Diamonds are endeavor.

A megalomaniac designs a satellite to harness the sun’s power. And James Bond is there to rain on his parade.

Cold Open Pretty Orange Explosion Zone: James Bond 007 (Pierce Brosnan, in his 4^th and final turn as the superspy) surfs some rad waves into North Korea (reflecting the tenor of the times, no more Russians), infiltrating diamond dealers, led by General’s son Col. Moon and his lieutenant Zao. They blow Bond’s cover, and he hovercrafts (!) and fights his way to a dead-end, killing Col. Moon in the chase. We are always wondering why villains don’t just shoot Bond immediately, but now we can understand a revenge motive, as the General imprisons Bond and tortures him until he looks like Gandalf after a bad day in Mirkwood.

Opening titles slam in with Madonna’s Die Another Day, which is very catchy, but washed out with insufferable auto-tune that makes me wanna smack her in the mouth, for which she would thank me. Hey, it’s Madonna. The lyrics, “I’m gonna close my body now…” make a lot of sense over the montage of Bond being tortured and closing his body off to suffering. Graphics of naked women on fire and naked women made of ice – to presage the plot of the movie…

Bearded bloodied Bond is eventually traded back to MI6 for Zao (Rick Yune), who was obviously captured after the Pretty Orange Explosions, which gave him the oomph Bond gimmick  – diamonds burned into his face. When Bond is released by the General for the trade, he sincerely thinks the Koreans are going to shoot him in the back, and Brosnan really sells it. Gone is the smug, gone is the suave, here is a man readying himself for nothingness.

But Bond is far from home free – matter of fact, he is home-imprisoned – as MI6, like any government, doesn’t trust its captured agents, so keep him locked in quarantine, with M (Judi Dench) rescinding his 00 status. (There is a heated exchange over Bond’s cyanide pill, which he apparently “got rid of years ago.” Does this make him a good agent or a bad risk? Was he so over-confident about his powers of not breaking under torture that he thought he’d never need it?) He says he was set up in North Korea, so, abandoned by his people, he must go it alone to find the mole.

Berry as Jinx: ass ass in.

So it’s that old premise: Bring the hero low. Find the mole that ruined his life.

One of the funniest scenes of any Bond movie is surely Bond walking barefoot into a swanky hotel in his soaking hospital togs and Gandalf-beard, shirt open on wet torso, after escaping the MI6 facility and swimming the bay, telling the concierge, “My usual suite, please.”

Bond starts tracking Zao. Onto Cuba, where he meets the plain-bordering-on-ugly Halle Berry as she exits the sea (in obvious homage to Ursula Andress in DR. NO, except not so deformed). Suddenly she’s dry. Bond meets her. Suddenly she’s wet again.

Berry is Jizz—sorry, Jinx, and she’s as smug as Bond (because this was that odd time in the world when people were telling Halle Berry she was all that), though I don’t know why – she’s not even a quarter as pretty as Bond. Nice side-boob though. Jinx is also some ass– I mean, also some kind of assassin. The dynamic of an adept female spy working alongside Bond worked so well in TOMORROW NEVER DIES they do it again, with Jinx. She’s no damsel in distress, and Berry does a great job of selling the strong woman who’s every bit as badass as Bond.

Jinx is under the command of Michael Madsen, whose sudden appearance in the MI6 office alongside regulars like Colin Salmon, made me think HE was the mole (brand new face in the office, and a star to boot; from RESERVOIR DOGS in 1992, in the space of just the decade till 2002’s DIE ANOTHER DAY, amassing over 60 credits! He’s like the modern day Lyle Talbot!)

Written by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (who both started with THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH, and would go on to write all the Daniel Craig era films), directed by Lee Tamahori (the brutal ONCE WERE WARRIORS, 1994), we once again feel the vignette-to-vignette nature of this Bond adventure. As with most of the convoluted plots of the Bond series, you can never quite work out the intricacies – but you always get the objective of each vignette.

Bond traces Zao to a DNA facility in Cuba. Jinx is there too, destroying files of herself. This place is one step beyond Witness Protection – it constructs new identities through “gene therapy” – reshaping your face completely. Zao escapes both Bond and Jinx. And Bond traces him to a London diamond merchant, Gustav Graves (the excellent Toby Stephens, smugger than Moore and Brosnan put together); a fencer, parachutist, knight, adventurer, whose oomph Bond gimmick is that he doesn’t sleep.

Gustav is constructing a satellite that can re-direct the sun’s golden beams on farmlands, or concentrate golden beams into destructive blasts. And he calls it… Goldeneye—no wait, that was copyrighted three films ago… damn! It woulda been perfect! (He calls it Icarus instead… does it bode well for anything if it’s named after the hubristic young mythological Greek who flew too close to the sun and died?)

I don’t know who’s cooler: the Black James Bond or Mr. White.

