GoldenEye
December 12, 2011 Leave a comment
Title: GoldenEye
Year: 1995. GoldenEye finally saw the dark of the theater in November of 1995 putting an end to the longest hiatus between 007 celluloid adventures ever. This six year gap, like the longest previous gap of three plus years between The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) and The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), was due to legal issues. The CliffsNotes; in 1989 Danjaq, the Swiss parent company of EON sued MGM/UA over issues surrounding the licensing of Bond television rights. At the time ABC among others were still making big bucks airing Bond on primetime TV and EON/Danjaq wanted more of the pie. The upshot was a freeze on all further Bond films until the suit was settled in December of ’94 for a reported $13.5 million according to Variety. In the meantime, those jonesing for their 007 fix had to settle for a shot of 003 ½. I wish I were kidding. In 1991 Bond fans could turn on Saturday morning cartoons and catch the animated program “James Bond Jr.” Now, you may be thinking, “But Bond never had kids” and you would be right. I’ll let IMDb.com explain:
James Bond Jr. is the nephew of the famous international spy. Determined to follow in the footsteps of his famous uncle, James Jr. enrolls in Warfield, a prep school based on the grounds of an old counter intelligence training base in the UK. Along with his schoolmates IQ (grandson of Q) and Gordo Leiter (son of CIA agent Felix), James Jr. fights against SCUM (Saboteurs and Criminals United in Mayhem), an international cartel of terrorists and mad scientists.
James Bond Jr. is a fictional character described as the nephew of Ian Fleming’s master spy James Bond. The name “James Bond Junior” was first used in 1967 for an unsuccessful spinoff novel entitled 003½: The Adventures of James Bond Junior written under the pseudonym R. D. Mascott. The idea of Bond having a nephew was used again in 1991 as an American animated series for television in which the title character defeats threats to the safety of the free world. The series was mildly successful and spawned six episode novelizations by John Peel writing as John Vincent, a 12 issue comic book series by Marvel Comics published in 1992, as well as a video game developed by Eurocom in 1991.
Wow! So they didn’t just pull 003 ½ out of their anuses, he’s been around since the days of Fleming. Obviously all of this is absolutely absurd except the idea of SPECTRE being replaced by SCUM. That’s awesome. If only there was a song spelling out how James Bond Jr. has a job to do and he chases SCUM around the world. Let’s go to the videotape!
When a movie as disastrous as Licence To Kill (1989) is followed by a six-year gap only to be filled by 003 ½, well, that would be enough to kill a lesser franchise. Additionally, Bond had to contend with the events of November 9, 1989. On that day crowds of East Germans and West Germans took hammers to the most visible symbol of the “evil empire,” the Berlin Wall, and Germany once again became united as one country. The U.S.S.R., bankrupt thanks to over spending on military ventures in Afghanistan and the arms race with NATO, ceased to be. The cold war superpower once again became Russia and the satellite countries that made up the rest of the U.S.S.R. regained their independence and those living behind the iron curtain were now free to buy all the Levis their hearts desired. Elated to be free at last, free at last, Lord almighty, free at last, the former Soviet citizens took to the street of Berlin in a frenzied celebration cumulating in a concert given by David Hasselhoff. The Hoff, standing on the ruins of the wall while donning a jacket lined with Christmas lights, serenaded the crowd with “Looking for Freedom,” a song that became the unofficial anthem of the historic event. After the Hoff left the stage, many East Germans concluded that if this was freedom then they wanted no part of it. They begged for the wall to be re-erected and the strict media blackout to be once again imposed but to no avail; the wall stayed down and the ex-Soviets had to live with David Hasselhoff like the rest of the world. With the cold war officially over, unless some enterprising individual adopted a white cat and sat down in the long abandon #1 chair at SPECTRE headquarters, James Bond’s services were no longer required. But the redrawing of the world map wasn’t the only major change to pass Bond by, the world of film also shifted while he slept. Young Sherlock Holms(1985) featured a scene early in the film where a Mid-Evil knight etched in stained glass becomes alive, jumps off the pane, and walks down a church aisle. He was crudely animated, two-dimensional and only on screen for a few second but he was the first use of computer-generated imagery or CGI in a film.
