the budget of ‘GoldenEye’ (which you’d swear was the more expensive production based on what’s up there on the screen), ‘TND’ doesn’t give you much bang for its hundred and ten million bucks.

BOND-A-THON: GoldenEye

‘GoldenEye’ was released in 1995, six years after ‘Licence to Kill’ – the longest hiatus in the Bond franchise, and the first real gap since the three years between ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’ and ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’. The Dalton films had done well enough at the box office, with ‘The Living Daylights’ earning over $191million from a $40million budget and even the much-maligned ‘Licence to Kill’ – which was considered, comparatively, an underperformer – netting $156million against a lower budget of $35million, so what went wrong?

A load of legal wrangling, that’s what. The Bond films were made by Eon Productions, under the auspice of parent company Danjaq, with financing and distribution from MGM/United Artists. In 1989 Australian corporation Qintex acquired MGM/UA, intending to merge it with Pathe. Qintex licenced Pathe to broadcast the Bond movies worldwide on television, incurring the wrath of Danjaq who had not granted permission for this. Danjaq instigated legal proceedings and production on the next 007 film was thus delayed.

Dalton had signed on for three movies. His third outing was intended to commence filming in 1990 for a 1991 release. 1990 came and went. So did 1991. Ditto a couple more years, and in 1994 Dalton resigned from the role. Almost a decade earlier, contractual obligations to ‘Remington Steele’ meant Pierce Brosnan had lost out in replacing Roger Moore. With no such obstacles in place this time round, the producers promptly cast him.

Albert R. Broccoli acted as consulting producer only on ‘GoldenEye’ – he died a year after its release – and effectively handed the reins to his daughter Barbara Broccoli and long-term Bond alumnus Michael G. Wilson. Writer Richard Maibaum – who had contributed to every Bond film apart from ‘You Only Live Twice’, ‘Live and Let Die’ and ‘Moonraker’ – died in 1991; the original draft of ‘GoldenEye’ was by Michael France, with a rewrite by Jeffrey Caine and some script polishing courtesy of Kevin Wade and Bruce Feirstein. The second film in the series, after its immediate predecessor, not to have an original Ian Fleming title, it was nonetheless named after Fleming’s house in Jamaica.

Having approached and been, albeit very politely, turned down by John Woo, the producers offered directorial duties to Martin Campbell who had made a name for himself on the small screen with ‘Reilly, Ace of Spies’ and ‘Edge of Darkness’. After five straight films directed by John Glen, the emphasis was on new blood. Along with Brosnan as the new Bond, ‘GoldenEye’ gives us a new M (Dame Judi Dench, turning in arguably the best performance on offer and redefining the character into the bargain) and a new Moneypenny (Samantha Bond).

The plot, however, is old hat. In an exercise in recycling, we have a renegade Russian general who forms a trio of villainy with a femme fatale and an egomaniac with pretentions to class (shades of ‘Octopussy’) – one of whom has their own personal train (further shades of ‘Octopussy’) – and steal military hardware by means of seducing/impersonating an officer (‘Thunderball’) in order to effect the control of a satellite (‘Diamonds Are Forever’) which they intend to control from their fully kitted-out secret base hidden in a crater (‘You Only Live Twice’) for the purpose of triggering an electromagnetic pulse (‘A View to a Kill’) over London and thereby causing global economic meltdown.

L to the M to the F to the A to the O. Seriously. Trigger the fucker over New York or – more realistically – Tokyo and you’d achieve that. But London? I doubt it’d affect the Dow Jones by more than half a point.

For a film that tries desperately to be of the moment (an inspired title sequence, perhaps the best in the whole franchise, depicts the fall of the old Soviet regime) it seems peculiarly regressive. The Red Menace gets such a bashing you’d think it was still the 80s and Roger Moore was giving it all for Queen and country. The script’s attempts at addressing a more politically correct audience – an aspect of the film that received much comment in the press back in 1995 – consists of Moneypenny giving Bond a mild telling off and M giving him an outright bollocking. Oh, and femme fatale Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen) is Bond’s match as a sexual predator.

But apart from that, Bond himself remains the smug cocksman of the Moore years. And even when Brosnan tries for a harder edge to the character, what emerges is still something of a backwards step from Dalton’s Bond.