Bond touches tips with Gustav in a ferocious swordfight, well-staged through common rooms and libraries of this grande olde British club. Madonna cameos as a fencer; her accent cameos as British. When asked to bet on the Gustav-Bond fight, she demurs, “I don’t like cockfights.” It’s funny because she’s a slut.

Rosamund Pike is Miranda Frost, Gustav’s right-hand woman, young and smooth and ice-queen, turning down Bond’s advances. Until she sleeps with him. Oh, we can use the excuse that she’s a double-agent, but we all know it’s because in a Bond film, sexism wins.

Bond, back in the begrudging good graces of M, visits Q (John Cleese, now entrenched as the Quartermaster due to the tragic death of Desmond Llewelyn; sadly, Cleese would not continue into the Daniel Craig era). He previews an invisible car and, for a hot second, as his legs are refracted through the invisible car, we get an unintentional taste of The Minister of Silly Walks! Or maybe that was a sly wink?

Next insane location: an Ice Hotel. These things DO exist – which is a wonder in itself, constructed for tourist seasons and melted months later – but never in the fancy fashion of Gustav’s Ice Palace from this movie, a wholly impractical construct with hedonistic frills no sane ice hotelier would attempt). Jinx is there too!

We discover Gustav is actually Col. Moon whom Bond “killed” in the Cold Open Pretty Orange Explosion Zone, altered through gene therapy, Moon snidely admitting that Bond was his English character-model: “That unjustifiable swagger, those crass quips, the defense mechanism concealing such inadequacy…”

Bond: “So you live to die another day?”

It’s racism so deep we hardly see it. The plot twist required Bond to have a connection to the diamond dealer/sun king, and not realize it. So couldn’t they make this guy another Asian? At the least, an ambiguous Easterner? Instead of going all the way to WHITE MAN? Now I happen to be a fan of this particular white man (mostly because he looks like Clint Eastwood), but we can’t shake the feeling the movie is implying that another Asian guy would not have played well because all Asians look alike. Or – the filmmakers might think the audience would automatically regard him as the villain, because we opened with the North Korean villains. Thing is: we regard Gustav as the villain anyway, through his smugness and Bond’s suspicions, so… how do we get to kumbaya from here?… Do tell us, filmmakers!

The main annoying aspect is still the talking-not-shooting syndrome of all the bad guys. Or the shooting madly at the heroes when they’re running away, but as soon as the heroes give themselves up, the shooting stops. Frost says, with a sword at Jinx’s neck, “Drowning you didn’t seem to work. We’ll have to try something more to the point!”– Shutup with the puns and SKEWER HER!

For all their stupidities, Pierce Brosnan’s Bond films are enjoyable diversions, consistent in their tone and production design. It is during Brosnan’s tenure we see the upheaval in special effects technology in movies, reflected in the use of computers within the storylines of the movies themselves. As computers become more prevalent in this series of movies, so too does Computer Graphic Imagery in the production of the films. GOLDENEYE used that big green writing on computer monitors; by DIE ANOTHER DAY, we have digital readouts, modern-looking screens, virtual reality and holograms.

There’s a thug named Mr. Kil, a laser watch and laser guns, an invisible car, a ring that shatters glass, the villain’s solar suit that looks like Iron Man, a rocket car that races the satellite’s sun beam and – Bond para-sailing across rad waves with icebergs. Movie Maniacs, if you stayed for the gene technology that could change an Asian guy’s face into Nearly Clint Eastwood, you can suspend your disbelief for the parasailing.

I think it was more that Asian/Caucasian plot twist that alienated this movie with Bond fans than the parasailing, which was a dumb surface reason. By replacing the Asian guy with a Brit, the film lost our investment of emotion. It suddenly felt like it was forcing us to invest in a character which we should have a connection with – but which we don’t because – he’s not that character that we met for all of two minutes in the cold open, which we never had the chance to connect with anyway. It’s off the chain batshit. So we feel as lopsided as the airplane that flies through a Goldeneye sunbeam with Bond and Jinx and Frost and Clint Eastwood dressed like Iron Man.

A final scene finds James entering MI6 and laying Moneypenny (Samantha Bond) across her desk for a sensual pumpi—a hologram! Moneypenny’s fantasy… Still, it was kinda nice that both these characters got to makeout in this last turn for both of them.

Bond ends this caper with diamonds and Jizz.

END

Rich people wanting richer.

Another villain with a bomb. Another hero who must defuse it. That’s what the twisty confusing plot boils down to in the James Bond actioner THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH.