That looks like a tasty burger...
Four years later James Cameron’s The Abyss (1989) gave us the first fully realized CGI character, a morphing worm-like alien, and the digital genie was not only out of the bottle, he made Robin William’s Aladdin (1992) character an antique. In the following years moviegoers got to witness robots walking through steel bars in T2: Judgment Day (1991), dinosaurs plucking lawyers off toilets in Jurassic Park (1993), and a legless Garry Sinise being a total asshole in Forrest Gump (1994). In some ways I’ve come to terms with my personal CGI demons but the technology still gives me the fits. CGI is one of many tools in a filmmaker’s toolbox and should be treated as such. But it’s a terrifyingly powerful tool and as we all learned from dear Uncle Ben Parker, with great power comes great responsibly. Some can handle it (Peter Jackson with the Lord of the Ring trilogy) but most can not (George Lucas with the Star Wars prequel trilogy). What would Bond producers, they of the over the top stunt, do with this new gadget? Hollywood movies had also shifted in a more fundamental, story-telling way since 1989. The hippest heroes of 90’s weren’t globe hopping action stars but hard-boiled tough guys who ate your tasty Kahuna burger before shooting you in the face. Add it all up and you could picture Bond turning in his double O license and retiring to the Florida Keys where he would pass his days fighting off drug lords and taking the occasional PI case for the local ladies a la Thomas Magnum. But then again Glen and Co. tried something like that with the last film and I would rather watch “James Bond Jr.” on YouTube then witness James suffer such an undignified fate. Thank the movie gods Bond has EON in his corner. The last time it looked like Bond would be put out to pasture, Broccoli and Co. blasted back with the stellar The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), the strongest Bond film of the 70’s and 80’s. That’s a lot to ask for once, could EON and 007 actually pull it off twice?
Film Length: 2 hours 10 minutes
Bond Actor: Interior EON Production offices, London. May 1994. Buzzzzzzz “Mr. Broccoli, Mr. Dalton is here for his 10 O’clock.” “Good send him in. Hi yah, Timothy, good to see you, come on in. No, don’t bother to sit down this will just take a second. So, I think it’s fair to tell you that we are going a different direction for the next Bond picture. We just feel the audience should, you know, like James Bond. And our research backs this up. Across the board we found that when people think of Bond, they want to think of him as someone likable, someone who is pleasant to be around, someone they want to spend time with. I’m sure you understand. Anyway Timothy, it was a good run and thanks so much. Talk to the girl on your way out, she can validate your parking, and remember, don’t call us, we’ll call you, or not. OK, good?” Buzzzzzzz “Yes, security, please escort Mr. Dalton to his car and make sure he’s off the lot in 15 minutes. Good luck Timothy, I’m sure you’ll land on your feet. Helen! Can you get me Pierce on the line?” That is made up. This isn’t “I thought Pierce Brosnan was a good choice. I liked GoldenEye. Timothy Dalton never got a handle on the role. He took it seriously in the wrong way. The person who plays Bond has to be dangerous. If there isn’t a sense of threat, you can’t be cool” and “Timothy Dalton has Shakespearean training but he underestimated the role. The character has to be graceful and move well and have a certain measure of charm as well as be dangerous. Pierce Brosnan is a good actor – he added some new elements to it.” Both of those are Sean Connery quotes and who’s going to argue with the man who invented to role? As for my thoughts on Pierce Brosnan’s Bond before I started this project, I didn’t really have any. I refer to the mid to late 90’s as my pop culture blackout period. I was a junior in college when this film came out and at that time I did not read any periodicals, I did not own a TV, and I could not listen to commercial radio. (Nor could anyone truth be told. The bliss of Nirvana and Pavement actually getting airtime on Top 40 radio was replace by 24 hours of Hootie and the Blow Fish and the Dave Mathews Band interrupted only by the Spin Doctors’ “Two Princes.” I’m not exaggerating one iota. Seriously, my private hell is FM radio in 1995.) As for other links to the outside world, my experience with that new thing called the World Wide Web at the time consisted of one room on campus. In that room were 12 computers with monitors displaying a green blinking cursor. The only function these terminals could perform was to send something called an “E-mail” which was “the future of communication” according to the sign on the door.
