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

Out with the smug. In with the smugger.

The codes of a destructive satellite named GOLDENEYE have been stolen by Russian traitors working with a British traitor, Agent 006, who plans to use Goldeneye’s electromagnetic pulses to cause a global financial meltdown. James Bond must defeat the stronger agent, thwart the runaway satellite, and bang the Russian hotness.

new bond: brosnan, pierce brosnan

The first Bond that came to my young attention was Moore, Roger Moore. And I lavished the appropriate young-boy idolatry on this Real Man surrounded by gangsters, gadgets and girls. Upon learning of Connery, Sean Connery, it seemed only appropriate to then lavish the proprietary respect on He Who Came First – and let’s face it, he was quite the Man’s Man himself (meaning he was even more of a misogynist than Moore). Lazenby, George Lazenby, I never knew thee. And Dalton, Timothy Dalton, I was ambivalent at best about the choice, being young, dumb and fulla that white stuff.

I used to go around saying what a fine Bond that young REMINGTON STEELE fella would make; whatsisname? – Brosnan, Pierce Brosnan. Well, little did I know that wheels of fate were in motion: Brosnan was married to Cassandra Harris in 1981 when she did FOR YOUR EYES ONLY, and was introduced to producer Albert Broccoli… and thus he was, in fact, chosen to replace Roger Moore in 1987’s THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS – and lost the gig to Timothy Dalton due to NBC grasping like the tentacles on the S.P.E.C.T.R.E. octopus and extending Brosnan’s contract on REMINGTON STEELE due to the heat he would generate from being Bond. So Broccoli said Fuck NBC and hired Dalton instead…

Sadly, Cassandra would die of cancer in 1991 and would not see her husband become Bond.

But here we are at last, me being proven right on what a damn fine double-oh Brosnan cuts, in his first go-around as 007 at 42 years of age, in a film once again named so appropriately in the Bond vein, GOLDENEYE (maybe because we’ve been conditioned to accept the “gold” appellation, with GOLDFINGER (1964) and THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN (1974)).

GOLDENEYE is the first Bond film not lifted from an Ian Fleming Bond novel.  But there is a connection to Fleming: Goldeneye is the name of his estate in Oracabessa Bay in Jamaica. It was where he started the first draft to the very first Bond novel in 1952, Casino Royale.

Smugtastic!

GOLDENEYE grips us immediately with James Bond 007 (Brosnan) bungee-jumping off a massive dam in total silence to infiltrate a Russian base. With fellow MI6 Agent 006 (Sean Bean), they both spy around a bit before 006 gets killed by Colonel Ourumov (Gottfried John) and 007 escapes in another throat-gripping stunt – leaping a motorbike off a cliff runway to chase a taxiing single-engine plane off the cliff, with no pilot. The stunt is so audacious, it cannot be matched by anything that comes after it. The opening titles slink in with Tina Turner singing Goldeneye.

NINE YEARS LATER…

Bond is careening down a mountain road in an Aston Martin with a young woman, who nervously begs him to slow down, “James, I enjoy a spirited ride as much as the next girl, but…”  A luscious woman in a red sportscar overtakes them, openly flirting with Bond. Bond’s young woman asks, “Who’s that?” James: “The next girl.” (Ha! I love it! Shutup! So do you! It’s 1995.)

After meeting that sportster at a baccarat table (the delectable Famke Janssen at the height of her sex as Xenia Onatopp – all the better to innuendo her), the plot kicks into gear, with Onatopp and Colonel Ourumov stealing a techno helicopter, wiping out a Russian satellite base, and tying Bond’s knickers into knots.

We are introduced to a new actor playing Moneypenny the MI6 secretary (Samantha Bond, who would play the character through Brosnan’s four Bond films); not as luscious as Caroline Bliss heating up Dalton, and not an auntie like Lois Maxwell pining for Connery’s and Moore’s underpants, Bond (Samantha) is an attractive redhead who smugly informs Bond (James) that she was just on a date with another gentleman, and that Bond’s flirtations could get him charged with sexual harassment! (Just wait’ll she gets a load of #MeToo!)

There’s a new M – Judi Dench as MI6 director, taking the reins from Robert Brown (who took over from Bernard Lee and only did four Bond films prior to Dench). The first female M, she’s openly contemptuous of Bond, “You’re a sexist, misogynist dinosaur,” as Bond is direct about his distaste for her as nothing more than “an accountant.” M matches Bond in smug, with a dash of anger – smug-anger? smanger? It sets up a contentious dynamic that would play right into the Daniel Craig era.

And there’s Q, the same old weapons expert we’ve grown to love – Desmond Llewelyn (a fixture since the 2nd Bond film, FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, and would be till his death after 1999’s THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH). His role is pure comic relief, and we realize this whole bit about showing Bond new gadgets has become almost a satire within each Bond film.

Alan Cumming is Russian computer whiz Boris (although it doesn’t take much to hack these 1995 computers, basically some typing skills and figuring out sexual innuendo passwords).