The cold open features a rather tame, though humorous, escape for a Bond movie, as Bond easily rappels down an office building (tied around a man’s waist at the top) – until we see the real cold open excitement: a powerboat chase of a damaging brunette in red leather (featuring Maria Grazia Cucinotta, who would also appear this year in THE SOPRANOS as “Isabella” S1E12). Featured gag is Bond’s boat doing a corkscrew jump out of the water (homage to the corkscrew car jump in THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN, 1974). After Bond damages more property and endangers more lives than any bad guy, the girl blows up (–awwww! What a waste of hotness!) and the opening titles slink in…

… with naked girls writhing in oil, while Garbage performs The World Is Not Enough.

Pierce Brosnan returns a third time as MI6 agent James Bond 007. Judi Dench is once again ‘M’ the boss, and Colin Salmon and Michael Kitchen return as office agents.

Desmond Llewelyn: The REAL secret weapon.

Desmond Llewelyn as weapons expert Q introduces “the young fellow who’ll be replacing me…” – John Cleese, who brings his A-game for the cameo! The producers wanted to film a farewell to Llewelyn in the last film (TOMORROW NEVER DIES) in case he retired, instead filming a quick goodbye here – and well they did, for 85-year-old Llewelyn would die tragically in a car accident one month after WORLD premiered. Bond even looks sad when he asks Q whether he is serious about retiring.

We did not know it at the time, but sadly, Llewelyn’s last words in a Bond film would be, “Always have an escape plan,” and as he descends out of sight, it would be the last we would see of him. The saddest cut of all is that Llewelyn expressed a desire to be in one more Bond film.

What would a Bond movie be without a car supplied by Q that shoots missiles? Bond uses such a car… and for the first time, when the car is ultimately destroyed, Bond makes a callback to his cantankerous pal: “Q’s not gonna like this!”

He might have provided the secret weapons, but all this time Desmond Llewelyn himself was the Bond series’ secret weapon.

Directed by Michael Apted (EXTREME MEASURES), this caper is set in motion when M’s personal friend is killed, leaving an oil empire for his daughter, Elektra (sultry Sophie Marceau, BRAVEHEART, 1995). A shoulder injury almost prevents Bond from pursuing the killer of Elektra’s father, but Bond plonks his hot doctor (Serena Scott Thomas) for a clean bill of health.

He makes contact with Elektra as a protector and ends up as an injector, if you take my meaning. On bedsheets that are getting progressively less concealing as the decade moves toward a new millennium. What I’m saying, boys, is – yes, there’s some nip slip…

As the hot chicks pile up, movie loses all credibility when it introduces Denise Richards as a physicist [record scratch]— named Christmas Jones, garbed in crop top and hot pants – because that’s how physicists dress. You read that right: Denise Richards is a Doctor of Physics — with not one scintilla of acting ability, as the producers discover when they mistakenly try to force lines of physics dialogue through those lubricious cupid-bow lips (“We’re safe from the radiation as long as the reactor coolant doesn’t burst!”) which were purposed by nature only for carnal intercourse grunts.

Christmas works for Elektra, who is trying to build an 800-mile pipeline “through Turkey, past the terrorists in Iraq, Iran and Syria.” Terrorists in those three countries? You don’t say! So they were praising allah and blowing up civilians back in the 90s, just like they are now? And 5,000 years ago, same. And I’m betting it will still be the same 10,000 years from now. Proving that there’s no cure for religious fuckheads.

A physicist arrives at work.

Some Bond movies snap our necks with all the unnecessary locations – WORLD is one of them. It just seems like writers Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Bruce Feirstein are thinking up vignettes to keep the story kinetic, yet not giving a toss on how or why the characters would find themselves in those situations. Like Bond and Elektra skiing down a mountain pursued by “parahawks” (guys in snowmobiles, suspended by parachutes). Choppered to the top of this mountain to supposedly “check the survey lines,” Elektra has brought no equipment except her skis and panties, no camera, no tools, not even one stinking clipboard to take notes. What kind of “surveying” are you doing, woman? It’s just a romantic interlude for these two, interrupted by Parahawk Action Sequence, which we would find out later has no meaning to the plot anyway.

At the Azerbaijan oil fields, Bond sees a helicopter outfitted with five circular saws hanging below it, cutting through trees, clearing land. Like THAT isn’t foreshadowing. (It’s what cuts through Q’s car later!) Part of the story is set in Istanbul, but a real life terrorist bombing there forced the filmmakers to do those scenes at Pinewood instead. (Thank you SO much, religious fuckheads!)

Robbie Coltrane reprises his role as Russian gangster Zukovsky. (We met him in GOLDENEYE; he skipped a movie, he’s back again, though I’m sure his accent has become more schoolyard-Boris than his last go-around.)