They may look different, but these two groups are the same band.
Yet, every time I walked past the room all I heard was typing and absolutely no one talking or you know, communicating. The irony was too rich for my 21-year-old mind so I swore I would avoid everything having to do with this “internet.” I guess what I’m saying is at this time in my life I was very focused on me and enjoying it. After spending every Friday night of my high school years at the record store and the local AMC 12 checking out the hot new releases, my head was now very much elsewhere/everywhere/nowhere. I took immense pride in the fact that I was willfully ignorant and cut-off from the rest of the world. “No, I’m sorry, I’ve never seen ‘Friends.’” (Still haven’t, not a single frame of a single episode.) I did still make my way to the cinema on occasion and I know I’ve seen all four Pierce films at some point. In fact, I think I caught GoldenEye in the theater over winter break, but Brosnan is by far the Bond I’m least familiar with/ have the weakest attachment to. So, it’s almost like I’m coming at the next four films blind (almost), which is super exciting. So, we’ve had a Scot, an Aussie, a proper Englishman and a Welshman. Now the Irish get their crack at it and after having the role snatched out from underneath him in 1987, Brosnan is beyond grateful for his second chance. On the DVD extras he is simply giddy when discussing the role. “My names Bond, James Bond! It’s a hoot.” His joy carries over to the film and shows in every frame. From the get go, this is a guy you want to hang out with. I never read any reviews of the Bond films until after I’ve written about them myself. It’s one of the ways I try to keep this as “pure” an experience as possible, but I do enjoy reading what other thought after I post. When I went back to read Roger Ebert’s review of The Living Daylights (1987) I was struck by his take on Dalton. “He’s a strong actor, he holds the screen well, he’s good in the serious scenes, but he never quite seems to understand that it’s all a joke. The correct tone for the Bond films was established right at the start, with Sean Connery’s quizzical eyebrows and sardonic smile. He understood that the Bond character was so preposterous that only lightheartedness could save him. The moment Bond began to act like a real man in a real world, all was lost.” Brosnan not only has the quizzical eyebrows and sardonic smile but he flirts like Cary Grant, he’s as physical as Jason Statham, and he can wear a suit like George Clooney. In short, he is more then a breath of fresh air; he is a brilliant blast of helium. His joy is infectious and I found myself smiling like a fool at points in the film. Perhaps I’m over reacting slightly having just come out from under the wet blanket of gloom that was Dalton, but I don’t think so. I have hazy memories of invisible cars and Denise Richards in our near future so it’s quite possible the Brosnan era goes off the rails but for this film at least, Pierce Brosnan is Bond, James Bond, and it’s a hoot.
