GoldenEye was the first Bond Film starring Pierce Brosnan and the first made after a six-year hiatus. It was the second attempt to get Brosnan on-board (cheeky reference thereto in the opening - yes, I wonder what else might possibly have happened in 1986, and BrosBond's activities therein utterly bosh the timeline, no point in not making the reboot clearer - oh yes, I know they kept Q around, so what? They kept M around for the first three Craigs) and the first of two directed by Martin Campbell, the Bond Director whose name I am most likely to forget (but not most likely to misspell - I could make a crack here at the expense of Mr. Tamahori or Mr. Fukunaga, and will instead settle for the safe option of belittling Mr. Spottiswoode). It is also, trivia fans, the only entry in the Bond canon to mention "safe sex."
Is it great? No. Does it do what it needed to do, take a 60s British staple that had lain dormant since 1989 and bring him back in the mid-nineties in a sort of greatest-hits mishmash that buggers up the continuity? A smidge better than Doctor Who: The Movie, that's for certain.
GoldenEye and Goldfinger were the first two Bonds I ever saw - can't remember which order, suspect it was GoldenEye first. Either way, this informs a statement sure to annoy a younger generation of Bond Fan (Christ, them): GoldenEye was the first "modern" Bond. Yes, I know that sounds daft now, given that 1992 is now the halfway point of the series (yikes), but look at it: it's got a proper bluescreen, for crying out loud! The Dalton didn't have no bluescreen.
Casting Brosnan in The Living Daylights would have been the safer and more expected option, and probably would have exposed that film as a lot hollower than I'd like it to be. (My opinion is that TLD's magnificent first hour is the best hour of Bond Film ever produced, with the possible exception of OHMSS's spellbinding final hour - but after Bond appears to have publicly assassinated the head of the KGB,* the second hour reverts to the usual BondFilm crap I want to throw stuff at the screen and cry. It was doing so well and then it got so bland! You are entitled to a different opinion, alas.)
*Well, if that doesn't create an international incident, then neither will Voldemort launching missiles at a "disputed island" in No Time To Die, so points for consistency.
Still, "trying something a bit different before reverting to the usual BondFilm crap, with a Third Man reference thrown in for laughs" does sum up the approach to both the film Brosnan could of done and the one he done did. Good as Sean Bean is, he's too young for the whole Lienz Cossack plot to work, so we're left with, as BrosBond says, petty theft. High-tech petty theft, with lots of SPIKE THEM and TRACE THE SIGNAL and I AM INVINCIBLE, but petty theft.
Also in here is a fleeting attempt at (oh, dear) introspection, something that hasn't been seen much of in previous Bond Films and then only fleetingly. "When someone is on skis at 40 mph trying to put a bullet in your back" in The Spy Who Loved Me, LazenBond's hesitant proposal in OHMSS, brief moments here and there in the Daltons, "you first dig two graves" in For Your Eyes Only. (Just noticed most of those, the proposal in OHMSS and post-tankersplosion in LTK aside, take place in hotel rooms. Weird decisionmaking. C'mon, it's BondFilm, show us some locations.) Here this introspection is imposed upon Bond through the character of Natalya Simonova, exquisitely played by "whatever happened to" Isabella Scorupco (after GoldenEye, she was offered a part in L.A. Confidential that ultimately went to Never Say Never Again's Kim Basinger - and more on NSNA in a while, can't be bothered to edit this ramble for structure - and basically didn't really chase a film career after that), who at one point held the #2 slot on my Best Bond Girl Ever list,* but that's outdated and I can't be bothered to fix it, because a thorough fixing of that list would entail rewatching Licence To Kill (Pam Bouvier's #3** on it) and, fond though I am of The Dalton, I dread such an experience.
*Do you even need to ask? OHMSS's Tracy is #1. Duh.
**Weird, my Word doc for this list insists she's #4, behind Elektra King, but that obviously ain't right.
The receptacle for this (oh, dear) introspection is, at least for now, not Daniel Craig (at this point best known for an episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and Sharpe's Eagle, a TV movie starring, er, Sean Bean) but instead Pierce Brosnan, quipologist. Brosnan was, in a sense, "my" Bond (I got into the franchise just as he was getting out - Die Another Day had already come out and I was chuffed to discover from a friend who'd seen it first that it had Yet Another Satellite Of Doom in it) and the two "Books About The Whole BondFilm Series" I have both have his mug on the cover. Which may be why, like Goldfinger, I'm harshest towards that with which I'm most familiar. Suspect I would like BrosBond better if he punned less often, let's leave it at that. No, let's not. The punnage is at least under control here, not yet foreshadowing how Brosnan's dialogue in Die Another Day is 72.4% quippery (and the rest is grunts and yelps).