Eventually we meet the terrorist behind the bomb, with his oomph-Bond-gimmick: “a stray bullet moving slowly through his brain, killing his nerves, so that he feels no pain, getting stronger until his eventual death.” Robert Carlyle, so impressive in TRAINSPOTTING and THE FULL MONTY, has nothing to do here as Renard, generic Bad Guy. His gimmick is never even utilized properly: when he and Bond eventually engage in hand-to-hand, over the thermonuclear device that Christmas can’t pronounce, Renard is not inordinately stronger than Bond, nor does he “feel no pain,” as every time Bond kicks him, he goes, “Oouf!” and “Aargh!” (Bovver boy Begbie was more resilient than this guy!…)

To further the annoyance at wasting such an ominous personality on generic punching, when Bond gets the drop on Renard – he’s the one now talking instead of shooting! You’d think he’d learn from all the talky villains who’ve gotten the drop on him, but maybe he thinks this is how international espionage is done?

At just over 2 hours long, we start to feel it, as the movie wends its way around the Middle Eastern world, especially when machine guns are popping off and bombs are blowing up and no one is getting hit except bad guys, and the air around Bond and Christmas.

When Elektra asks M to protect her personally, we have to ask ourselves what M can do that ten skilled male agents can’t. The trap is so obvious, it’s only a matter of time before M finds herself in an easily-escapable cell. But then, it would seem every trap for Bond is never designed to kill him either, but to put off his death, as Renard strands Bond in an exploding mine and Elektra ties him to a torture chair. (Maybe these people need more religion – to become better killers.)

The last sequence finds Bond and Christmas trapped in a sinking sub. Can’t get more claustrophobic than that. Well, you can if Denise Richards is saying her lines at your face like a first-year acting student. Really, couldn’t they have switched the Christmas role with Maria Grazia Cucinotta instead?! Tits AND brains.

– – – – – SPOILERS – – – – –

There’s a new villain dynamic in THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH – The Bond Girl is also The Bond Villain. (No, I’m not saying Robert Carlyle is a girl, I’m saying Sophie Marceau is playing both sides of the bed.)

Elektra was kidnapped by Renard when young, and embraced his ideology (Stockholm Syndrome, meet Patty Hearst), so even though Renard is the mad bomber, Elektra is his mad funder; he’s the muscle, but she’s the megalomaniac tactician calling the shots, aiming to rule the world through Big Oil, which, as we know, is a much more criminal enterprise than a simple kidnapper-bomber.

As usual, movie ends with Bond eating Christmas for dinner.

END

When even Fake News was ethical.

James Bond versus Fox News! And all disinformation breaks loose!

Pierce Brosnan returns as James Bond 007 against Jonathan Pryce as Roger Ailes of Fox News—wait, sorry, Brit-evil Pryce is actually media mogul Elliot Carver, who goes to all the trouble of creating a stealth ship, stockpiling it with missiles of different nations, and then carefully launching a certain country’s missiles against that country’s political opposition, in order to spur worldwide wars – not for the sake of war per se – but to give his media company primacy over all others in the world by reporting this created news literally before it happens. It’s ten steps further than the Fox News business model of reporting world events without any research at all; matter of fact, Fox – with their gaslighting, lies, complicity to murder, kidnapping, treason, money-laundering and obstruction of justice – could NEVER be that principled!

Carver’s Media company only reports what actually happened. They are just not revealing their duplicity in creating the news they report. But Fox News makes no distinction between lies and reality; they just don’t care.

Fox News is worse than a super criminal in a fantasy movie. Let that sink in…

Written by Bruce Feirstein (GOLDENEYE) and directed by Roger Spottiswoode (AIR AMERICA), TOMORROW NEVER DIES opens in MI6 headquarters, on Colin Salmon (the man whom I’ve always said would make a great Black James Bond! Hear me now, believe me later!) coordinating espionage maneuvers for Agent 007, their spy on the ground at a terrorist arms camp. While other officers watch the monitors and criticize 007’s methods (“What’s he doing?!), the head of MI6, M (Judi Dench) stands up for Bond (“His job!”). Whereas she disdained Bond’s machismo and methods in the last Bond entry, GOLDENEYE, here she has come around to his “boyish charm” it would seem.

Pretty Orange Explosions ensue.

Opening titles, naked lady silhouettes, with Sheryl Crow singing the theme song.

We will find out later this weapons Farmer’s Market is where Carver bought his various international weapons for his Machiavellian, megalomaniacal plan. He meets with world media leaders on a split screen, in a flashdance of spurting headlines that have not happened yet, then delegates his mayhem To-Do list to his Aryan-blond man-mountain Stamper (Götz Otto).

Since “computers” were so Neanderthal in the last Bond movie, just two years ago, it’s pertinent to note that computers are ubiquitous in this movie; Carver even carries a kind of iPad; a testament to how quickly we all got used to them in our daily lives. Carver gloats: “Words are the new weapons, satellites the artillery” … Yet someone still felt the need to explain “…the GPS – the Global Positioning Satellite…” (snigger – but we can’t be too harsh on them 90’s cavemen – in fifty years’ time, think how they’ll be laughing at our attempts at driverless cars and Wolf Blitzer holograms. Speaking of Wolf, M quipped in GOLDENEYE, “Unlike the American government, we prefer not to get our bad news from CNN”. And in this day and age, I can’t figure out whether this was an insult to the U.S. government or CNN. Fox News reported it was definitely insulting the U.S. and CNN, because Obama and Muslims.)