Director: Martin Campbell. The great purge continues behind the camera with a new director and for the first time ever, no Cubby Broccoli. Barbara Broccoli, Cubby’s daughter and her husband Michael Wilson, who has been increasingly involved since the mid 1970’s, are listed as the Executive Producers. They worked “under the supervision of Cubby” which I read to mean Cubby was present in name only. Indeed, GoldenEye would be Albert “Cubby” Broccoli’ last film as one of the men most reasonable for the Bond films passed away on June 27, 1996 at age of 87. Campbell, who was well known in the UK for his work on the BBC show “Edge of Darkness,” brought a modern sensibility to the Bond franchise. More importantly, unlike Glen, he is a capital “F” Filmmaker. On the DVD extras, the Kiwi director is painted as a precise craftsman and a tough love taskmaster. The cast and crew talk about how intense Campbell is on set and “There is lots of yelling…” is a familiar refrain but across the board everyone agrees he’s “sharp as a knife” and “keeps your head in it.” Pierce in particular talks about how Campbell pushes but keeps the energy up and can be trusted. Listening to this stuff reminds me of the classic baseball scenario where a “player’s manager” is sacked after losing 90 plus games to be replaced by a spitting-from-the-mouth-screamer who drops F bombs and throws the occasional chair. The players all snap to and in the end are a much better team for it. This is exactly what the lazy Bond franchise needed, a new guy to take over the clubhouse and kick some ass. The #1 best thing about this film, and this goes back to Campbell, is balance. The director seamlessly balances the classic Bond conventions we love with a new modern flare he brings to the picture. The humor and action play together like rhythm and melody in a well crafted pop tune. The use of the old school filmmaking, stunts, miniature models, and actual locations are mixed in effortlessly with minimal, tasteful CGI and quick cut modern editing. The film simultaneously plays out as a 50’s spy noir and updated post cold war thriller. The script even expands on James Bond character, dropping nuggets like the fact Bond was orphaned when both his parents died in a climbing accident. Most importantly the romance is back, and I’m not talking about Bonds relationship with women. I’m talking about the romance of going on an epic adventure with a spy who is out to save the world. From the get go, I couldn’t believe how much more juicy and enjoyable the action sequences were and how everything fit together organically, one moment rolling into the next with expert pacing and seamless ease. Add the numerous nods to James past and winks to long time fans and Campbell delivers everything you want in a Bond film and then some.
Reported Budget: $58,000,000 estimated. Shot in 110 days with a crew of over 500 almost all the money is, as they say, on the screen. At first glance, $58M is some big bucks. Not quite double the $34 million for Moonraker (1979), the most expensive Bond to date, but well over the $32 for Licence To Kill (1989). However, in the context of 1995 big budget films, the number is just about right. Other ‘95 films like Jumanji, Casper, Crimson Tide, Congo, Braveheart, Outbreak, and Nixon all had budgets in the $50 million range. Meanwhile, the big ticket items of the year were Money Train and Under Siege 2 ($60M estimated), Apollo 13 ($62M estimated), Judge Dredd ($70M estimated), Die Hard: With A Vengeance ($90M estimated), Batman Forever ($100M estimated) and one of the most notorious budget 
busting flops of all time which was also the most expensive film made at the time, Waterworld ($175M estimated). Now here’s the kicker; only two of the above films made more money then Bond.
Reported Box-office: $106,600,000 USA and $351,500,000 worldwide. Nothing will ever come close percentage wise to the 1960’s Bond heyday where seven digit budgets could turn into nine digit returns, but GoldenEye made more in terms of dollars than any previous Bond both in the US and abroad. (The record holder was Moonraker with $70,308,099 USA and $210,308,099 worldwide.) GoldenEye finished at #6 on the year in the U.S. beat by #2 Batman Forever ($184M) and #3 Apollo 13 ($172) while #10 Die Hard: With A Vengeance ($100M), #12 Waterworld ($88M), #52 Judge Dredd ($34M), and #100 Nixon ($13M) staring Anthony Hopkins who passed on playing a Bond villain to play someone much more sinister in Oliver Stone’s film, all fell short of the newly jump started Bond machine. Bond Forever, With A Vengeance.
Theme Song: “Goldeneye” performed by Tina Turner. I love Tina Turner. I could listen to her sing my grocery list. Her sultry, sex vocals work overtime here but the issue is the Bono and Edge penned tune. U2 was in the middle of their post-ironic Zooropa, Pop Mart, super hero costume period and I just don’t think it’s the right fit. Would something from the Joshua Tree or even Achtung Baby vintage have worked? Perhaps but Tina and the pounding, faux industrial lite “GoldenEye” work at crossed purposes. However, when the bridge threatens to collapse under the weight of the tune, Tina belts out “now I’ve got you in my siIIIIIIIIITTTTTTES with a golden EEEYEEEEEEEEEEEE!” to keep everything afloat. As for the clip, I think the stage setup speaks to just how huge a star Tina was at this point. Also, take note of the keyboard player who is clearly a hold-over from Tina’s previous big film soundtrack hit, “We Don’t Need Another Hero” from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985). Take it away Tina!