Other Die Another Day foreshadowing is present in the form of the bad CGI, but that's a lazy joke at the later film's expense, rather than something specifically wrong with GoldenEye. Yes the model satellites look like garbage and yes the Earth looked better in 1967 (not actually a global warming/climate change observation). So what? They're in the film for maybe a minute, tops, and their presence irks me far less than the supposition that the fetching Ms. Simonova survived a Russian night in that thin sweater. Speaking of foreshadowing, there's also the climax, where Bond gets into a gunfight against a number of goons armed with automatic weapons. My suspension of belief is insta-shattered, and it's going to be like this for the next three films, boo.
So, really, "reinflate a flagging franchise and set the course for the rest of the Brosnage" was what GoldenEye set out to do and do it it did. Jolly good show all 'round. Why don't I think more highly of it?
I mean... look where it went. Hrm. Brosnan bookend BondFilm featuring a space-based threat and a baddie who was supposedly offed in the opening sequence. There's more Die Another Day DNA in here than I thought. At least he doesn't surf in this one.
My real problem with Brosnan, aside from the endless storm of puns (punderstorm?), is that his Bond is the blandest of the bunch. You can see how this was made, a careful application of Connery's panty-dropping charisma, a slathering of Moorey cheesy overdressed silver-tongued lechery, a dollop of Daltonesque humanity and ruthlessness and not actually liking his job (Bond's job, that is; Connery's the one who didn't like the actor's job) but definitely not being allowed to explore that aspect of his character because of The Formula, and a pound of "what the hell is that accent?" Lazenby.* At 41 when he (finally) got the part, he was older than Connery and Lazenby, but younger than Moore and (barely) Dalton, making him blandly average there as well.** This works for GoldenEye, patently a Get-Bond-Back-In-The-PublicEye endeavor, remind you of your favorite bits of Wot's Come Before.
*Do I need to explain this joke? Well, I keep making it, so I better. Lazenby's Australian; the Australian accent was a lot closer to British in 1969, so Americans can't hear his accent slip, but Brits can, and according to at least one of them, it does. Frequently. As for Brosnan (Irish and/or American), that's plainly not his real accent; neither Brosnan nor Bean are using their real accents here, and while Bean's is at least in the ballpark of British, I've never heard anybody else talk the way BrosBond does. Well, maybe Peter Dinklage on Game of Thrones - patently not a British accent either.
**The average age for all the Bonds at time of casting is 37, which happens to be a) how old Craig was when he got the part, and b) how old BookBond canonically is.
It just doesn't work going forward. The problem with character introspection is that you need a character to introspect. It tripped up Dalton (hence my trepidation at revisiting Licence to Kill); it trips up Brosnan; it would trip up Craig except they actually bothered giving him a character and everybody hated it, so they brought in Javier Bardem to play Sean Bean and re-do GoldenEye.
Speaking of.
No, no, not speaking of GoldenEye itself and its own artistic merit (why bother), it's a re-do and in much the same way my The Spy Who Loved Me rewatch review petered out. No, rather speaking of one particular thing GoldenEye re-did and looping all the way several paragraphs back to Ms. Basinger and The Bond We Don't Talk About Ever Again. Odd that of all the Bondery in the world, the most recognizable element was lifted not from some venerable ancestor like The Spy Who Loved Me or (holding my nose here) Goldfinger, but rather from the Thunderball knockoff starring an older and grumpier Sean Connery. I speak, of course, of Fatima Blush/Xenia Onatopp. Yes, yes, Bonds Past had their sexpot femme fatales (the original Thunderball had the spectacular Fiona Volpe (#3 on the henchmen list - not on the Bond Girl list? Must fix)), but the genesis of Xenia's, ahem, orgasmic approach to slaughter is clearly found in the weirdo knockoff rather than in any official Broccoli product. Weird decision, especially given how lawsuit-happy Kevin McClory was.
Speaking of weird decisions, back at the start of the Moorera I observed how cautious they were about putting Jim Mk. III into all of Connery's old trappings. As a reminder, Moore's first card game is gin rummy, at the very end of his first film (come to think of it, he doesn't get to do real cards* until his fifth); he doesn't wear a tux until at least a third of the way into his second; he gets his first "shaken not stirred" martini (a line he doesn't even get to say) in his third; and he never drives an Aston Martin. Dalton ambles through these elements a bit more briskly, leaving only the card game for his second outing. BrosBond, like Lazenby before him, blows through all four by the 20-minute mark. (Connery, in case you wondered/forgot, has to wait until midway through his first one for his first martini, and of course doesn't get the Aston until his third. Craig breezes through it all in his first film, but is unique in that he gets the tux last. And the card games are all Poker, which obviously don't count because they're not commentated in French.) I was making a point and that point is this: they're a lot more desperate to get JAMES BOND up in your face than they have been since the last time his voice went all funny (no, I'm not counting Dalton's accent slips in LTK, those were deliberate, you see).
*Guys, baccarat is not difficult. Whatever the villain has on the last hand, Bond will have exactly one point more. Regardless of whether the non-Bond player hits or stands on 5, it's a mistake. The scoring is simple; it's the betting, particularly in Bond's favorite variant, that's more complex than the plot of The Living Daylights.
