Hail and farewell to the one true Q, Desmond Llewellyn. Last time Bond drives a BMW, thank frak, and
first time the character they’ve shilled as the “main” Bond Girl turns out to
be evil.
First hint that M uses MI6 as her own private army; see also
the Craig films.
Critique
First things first. If
you’ve come here for abuse heaped on Denise Richards, you’re going to have to
look elsewhere, i.e., basically any other review of this film, ever. I didn’t like her character much to begin with, and I fail to see how who they cast
to play the part is in any way relevant.
Christmas Jones only exists so that Bond has someone to explain the plot
to, and then bang in the dénouement.
Hooray. (By the way, James Bond
has an IQ of 200 and advanced degrees in every topic under the sun, so the
script ends up having Bond and Jones explain things to each other that the
other already knows for the sake of the audience; this is also why Doctor Who’s
companions tend to be airheads.) The
character shouldn’t be there, and my one complaint about who they got to play
her is that she’s obviously too young to have that kind of job.
Meanwhile, Sophie Marceau as Elektra King has the best
chemistry with Brosnan of any of his co-stars in any of his films, and is the only
actress/character to turn up both on my Best Bond Girl and Best Villain lists. Brosnan’s found his footing here (some hammy
overacting aside – this is a Bond film and contemporary wisdom says the Dalton
era was a mistake, so what did you expect?); now would be the perfect time to
do exactly what the producers decided to do double-oh-seven years hence: make
the main Bond Girl evil and make her death the (immensely satisfying) emotional
climax of the film.
Alas, in the world of What Might Have Been, they made Diamonds Are Forever in the style of Licence to Kill, nobody felt the need to
change the production schedule because of Star
Wars, Quantum of Solace wasn’t
made by a Bourne fan during a writers’ strike, and George Lazenby hired an
acting coach. Back in reality, we’re
left with a middling film. It has one
bold departure from The Formula, but it ends up papering over that departure
because Playing It Safe had never, ever backfired on them before, right? Wrong: what they got this time was the film with
the lowest box-office-to-budget ratio in the franchise’s history. Suddenly all that money blowing up at the
beginning starts to look like a metaphor.
“There’s no point in
living if you can’t feel alive.” Kind of
describes the series’ creative sterility between, say, OHMSS and Casino Royale with
remarkably few, blessed, exceptions.
This film seems to be trying
to do something different, but then we realize that’s not just a cameo for
Denise Richards, and Elektra King turning out to be evil is just going to be
treated as this film’s Shocking Plot Twist rather than the best chance since OHMSS to actually give Bond some proper
character depth. In turn, that means the
rest of this film turns into the biggest missed opportunity since Diamonds Are Forever (a title it can’t
even hold for a decade; cf. the Quantum
of Solace review). But it’s easy to
hate on that film because it set the tone for a decade-and-a-half of mostly
crap; TWINE is just kind of there (which sums up Brosnan’s entire
tenure, really; they tried playing it safe and ended up with mediocre results). It used to be The One With The Bad Bond Girl
(there’s a double entendre for you), but then Casino Royale came around and stole its thunder. So now it’s just The One Where Q Leaves. Given the circumstances of Desmond
Llewellyn’s death I’m not going to make light of that scene, other than to
observe that at no point did Q endeavor to teach Bond anything beyond “bring it
back intact for once.” I will pause to
mention that neither of TrueQ’s replacements are worth a damn – Inspector Cleeseau
because his characterization is hella wrong and NotMarkZuckerberg because he’s
a stupidhead. Moving on.
The other problem with the film – this one limited more to
this particular film than to the franchise as a whole at this point – is that
it can’t be bothered to make a quantum of sense. Elektra King’s entire motivation is delivered
to us as backstory, there’s some kerfuffle involving five million dollars, and
maybe, just maybe, instead of
mounting a geographically-challenged boat chase on the Thames, they would have
been better served slowing things down
and explaining the plot.
No, wait, Tradition Demands a precredits sequence of
WhamBoomBang. Goody. (I wouldn’t harp on Tradition and The Formula
so much if, just once, a Bond film broke from tradition and was utter
dreck. The closest we got to that was Quantum of Solace; formulaic detritus
like Diamonds Are Forever and Die Another Day are far worse.)
What’s particularly grating is that this film was made right
around the time OHMSS was
rehabilitated – it stole its title from OHMSS,
fer frak’s sake – and it’s full of
nods to the Least Formulaic Bond Film To Date.
To wit:
- · There is a close-up of a bullet hole in a glass window.
- · The Bond Girl's father is curiously/unjustifiably on speaking terms with the head of MI6.
- · The first vehicle Bond drives is black and lacks a bulletproof windscreen.
- · A pre-credit action scene takes place in a body of water and has a glaring continuity error.
- · The Bond Girl is a suicidal billionaire heiress with a dark and troubled past.
- · Elektra asks Bond if he ever lost a loved one. This is the most blatant Tracy reference of the Brosnan era.
- · Bond and the Bond Girl go skiing. They're attacked, and end up buried under an avalanche.
- · Bond skis to the edge of a cliff and sends his pursuer over it.
- · The Bond Girl loses badly at a card game.
- · "People who want to stay alive play it safe."/"There's no point in living if you can't feel alive."
- · Brainwashing (apparently) plays a key role in the plot.
- · The main villain cut off their own earlobe(s).
- · "The World is not Enough" is stated to be the Bond family motto.
- · The Bond Girl dies from a single gunshot wound while wearing an outfit that reaches her wrists and ankles but still shows an amazing amount of skin between/underneath the fabric.
- · Bond is clearly aggrieved by her death, and cradles her corpse afterward.
And yet this is all pale lip service. Apparently the train of thought was, “oh,
let’s just do OHMSS with an actor who
can do puns, and without the downer ending, and without the decaying,
depressing world of that film.” It.
Didn’t. Work. Casino Royale got it; this one didn’t.
On the plus side, the entire notion that M is treating MI6
as her own private army – developed beautifully across the first three Craig
films – gets its start here. Having
tried recycling one character from GoldenEye
in the previous outing, here they bring back Zukovsky. Far less annoying than Jack Wade, I’ll give
them that. And the soundtrack is killer:
David Arnold’s only the second artiste in the entire franchise to get hired for
a second film, and boy howdy does he deserve it. (This film’s soundtrack was the first non-Star Wars soundtrack I ever bought,
primarily for the “Pipeline” track, and oh yes it was worth every penny.)
But now Brosnan’s figured out how to play James Bond, and
he’s gotten a tad too comfortable in the role, and by that I mean he is
extraordinarily hammy for a series where the lead actor has either underplayed
the role (ConneryMoore), delivered an uncertain if very human performance
(Lazenby), or actually, um, acted (DaltonCraig). Still, I maintain that Brosnan was hardly the
problem in his films; he was dealt formulaic, timid scripts and did the best he
could with them. And I do appreciate
this film’s attempt to distinguish itself from the rest of the BrosBonds.
On re-watch, it is flagrantly
obvious that the traitor in Mr. King’s business enterprise is his own
daughter, but they had never done that
before. The only other time the
“main” Bond Girl got billed behind the main villain was A View to a Kill, and we’re not going to blame them for that
(“that” being the billing order; “we” will gladly
blame “them” for the rest of A View
to a Kill).
All right. Let’s come
to some semblance of a point. The climax
– the true climax; the bit on the submarine is frippery – sees James Bond shoot
a former lover in cold blood for the only time in the franchise. That scene is powerful and well-earned, but
basically everything that wasn’t geared towards earning that scene was a
disappointment.
To come full circle: it’s a shame they threw the extra wench
at us.
Final Grade: C
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