And for the record, an avant-garde noise infused take on the Bond theme can be fantastic as John Zorn proves on his 1989 album “Naked City.”
Opening Titles: And the hits keep coming. Reimagined yet grounded in tradition, these are the best titles we’ve had since the early 70’s. Right off the bat, the high symbolism that is inherent to the Bond titles tie directly to films theme. Juxtaposed to the shimmering soft bodies of the every present “Bond credit women” are cold, heavy stone statues of imperialistic Russian leaders. So we see oppressive busts of Stalin and Lenin float past inviting busts. Yes, thanks to vertical gun barrels and sickles bulls eyeing hammers there are phallic symbols aplenty but everything here seems to speak to one whole as opposed to just tossing five or six naked dancing women on the screen and calling it a day. All the images finally merge about ¾ through when the women take the hammers and break apart the statues in an obvious nod to the tearing down of the wall. Bond is not running away from the fall of the Soviet Union, he’s embracing it head on and in his signature style to boot. Additionally, everything is shot with a gold tint as if one were observing all of this thorough a golden eye. By the time we get sucked back into the gun barrel (after violently being cased out by a bullet at the top of 
the sequence) GoldenEye’s credits have upped the ante considerably. When you look at the actual credits themselves; Famke Janssen, Sean Bean, Alan Cumming, Robbie Coltrane, and Judi Dench as “M”, it would appear that Bond 17 has the cards to win back anything 007 lost in his six year absence.
Opening Action Sequence: James Bond is running. Fast. Hauling ass really. We have seen Bond run many times, but never like this. This is not “actor” running. This is a man who is moving with purpose and actually, really running. He’s in black, with a rope slung over his shoulder, trucking out onto a narrow walkway with reckless abandon. If you, I, or any mortal human were to walk five paces out onto this wall of concrete wedged between two cliffs we would be spinning with vertigo. But Bond is running to the center at top speed. The dam, the film tells us, is the Arkangel Chemical Weapons Facility, deep in the now defunct USSR. When Bond reaches the middle, he Carabiner clamps himself to the structure and in the first of many stunning shots in the film, he swan dives off the dam in one uninterrupted take. As his bungee cord brings him to near stop, he shots a grapple gun with a motorized winch to draw himself to the ground. Then he pops the hatch and into the enemy’s lair he goes. With the bungee jump, producers immediately demonstrate that this modern Bond is up to date on the latest trends. I recall a trip I took to Orlando in the mid-90’s and the skyline was dotted with crazy jackasses paying $50 a pop to bungee jump off construction cranes in what is now hopefully an illegal form of recreation. While jumping on this bungee trend (snicker), the film wisely avoid another, relying on CGI for everything, especially stunts. Following the proud Bond tradition of “doing it for real,” stuntman Wayne Michaels actually bungeed of the Verzasca Dam in Locarno, Switzerland. When we finally meet Bond up close he is still hanging upside down but not on the bungee. Like our T-Rex friend from Jurassic Park, he is about to take a man who is sitting on the toilet out. “Beg your pardon, I forgot to knock” is well delivered with just the right amount of smirking (upside down smirking for what it’s worth.) The kidding quickly become serious when out of the dark comes a gun, pointed right at James’ head. This establishes the humor/serious back and forth that will play out for the entire film and Brosnan handles the switch from comedy mask to drama mask effortlessly. And hey, good news! The man with the 
gun is just good old 006. “For England James?” “For England Alec.” As the two break into the main generator room it quickly become clear they have worked together before. Like a QB needs to be in complete sync with his star receiver in order to orchestrate a 2 minute drill, James and Alec work the room as tightly as a Swiss watch; that is until James peeks out to see Alec on his knees with a gun to his head and 50 or so Ruskie soldiers. “Come out with your hands up.” “How original.” It’s all pearls with this Brosnan fellow. Before 007 obeys the clichéd order he resets the timers on the explosives he and 006 planted from 6 minutes to 3. Make note of it, it becomes important later on. The man holding the gun to 006’s head by the by is wearing possibly the best police state military uniform since Ralph “don’t call me Ralph” Fiennes stomped around in Nazi boots in Schindler’s List (1993). He is General Arkady Grigorovich Ourumov and his name says it all. Ourumov is a deliciously evil cartoon