Q (Desmond Llewelyn) bequeaths Bond a self-driving, rocket-launching, tricked-out BMW (which will be a great action gag in a parking garage), a cellphone/taser/car-remote, and his parting advice, “Grow up, double-oh seven!”

At the launch of Carver’s newspaper called Tomorrow, Bond meets old flame and Carver’s current wife, Paris (Teri Hatcher, hot off LOIS & CLARK: THE NEW ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN, 1993-97). Carver is supervillain-jealous that she knows Bond from a previous double-O (as in orgasm). And when you piss off a man with a god-complex, you get the devil bashed out of you. Which Bond gets.

But Bond gets the last laugh, as he turns off Carver’s worldwide inaugural transmission mid-gloat. And for the self-touted media monolith, the glitch is AWK-ward to say the least. Bond also steals a red oblong Encoder (i.e. McGuffin) that makes all Carver’s satellites evil like Fox News.

In the ensuing spy-chase, we meet this movie’s Bond Girl—Wait, you thought that was Teri Hatcher, right? She’s the fake-out Bond Girl – the actual Bond Girl is worked into the tale more subtly.

Michelle Yeoh is Wai Lin – a Chinese spy, also onto Carver’s game – who falls into the action by turning up everywhere that Bond is sneaking around. Every bit as skilled as Bond in fighting, driving, shooting and general sneaking, we feel a cute chemistry between them – two artisans working together; someone that Bond can actually, uh, bond with, rather than smash and run. But, to our surprise, Bond does no smashing, as the filmmakers draw out the sexual tension by making Lin decline any interest in Bond; every time they get physically close during intense escapes, she keeps warning, “Don’t get any ideas.” For a long period, they are handcuffed together and must affect an escape by riding a motorbike creatively while cuffed, jumping helicopters and teasing cowboy positions. The first time they actually “kiss” is near the end of the third act, when Bond must save her life underwater by blowing into her mouth. Remember boys, you can save a drowning woman by blowing into her mouth.

Fun scene with Vincent Schiavelli (a long-faced That Guy whom you’ve seen in scores of movies like AMADEUS and GHOST), an assassin who talks when he should be shooting. Bond knows when to talk – only when quipping after killing someone.

Speaking of talking – Joe Don Baker. Cameos again as American agent Wade, who can’t keep his Ugly American mouth shut.

The advent of automatic weapons has really made bad guys look more incompetent than at any other time in the history of bad guys (except maybe a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away). In the (Earth’s) past, when people used to have single shots, you couldn’t be faulted for missing a moving target, but with automatic weapons burping hundreds of rounds a minute (from the quantity of bad guys shooting at our heroes), you’ve got to be a real dog to miss so efficiently so consistently. And Yeoh even gets to go Jackie Chan on some bad guys who apparently forgot to even bring guns. (That’s Jackie Chan’s actual stunt team being kicked by Michelle Yeoh. Coincidentally, her first onscreen job was on a commercial with – Jackie Chan! I’ve officially said Jackie Chan too many times in a movie with no Jackie Chan.)

The ending is quite sudden, with all the fistfights onboard the stealth ship, all the shooting and missing, all the talking not shooting, culminating in a Pretty Orange Explosion that yet leaves at least one lifeboat unscathed for Bond and Lin to get it on dragon-style.

Between the last Bond film (GOLDENEYE) and this one, Albert R. Broccoli died, the legendary producer of ALL Bond films (except NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN). The outro credits first title card: “In loving memory of Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli.”

Back in its day, TOMORROW NEVER DIES seemed like science fiction – satellites and iPads and “computers” and telling outright lies in place of news – but in retrospect it looks almost quaint alongside the real life Fox News promulgating its proven lies to a whole ignorant swathe of the American voting population who dangerously regard them as fact. Waitaminute—

Fox News launched in October 1996. This movie was released in December 1997. Was it a dry run for the Fox business model? Words are the new weapons, rednecks the artillery.

END

Secret Service Superman.

LONDON HAS FALLEN follows in the same vein as its predecessor, OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN – a gritty actioner that puts the American president in peril, so his bromantic bodyguard can save him.

The terrorists are winning again.