Ah yes, Pierce Brosnan. Here we come to a major problem with ‘GoldenEye’ – and a major problem with the three films that follow it. In the pantheon of actors who have essayed the role, if we characterise Sean Connery as the definitive Bond, George Lazenby as the awkward Bond, Roger Moore as the suave/smarmy Bond and Timothy Dalton as Bond played straight, then in Pierce Brosnan we have the pouty Bond. There are many attributes I want to see in Bond, no matter who’s playing him: I want to see ruthlessness, tenacity, style, nicely tailored suits, fine wines and vodka martinis; I want to see hardware, fast cars and an effortless way with the ladies. I do not – repeat not – want to see pouting. Pouting is for effeminate sparkly vampires, not for hard-living secret agents with a licence to kill.

To be fair, there is much to be said in favour of ‘GoldenEye’. The title sequence is an absolute belter, a ten-minute movie in miniature that offers suspense, action and a freakin’ great payoff with motorbike chasing plane as both hurtle towards a sheer drop. Then that unexpectedly inventive title sequence kicks in while Tina Turner belts out the theme song. Written by Bono and The Edge, and with Turner channeling her inner Shirley Bassey, the theme song is the best in a couple of decades. The good work continues in the first half, with some actual espionage (it’s always good when the filmmakers remember that Bond is a spy), a winning heroine in the form of Natalya Simonova (Izabella Scorupco) and a brilliantly noirish scene in what can only be described as a graveyard of statues. The cool stuff culminates with the film’s most outlandish and boyishly entertaining sequence, about which I have only three words to say: tank chase, baby!

On the minus side, the immediate post-credits scene with Bond and Onatopp chasing each other around some hairpin bends is several minutes of pointlessness and the music that accompanies it is awful. Eric Serra’s original score is a whole lot of nothing much. The casting of Joe Don Baker as Bond’s CIA contact Jack Wade rankles. I don’t have any issue with his performance (Wade initially dissing 007 as “stiff-assed Brit” is priceless, ditto his subsequent tendency to address Bond as “Jimbo” or “Jimmy”), it’s just another instance of the producers casting someone in diametric opposition to the character type they played in a previous Bond film. As Charles Grey appeared first as ally (‘You Only Live Twice’) and then as villain (Blofeld in ‘Diamonds Are Forever’), Baker had earlier appeared as villain in ‘The Living Daylights’ and now shows up as one of the good guys.

Regarding Sean Bean as the treacherous former Double-O agent Alec Trevelyan, the decision to portray him as the opposite side of the same coin to Bond underlines the whole Brosnan problem. I can quite easily imagine Bean, particularly at the mid-90s stage of his career when he was winning a legion of fans as Sharpe in the TV adaptations of Bernard Cornwell’s novels, as Bond. The physicality and the rough charm are there; that steely glint in the eye promises ruthlessness. Sean Bean looks like he could kill a man and casually order a vodka martini. Pierce Brosnan looks like he belongs in a shampoo commercial.

BOND-A-THON: Licence to Kill

‘Licence to Kill’ presents us with a plethora of firsts and lasts. It’s the first Bond film not to take its title from a work by Ian Fleming (although the script incorporates elements from the novel ‘Live and Let Die’ and the short story ‘The Hildebrand Rarity’), and the first to gain a 15 certificate. It’s the first Bond movie where a previous actor reprises the role of Felix Leiter – David Hedison, who essayed the role in ‘Live and Let Die’. It’s Michael G. Wilson’s first as co-producer, a role he took on after Albert R. Broccoli took ill during filming.

It’s the last to feature Timothy Dalton as Bond, Caroline Bliss as Moneypenny and Robert Brown as M, the last to feature a credits sequence designed by Maurice Binder, the last to be directed by John Glen and the last to be produced by Broccoli. Richard Maibaum co-scripts for the last time, and editor John Grover and cinematographer Alec Mills similarly bow out from the franchise.

‘Licence to Kill’ feels like it ought to be an autumnal, elegiac work. Instead, it’s full throttle action thriller, with a viciousness not seen since the early days of Connery and a hard-edged depiction of 007. When those who dislike the Dalton films complain that they don’t feel like Bond movies, it’s ‘Licence to Kill’ they point to specifically. There’s no uber-villain, merely a Colombian drug lord. There’s no world-threatening scheme, just a clever means of transporting cocaine. There’s no briefing from M – Bond goes renegade for personal reasons. Gadgets are kept to an absolute minimum, although – ironically – Q (Desmond Llewellyn) gets his most expansive role. Likewise, the Bond girls are (in different ways) survivors rather than wallflowers. And the pre-credits sequence acts as a prologue to the film proper rather than being a show reel for the stunts team.