military tyrant who would fit seamless in with the cast of Dr. Strangelove (1964). Just to prove how nasty he is, he puts bullet in 006’s head when it didn’t quite seem necessary to do so. Make note of it, it becomes important later on. Like every room in warehouse looking structures in Bond films, this room is filled with vats of nasty chemicals and explosives but since this is a Chemical Weapons Facility I guess it’s understandable. Perhaps they ran out of room in the pantry and the just stacked the stuff on empty shelves, like the one above everyone to the left. A quick gun blast from Bond and the canister come pouring down upon all the soldiers’ heads. As the fire starts Bond blots out the door mowing down machine gun toting baddies like he’s a 15-year-old boy on Red Bull playing “Call of Duty.” As Ourumov and half the Soviet army chase him down, Bond jumps into a plane which is headed toward the edge of a cliff. At this point, we expect him to fly off into the night but the film, not for the last time, sweeps the carpet out from under our expectations. When Bond goes to toss the pilot out the door, the pilot grabs Bonds arms and pulls them both out onto the tarmac. Always a great improviser, Bond grabs a Russian motorcycle and jumps on to chase the pilotless plane that’s continuing down the runway to the cliffs edge. While Ourumov looks on with more admiration then disappoint at loosing his prisoner, Bond guns the motorcycle and like he did 18 years earlier on skies, jumps off the cliff into the void. Kicking the bike aside and turning himself into a missile, Bond, Superman like, flies through the air to catch up with the plane, makes his way into the cockpit, grabs a hold of the yolk, and pulls up before going head on into the mountain to cap off what is hands down the most exciting open since The Spy Who Love Me.
Bond’s Mission: After the credits we learn the events in the open happened 9 years earlier, and now we are in the present, 1995. We join James as he is engaged in some high-speed road flirting a al Chevy Chase and Christie Brinkley in National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983). The girl is still in a red Ferrari and the guy still needs to peer over a more conservative woman in his passenger seat to catch the red Ferrari girl’s eye however, this time the part of Clark W. Griswold is played by Bond, the green wood paneled family truckster is now the classic grey Aniston Martin DB5, and the flat highway of the American Midwest is replaced by a mountain road in the French Alps. The conservative woman in Bond’s passenger seat (on the left side of the car, though the girl in the red Ferrari is driving from the left. Europe is just crazy…) has been sent by the new M (who we have not met) to observe Bond in the field. She’s a one-dimensional prop who I immediately pegged as a misstep in the film. That was until Bond slams on the breaks to stop the car in the middle of the mountain road, produces a bottle of Bollinger (chilled), and gets an “Oh James…” all in 15 seconds. Ahhh, I get it now. This is silly and outrageous. With this 15 seconds all the ill will of the PC uptight Dalton Bond is erased and we are once again allowed to not take it all so seriously. Not for nothing is 007 in a grey Aston Martin; this is the return of the rakish hero we all know and love. The Bond who drives fast and chases skits is back and not a moment to soon. Need more proof? In the next few shots we see Bond in a tux, entering a casino, drinking a martini made to his liking, and playing baccarat with the girl in the red Ferrari, one Ms. Xenia Onatopp. “On a top?” The first 10 minutes of GoldenEye firmly puts us back into the proper Bond world of hyper-realty where the cars a little faster, the drinks a little stronger, the stakes at the table are a little higher and women …ahhh the women. If Bond’s your bag, you’re in clover. 007 movies generally work best as elaborate case films with twist and turns along the way. GoldenEye, like the classic From Russia With Love (1963), is essentially Bond and the baddies both trying to get their hands on the same technological dingus with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. The MacGuffin this go around is the French prototype stealth helicopter TIGER. Not only is it invisible to radar, it can still fly after a magnet pulse from a nuclear blast, an event that would render every other electronic device useless. Not two seconds after we learn how kick-ass the TIGER is Onatopp and her accomplice, General Ourumov, committing Grand Theft Huey. But in a classic film noire twist, the MacGuffin is a red herring! The real MacGuffin, like the Lektor before, is much more sinister and dangerous. Ourumov and Onatopp (not to be confused with Bonnie and Clyde) stole the TIGER to be used as a getaway car in the theft of the Goldeneye. 