Movie opens on a Middle Eastern wedding party near Pakistan, which is blown sky-high by an American missile, taking the lives of over 200 people, 2 of whom are sinister-looking guys planning revenge killings. Scorecard: 2 potential criminals, 198 innocent civilians. Told you the terrorists were winning—oh, you took it for granted I meant Middle Eastern olive-skinned people when I said “terrorists,” and not the American military with drones, attacking from a base in Nevada and murdering in cold blood from afar like cowards? The mission officer even tells the guy flying the drone, “You’re clear to execute.” He uses the word “execute.” And gets away with it because – America…

The explosion cross-fades into an American flag – as if to rub our noses in it. (‘Watch us murder with impunity and then wrap ourselves in the stars and stripes to justify it!’) Title card tells us it is Two Years Later…

We meet American President Ben Asher (Aaron Eckhart) and his bodyguard Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) jogging; the youthful, sexy Pres once again amazed at the iron constitution of his chief protector running rings around him. Little does he know his taut-buttocked guardian is writing a Resignation Letter, expecting his first child (with wife Radha Mitchell).

But then – the British Prime Minister dies and every world leader must attend the funeral in London. Not knowing Banning intends to resign, Pres calls on him to make the trip. Banning accepts, telling his understanding wife, ‘One last time.’

With every world leader in London, the city is blown to hell, in a massive coordinated strike that leaves few leaders alive. One of my favorite newsmen, Lawrence O’Donnell, represents Generic American Newsguy: “the attack decimated most of the British landmarks. Five world leaders confirmed dead.” (I’m presuming Londoners would be a tad more impressed with this film than the rest of the world, seeing their landmarks blowing up in such realistic detail, as we Angelenos appreciated the novelty of L.A. landmarks torched by special effects in VOLCANO).

A Pakistani named Barkawi (Alon Aboutboul) takes the blame, the same guy whose daughter was blown up at the wedding earlier. So this is blowback for the American attack. Barkawi was one of the 2 sinister-looking guys – and he didn’t even die, which means the Americans blew up all those innocent people for nothing! (The innocent victims are later referred to as “collateral.” Who are the terrorists again?) And now the Americans seem surprised when arms dealer Barkawi comes after them righteously for blowing up his whole family! These “terrorists” and their vendettas! Why can’t they just let America blow them up without retaliating?!

In the midst of the Pretty Orange Explosions and gun battles, President Asher and his boy Mike Banning, fight their way to the chah-pah! It’s all blam-fest from there on in, superguy Banning providing protection level services that only a man-of-steel could likely get away with.

All the main characters reprise their roles from OLYMPUS: Morgan Freeman is VP, Angela Bassett is Secret Service director; Robert Forster and Melissa Leo in the president’s cabinet, drawing on their reserves of Concerned Face No.7 around the White House conference table; Jackie Earle Haley joining them with Concerned Face No.9.  Colin Salmon is head of British security (the man who should be the black James Bond); and there’s cute and sexy Charlotte Riley as Jacquelin (Banning warns, “Don’t fuck with her!”), dealing with a mole in the British Secret Service, who helped coordinate the London strikes.

Co-written by the writers of OLYMPUS (Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedickt, and directed by Babak Najafi (hey! He sounds like one o’ dem terrorists), LONDON HAS FALLEN is a brutal R-rated bullet-fest with premium swearing and savage, violent deaths. There is a scene where Banning shoves a knife slowly into Barkawi’s son, just so that man’s brother (listening on the walkie-talkie) can hear him scream and die. The president asks Banning, “Was that necessary?” Banning’s curt reply, “No.” It’s comedy gold—but wait! Shouldn’t the Pres be horrified, thinking, “Whoa my God! My bodyguard is a SADIST!”? But no. Funny. Because – American.

The Pres and Banning make it to the chah-pah, called Marine-1. In an amazing sequence (for more than one reason), the convoy of three helicopters runs out of flares to deflect the missiles coming at them from the ground. We hear on the com, “Marine-2, prepare to sacrifice.” Marine-2 says, “Copy”– wait—what?!— Marine-2 simply has to take it in the ass for Marine-1?! And we see Marine-2, without hesitation, fly into the path of the oncoming missile, without any lube.

“Don’t worry, sir. That CNN interview with Kellyanne Conway
has already been logged under “cyberterror.”

Cliché Alert: The Pres and Banning drive through a hail of bullets and get clear, then start laughing, “We fucken made it!” Isn’t this ALWAYS the moment that the attack comes ‘pon the side? The Pres is nabbed by the villains, who plan to execute him live on the internet (which should trend for about 3 hours, and then be replaced by news of the Kardashians).