And the Bond Girl in this 17^th EON Production Bond film – Izabella Scorupco as Natalya. She’s a computer programmer – because she’s a girl. Think I’m joking? Computers were coming into their own as plot drivers in movies, but note the attitude toward sitting and typing in 1995 – a task usually reserved for secretaries, a job usually reserved for women since time immemorial – all the Russian computer techs are women and doughy guys, and effete Alan Cumming is the head computer nerd. Real Men were still doing the punching and shooting. There is a moment where this disparity of effort comes across: Natalya must hack Goldeneye, and Bond gives her a look that says, “Wait – you’re actually going to sit there and TYPE while I do the real work of punching and shooting?!” It lasts for just a second – but it’s there, giving away the inborn misogyny of the filmmakers (writers Jeffery Caine and Bruce Feirstein and director Martin Campbell). There’s also another message in Bond’s look: that of a man unversed in computers (again – because they’re girly things).

Compare that 1995 attitude to Timothy Olyphant’s sexy computer mastermind in LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD (2007), or even Man’s Man Daniel Craig as 007 hacking M’s computer in CASINO ROYALE (2006).

To be fair, the women are given their due in fighting skills – Onatopp, it seems, takes an equal amount of sensual pleasure in violent killing as raunchy fucking, and her signature move is wrapping her thighs around a man and crushing the breath from him. And when Bond gives Natalya a gun, asking if she knows how to use it, she quickly demonstrates how proficient she is. So, Ladies – we got your back (as long as it’s pearbottom).

Joe Don Baker’s first Bond appearance was in THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS as an American ex-communicated general who supported the Confederates; here he plays agent Wade, a more regular Ugly American, loud and obnoxious, Bond’s disrespectful sidekick (“Hey, Jimbo!”), who turns up wherever he’s needed so that Bond isn’t stranded. And Robbie Coltrane is Russian mafia, more for comedy than plot.

GOLDENEYE loses steam when 006 turns up back from the dead, as a British traitor, and tries to kill Bond and Natalya. This first murder attempt, where they are left in a helicopter with missiles headed for them, yet with the EJECT button within reach… was beyond laughable for a supposedly canny traitorous double-oh agent to have set up. Was the movie pulling our legs? So by the 5^th attempt on Bond’s and Natalya’s lives, we’ve checked out, figuring that 006 must harbor some love-that-cannot-be-spoken for 007 for all his half-hearted efforts in terminating him.

But it’s not all his fault – at one point, 006 sees Bond on a monitor and clearly says to his men, “Kill him.” Easy enough directive, right? Wrong. So the stormtrooper-trained baddies all machine-gun Bond’s general direction, hitting nothing but air, then when Bond steps out with his hands up, they point their guns at him as if that’s a threat. Idiots, you were just shooting at him enough to turn him into confetti, and now that he’s standing right in front of you, you STOP? They take Bond back to 006 – who proceeds to question Bond on why he won’t die. The first thing he should’ve shouted at his idiot soldiers: “Why did you morons bring him back here?! I SPECIFICALLY TOLD YOU TO KILL HIM!”

Movie devolves to TV’s THE A-TEAM when Bond chases Ourumov through Russian streets in a tank. Yes, I said TANK. It’s the coolest scene in the movie, with Bond driving a Russian T-55 tank blithely through buildings and landmarks (the amount of collateral damage! and probable death! But – good guy, so it’s okay) – yet every police car that impacts the tank and is turned over, crushed, or pushed off bridges, we see the occupants exit the cars in quick cutaways, for the PG-13 rubdown.

What about all those trained soldiers that run directly INTO the line of fire? Well, they fall down with no blood or brains spattering everywhere, as would be the case with the high caliber weapons they are being killed with.

Inexplicable interlude in the Caribbean, where Bond and Natalya seem to be spending a casual honeymoon. Skip–

James Bond fiercely guards his woman from progressive liberalism.

More could have been made of the competitiveness between 006 and 007. I imagined 006 was the veteran, having earned his license to kill earlier than Bond. The script plays them as old friends, with Bond BETWAYED. 006 sneers that he “was always better,” which means he has the inferiority complex. A climax above the dish of a radio antenna proves him wrong. However this outcome might have been more poignant had 007 always thought he was the inferior one and comes to realize, without fanfare, that in besting 006 he was, in fact, “always better” – the better agent, the better man, the better smug.

Timothy Dalton went back to the Ian Fleming 007 novels to inspire his take on Bond, but Pierce just looked to Roger Moore – and turned up the smug. Moore was 58 years old when his last Bond was released (A VIEW TO A KILL, 1985), and just didn’t have the smug-stamina (smugina? staminug?) to compete against a new generation of bad guys and badder girls. The franchise needed the younger Pierce to inject its smug into those bad people.

Except for the opening stunts, which are organic to the story, each outlandish action sequence is predicated on stupid things being done or neglected or coincidentally falling into place in the preceding action sequence, which means negating one small coincidence, or just having one of the 50,000 stray bullets hit its mark would put an end to this whole beargarden. The biggest recurring mistake is that no one will get smart and shoot Bond in the head point-blank, over the course of about 63 opportunities to do so. Seriously, you almost start rooting for the bad guys, the number of times this super secret agent finds himself in these embarrassing situations. If he was half the spy his legend makes him out to be, he wouldn’t wind up captured or in the crosshairs in the first place, and the story wouldn’t need the pathological procrastination and breathtaking bad aim.

The grandest, stupidest plot convenience of all must surely be Boris’s subconscious habit of clicking a pen three times while twirling it in his fingers, while he does his feminine computer hacking. Well, it’s a good thing Q just happened to give Bond an explosive pen that is armed when you click it three times. So, yeh… CONVENIENT. I mean, what are the odds?

About the same as someone shooting Bond in the head point-blank.

END