Let’s start with this sequence. Bond and Leiter are en route to the latter’s wedding, Bond on best man duties, when the Coast Guard inform Leiter that a drug baron he’s been investigating, Sanchez (Robert Davi), is on American soil and therefore arrestable. Sanchez has made a risky incursion in order to wipe out a rival who’s stolen his girl, the sultry Lupe Lamora (Talisa Soto). Leiter, seemingly forgetting the impending nuptials, goes tearing off in hot pursuit, inviting Bond along in an observational capacity only. Predictably, Bond doesn’t do observation and when it seems like Sanchez is about to fly out of US airspace, Bond engages in a dangerous in a dangerous stunt with a helicopter to put paid to Sanchez’s plans. This done, the pair of them parachute out and Leiter gets to the church on time, if rather dramatically. Roll opening credits. 

The curtain-raiser over and done with, Act One delivers some nasty business: Sanchez pulls off an escape, his goons kill Leiter’s bride-of-a-few-hours and dump Leiter himself in a shark pit. Bond, on his way to the airport and in something of a maudlin mood after a chance remark at the reception puts him in mind of the late Teresa Bond, nee di Vicenzo, hears of the escape and heads back to Leiter’s home on an instinct. Here he finds Leiter in a body bag, severely lacerated and barely alive. Bond’s mood changes from maudlin to righteously pissed off and he goes out for revenge.

Working his way through Sanchez’s chain of associates, from corrupt DEA official Ed Kilifer (Everett McGill) to marine research head honcho Milton Krest (Anthony Zerbe), Bond’s blunt tactics attract the attention of Leiter’s CIA colleagues who haul him in for a little chat. M is in on the act and gives 007 a royal bollocking for neglecting an assignment. After a terse exchange, Bond effectively resigns, gives the CIA goons the slip and goes renegade, his licence to kill revoked. (The film originally went into production as ‘Licence Revoked’, but the title was changed after doubts that audiences wouldn’t know what “revoked” meant. This is more than a little bit sad.)

En route to his final confrontation with Sanchez and the drug lord’s borderline psychotic protégé Dario (Benicio del Toro in only his second film role), Bond enlists the help of Leiter’s contact, pilot Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell), introduced in a splendid scene in a dockside bar where she deters an aggressor by ramming the business end of a double-barrelled shotgun in his groin, holds her own in a barroom brawl and blows a hole in the wall to facilitate a quick exit. Pam is tough, resourceful, saves Bond’s ass at one point and also looks glamorous as all hell. And kudos to Wilson and Maibaum for a script that doesn’t compel her to do something stupid or have to get rescued in the final reel. Lowell is definitely one of my all time favourite Bond girls and her contribution to the canon still remains undervalued.

Lupe Lamora, on the other hand, is cut from the same cloth as Domino in ‘Thunderball’ or Andrea Anders in ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’: the kept woman of a dangerous antagonist who sees Bond as her way out of an otherwise insoluble situation.

Davi plays Sanchez for what he is, a ruthless businessman whose business just happens to be narcotics; it’s a performance as far removed from the cartoon villainy of most Bond villains as it’s possible to get. Del Toro, however, doesn’t get to do much more than sneer and strike macho poses – there’s certainly little hint of what he would go on to – but the suggestion of a homoerotic subtext between Sanchez and Dario is something of a throwback to the casual homophobia of ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ and the one unfortunate element in a film that otherwise ranks very high in my personal 007 league table.

The action sequences are impressive, particularly Sanchez’s rescue from an armed convoy, staged to great effect along the Seven Mile Bridge in the Florida Keys. Things do get a little over the top towards the end, though, with Kenworth tanker trucks popping wheelies or tilting to drive on one set of wheels to dodge a missile.

But on the whole, ‘Licence to Kill’ works very well as a darker, edgier approach to Bond, shorn of corny one-liners and the first entry in the franchise for fucking ages not to end with some personality-challenged bit of eye-candy gasping “oh, James”. This alone earns it kudos.