It’s amusing that Gerard Butler’s character name (Banning) is so close to the actual name of the white supremacist Hutt in the 2017 Dumbo Donald administration (Bannon). This movie makes us wish someone would kidnap Dumbo Donald and beat the shit out of him, as they do President Asher, although one might wonder what principles the villains would make Dumbo Donald renege on (as the pathological liar is devoid of principles or loyalty to any country or creed), or what national secrets they could beat out of him that he hasn’t divulged himself without any prompting? This is why Dumbo Donald – the president who has insulted every other world leader with his ignorance – has not been kidnapped yet. Firstly because everyone knows that no one would try to get him back, and secondly, because there is no ethos there, no system of belief that can be denigrated on the world stage. And really, how far would Dumbo’s Bannon go to rescue his senile, retarded Nazi boss? And we could bet no helicopter would throw itself in the path of an oncoming missile for that obese mongrel swine.

Cliché Alert: Humanizing the Americans – Pres cares for his son, Banning cares for his wife, Morgan Freeman wants to catch a big fish… How come we never hear how much Barkawi cared for his daughter? His emotion for her is relegated to revenge on London. They say he deals weapons to America’s enemies. But didn’t America sell arms to the Afghans, Iranians, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Palestinians, the Mujahideen, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hezbollah, and ISIS? Oh, that must have been some other country named The United States of America.

Cliché Alert: Jacquelin discovers the mole betraying British Secret Service. Instead of alerting a whole squad to go pick him up, she confronts him alone in a parking garage. (Just because you’re sexy doesn’t make you smart.) With gun in hand, she then proceeds to tell him how she figured he was the mole. How about saving it for the trial, honey? Then she tells him softly to “Get on the floor.” We know he’s going to back away towards his car, where there is a gun waiting for him. We know she’s going to say it louder, “Get on the floor!” while he continues to back away with his hands up. And we know she’s going to scream “GET ON THE FUCKING FLOOR!” before he lunges for the gun and she is forced to shoot him dead. She could have wounded him, but no. So  when reporting the incident, how will anyone know she is in the right? Maybe she shot this man in cold blood and PLANTED all that evidence making him look like the mole? This scene is so stupid, it made Jacquelin even hotter.

Cliché Alert: Banning deletes his Letter of Resignation. Because he loves his job? Because he loves his country? Because he loves his president? No, because he loves a sequel.

Being reminded of all the damage America has done to the world
always makes the cabinet recoil in horror.

Movie ends by blowing up Barkawi. And to pander to Social Justice Warriors, we clearly hear, “Ground asset confirms: clear of civilian presences.” Yeh, royt. So this makes up for murdering those innocent 195? Because you CHECKED this time for “collateral”? I guess we owe America an apology.

If you love action movies, LONDON HAS FALLEN is a good proponent. It’s well-acted, and may squeeze a poignant tear in small sequences. The set-up scenes in the first act are very compelling for their detail, editing and direction. And production values are exceptional: there is a firefight where our heroes are running towards their objective at the end of a street, while being fired upon from that point, and we can see fiery streaks of heavy duty rounds coming at us from a vanishing point. We see the flares of the firing, hot bullet trails in the air, impact points, meticulous sound design; the blocking and cinematography in this scene alone is stunning. It separates LONDON from its copycats.

It’s a highly predictable film of course, because no American president is killed in an American movie (unless it’s Lincoln or Kennedy). Especially by so-called “terrorists.” Terrorists have to lose in this current fearful political climate. It’s not so much fantasy as wish-fulfillment.

But the funniest thing is, even though movies portray terrorists as being from Anywhere But America, America has proven itself the greatest terrorist threat to the world, especially with a madman at the helm (Dumbo Donald): not even counting the innumerable American gunmen who terrorize schools and malls, America “boasts” the largest nuclear armory in the world, disallows other countries to amass nuclear weapons, uses the threat of WMDs to keep other countries cowed; has military bases around the world holding the boot on other countries’ necks, owes debt to other countries with no intent to pay it back, with the threat of sanctions, embargoes and loss of support, should those countries pipsqueak their dissatisfaction.

And though all other countries still try to outwit America the old-fashioned way – with bombs and guns and man-agents dressed as women – Russia eventually got it right, installing a dimwit sociopath wannabe dictator in the White House in 2016 to do their bidding (much like America installed the Shah of Iran in 1953), and this Dumbo Donald is systematically dismantling the tenets of democracy one freedom fry at a time.

The terrorists have won.

Olympus has fallen.

END

AVP: Audience Versus Padding.

The question is not whether an “Alien” can overcome a “Predator” (ignorant semantics, as the two non-human species in this film are both “aliens” and “predators”); the real battle is pitting the movie’s Audience against its interminable Padding scenes. Can – we – survive? With my leg bloodied from the onslaught and a gaping wound in my side, I struggled out the theater exit, leaving two friends gurgling in the seventh row – hey, I’m no jarhead – I make no empty promises to “leave no one behind”… If the subterranean walking scenes didn’t finish them off, the inane talking scenes did.

Padding: 2. Audience: 1.