But all of this comes after the single most fantastically bizarre introduction to any James Bond before or since: upside-down in a loo. To be fair to the producers, Brosnan did try out for the part immediately after Roger Moore quit, so he knew what he was getting himself into.
Right, yes, okay, rote observation that Sean Bean's role in these proceedings looks like a hilarious send-up of his reputation for getting killed off in the first act. I already did the rote observation that he's too young for the Lienz Cossack plot to work, so all that's left is the rote observation that his "surprise villain" role is rather spoiled by the fact that he's credited second. (They get cleverer with this sort of thing in The World Is Not Enough, where the Surprise Villain is again billed second - but she's set up as the main Bond Girl, so you expect her role to be larger than "guy what gets shot in the face 006 minutes into the film.") Bit annoyed with how low-key Bean's burned half-face makeup is, but Batman Forever (aka The One With Two-Face) came out the same year, and Bond had already lost bigly to the Bat once (ask yourself why Licence to Kill is the franchise's last-ever summer release). Bit more annoyed with the notion that 006 needed more than three minutes to get up off the floor and disarm those bombs, though. Even more annoyed that someone pointed out to me that Desmond Llewellyn is blatantly reading all his dialogue off cue cards, which is mean to notice since he was 80 at the time.
The thing about GoldenEye that annoys me the most - key word there, "me," the most ornery of Bond Fan (Christ, them) - is the halfheartedness of the reboot on display here. No Felix Leiter this time, we've got something calling himself a "Jack Wade," played by, oh my, The Living Daylights' Joe Don Baker. Whyzzat? Because Felix got himself crippled by sharkbite in the previous one, and we dunno if that's "canon" or not now. Evidence suggests that the franchise can't go more than four or five films without buggering up the continuity anyway (see the "has Bond been to Japan before" discrepancy in From Russia and You Only Live Twice, question how Bond and Blofeld meet for the first time in both Twice and OHMSS, or infer the year of Tracy Bond's death in OHMSS and compare that with the year presented on the gravestone in For Your Eyes Only), so why not just plainly reboot it every time Bond gets a face/personality transplant? Licence to Kill would have to stand on its own instead of pretending to be an 18-years-too-late sequel to OHMSS, for starters.
It's obvious why they wouldn't, though. For much the same reason as Broccoli decided Dalton couldn't come back for a one-off: the point of this exercise is to give the Bond-starved public the Greatest Hits album, and go from there. A radical reboot at this juncture would have gone the way of Doctor Who: The Movie, and we'd have to wait until 2005 for a close-cropped jug-eared grumpy capital-A Actor veteran of Our Friends in the North to swing in and rescue the thing.
Oh wait.
(God, that's a multilayered joke. Take a minute to parse it. Yes, I know I'm tooting my own horn, but this is a GoldenEye rewatch, I'm just getting into the spirit of things. The obvious bit is that Daniel Craig and Christopher Eccleston a) share some facial features and demeanor b) did that one thing together, and c) were cast as the lead in A Quintessentially British Thing circa 2005. The less obvious bit is working in the reference to the idea of Dalton (who would go on to be in Doctor Who, layers upon layers) relaunching the franchise with a single installment before handing the role off to someone else, which is exactly what Eccleston did.)
Now I'm being unfair. James Bond made a shit-ton more money between 1996 and 2005 than Doctor Who did, so one of these mid-90s "reboots" "worked" and the other didn't. James Bond was undoubtedly the more established brand on this side of the pond, even if literally half of that brand was "wacky adventures with Uncle Rog and a misedited* Aussie." (How many Americans could even name two Doctors Who? "Well, there was the one with the scarf, and, um.") But even with that accounted for, Bond has the advantage in that you don't need to know what's a Gallifrey or why that phone box is smaller on the outside. Something about Aston Martins and Baccarat and Tuxes and Martinis and his backward way of introducing himself and 'splosions and Gurrlls, that's your Jimbo right there. And that's what GoldenEye is. "Ready to save the world again?" You better believe it.
*The BondFact that boggles me more than anything else is that the first time you could watch the unedited theatrical cut of OHMSS in the comfort of your own home was on the 2003 "special edition" DVD release. I've never actually seen the butchered TV cut, but from what I've heard, it's made of asbestos. (The 1983 VHS cut is at least in the proper order, but it's still missing a scene or two.) No wonder that film's reputation took a while to recover.
- OHMSS
- The Spy Who Loved Me
- From Russia With Love
- The Living Daylights
- No Time to Die
- Thunderball
- Casino Royale
- Moonraker
- GoldenEye (+1)
- Live and Let Die (+5)
- Quantum of Solace (+2)
- You Only Live Twice (-3)
- Goldfinger (-1)
- Dr. No (-3)
- Tomorrow Never Dies (-1)
- For Your Eyes Only
- Licence to Kill
- The World is Not Enough
- Skyfall
- Octopussy
- The Man With the Golden Gun
- A View to a Kill
- Die Another Day
- Diamonds Are Forever
- Spectre
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