AVP: ALIEN VS PREDATOR is a nippled Batsuit – a franchise gone too far. It fulfills its purpose of keeping 14-year-old boys off the street and thereby less likely to shoot up a school or get your daughter pregnant, which is small respite; all we can hope for – until the next over-breasted Lara Croft video game release or somnolent Harry Potter movie. But as adult entertainment – and let’s face it: present-day adults, not kids, are the demographic weaned on the ALIEN and PREDATOR movies – it is diversionary, but not involving; good but not great, glittering but no prize.

Predapoff

An ancient pyramid is discovered beneath the snows of some snowy country, where Aliens are kept imprisoned in labyrinths, for Predators to send their teen warriors in and achieve predatorhood via slaughter. Sounds great on paper.

Both ALIEN (1979) and PREDATOR (1987) were sui generis movies, the former, through canny screenwriting and an uncompromising lead heroine, spawned three above-average sequels while the latter spawned an adequate-bordering-on-lame sequel (Danny in lieu of Arnold?!). Now, like the HIGHLANDER franchise, the mythos of both creations is sullied to the level of soap opera and with the Marketeers wielding their pimp-witted power, no longer will any successive ALIEN or PREDATOR movies exude the mystery or excitement of their progenitors, but rather, bombastic, overblown CGI and gratuitously-tweaked explosions for the action-figure teenboy market.

As a stand-alone movie – forget it! AVP’s existence is predicated on our cognizance of the last 25 years of these iconic monsters. Without that foreknowledge the very existence of these creatures and their interaction will appear contrived. The plot seems cobbled together from drafts made by 14-year-olds playing with their action figures (much like George Lucas writes his plots). The concept of the battling races at first seems mildly plausible, but then we realize the whole backstory is shoving square storyline into round plot holes and demystifying not one, but two rapacious extra-terrestrial cultures. Casting one’s senses back to those heady days of the original movies, our enjoyment was piqued precisely because their antagonists were inexplicable; they were truly… “alien.” Now they’re just Philo Beddoe in a barroom.

Except for Lance Henriksen (renowned B-movie “That Guy”), all human characters are instantly forgettable, except for a guy whose cultured locution could easily get him mistaken for a black James Bond (Colin Salmon, who actually had a small recurring role in the three Brosnan Bond films) and the young female expedition leader (Sanaa Lathan), i.e. Black Ripley; in essence, humans are this movie’s McGuffin, for any agent could have unearthed the battle-pyramid and a text crawl could have explained the backstory of the Alien-Predator symbiosis. Only reason we meet humans at all in this film is to mayhap invest a modicum of interest in this tale which, literally, has nothing to do with our species.

It’s a B-Actor hoedown: Sanaa Lathan and a cast of glorified extras.

Henriksen’s role is anomalous: his character is familiar with Aliens (from ALIEN 3), yet when confronted by one, instead of becoming Mr. Corporation (as would be his character’s wont), he burbles incoherently with the rest of the B-Actors. Then when confronted by a Predator, instead of dollar signs cha-chinging in his eyes at the discovery of yet another alien species, he goes Rambo on it and gets, subsequently, dead. But I will leave that trite conundrum to the fanboys to clarify.

Terming one species Alien and one Predator is a point of irritating contention for me; these terms only exist in our viewer-reality, for in the movie, the creatures are only superficially identified as “serpents” (Aliens) and “hunters” (Predators). The substitute terms are a dead giveaway: hunters are “noble”; serpents, well… do we need to extemporize on a well-trodden metaphor? From the outset, we are led a merry road by the film-makers to perceive the Predators as “good guys.” No surprise, for in being prejudicially human, we are prone to siding with the more anthropoid of the two aliens and ironically, the Predators assume the Arnold role in this movie – the musclebound “heroes,” as it were. The movie rationalizes, sensibly, that the Predators only try to kill our human B-actors to re-acquire what the B-actors stole – their weapons. Which puts paid to the movie’s tag-line, “Whoever wins – we lose.” Well, not exactly, for the Predators are portrayed as sentinels keeping the roistering Aliens at bay… So only if the Predators lose, we lose.

Battle scenes ensue – with the predictably close-cut action and blurred whiz-banging – but the fights are only adequately directed and rather short, and it is just too incongruous viewing these two iconic monsters on screen together. Something just don’t click. Either this would be a good Alien movie (for the Aliens are animated excellently, combining live puppetry with CGI) or a good Predator movie (the rugged masculinity of those 7-foot behemoths was enough super-cruel to power a small township), but – as Offspring advised – “you gotta keep ’em separated.”

And for the record, the “AVP” acronym is so IGNINTLY “skoolyard-bitchin” that it reeks of Marketeers grappling with the long-dead spirits of their nerd youth in pathetically trying to ramp up the street-cool of this geek-square movie.

Now gimme that spear – after witnessing those man-tastic pecs on the Predators, I’m going in – I’ve got two friends to save in the seventh row…

END