The dingus, named after Ian Flaming’s Jamaican home, is a space-based magnetic-pulse weapon that simulates the shutting-down-all-electrical-devises havoc of a nuclear blast without all the messy fallout. You now see why they needed the TIGER. All of this business is handled in an entertaining and efficient manner that’s on par with mid 90’s pacing but also in a way than demands the audience keep up to speed. In other words, it’s a smart film that treats you, the viewer, as an equal, unlike its predecessor, which fed us garbage and told us it was a gourmet meal. Anyway, now the baddies have the Goldeneye and Bond must get it.
Villain’s Name: Alec Trevelyan. AKA 006. Well, I certainty didn’t see that one coming. I recalled the dam dive from when I saw GoldenEye in the theater but I didn’t remember this twist at all so I nearly jumped off my couch in a genuine “Oh shit!” moment when Alec emerges from the shadows to revile himself at the leaded of the Janus Gang. The first time Alec came out of the dark was at the Arkangel Chemical Weapons Facility where Bond was happy to see 006; this time James looks as if he’s seen a ghost and indeed, ghosts are all over this fantastic scene. It turns out, Alec Trevelyan was a sleeper double agent all along and he and Ourumov faked his death at Arkangel. Alec then went underground and after the fall of the Soviet Union rounded up Ourumov and Onatopp and a bunch of ex-Soviet loyalist not yet ready to wave the white flag and stole the Goldeneye. From a structural standpoint the Bond films are perfectly positioned to blindside audiences with this villain switch-a-roo (from Ourumov to Alec). After 17 Bond films we have been programmed as viewers to keep the opening sequences in its own box. Yes, the open can tie into the story or not, but we have come to accept that characters introduced in the open can stay there and not be referenced again, especially if we think that character was killed. Add the fact that nine yeas have passed since the events of the open and it nearly guarantees we’ve all forgotten good old 006 until like Lazarus he comes back to life. We have also become accustom to Bond shedding partners like Spinal Tap goes through drummers. Remember dear departed Sharky from Licence To Kill, Saunders from The Living Daylights, Sir Godfrey Tibbett from A View To A Kill (1985), Vijay from Octopussy (1983), and Luigi Ferrara from For Your Eyes Only (1981) just to name recent examples. Basically, if you team up with Bond and you’re not a woman or named Felix, chances are you’re the red shirted ensign on the away team. The unmasking of the true villain is also shocking thanks to the fact that General Arkady Grigorovich Ourumov is so well written. The General could have just been placeholder keeping the chair warm until the big kahuna showed up but Ourumov is credible as the head baddie in both appearance and action. In the open, after he “shoots” 006 in the head, he orders his men to not shoot at Bond for risk of hitting the chemical drums. (Those damn chemical drums again.) Bond grabs a cart loaded with said drums and uses the combustible canisters as cover. The General cocks his head and smirks in wide-eyed amazement as Bond squeaks across the floor. He has a look on his face like a man who’s just flopped the nuts and simply can’t believe 3 players are betting into him. Later, when the tables have turned and Ourumov finds himself in the back of a car trying to outrun Bond, who happens to be chasing him in a tank, all the General can do is go between a nervous giggle and shear panic while pulling off a flask. It’s these little moments that I cherish because they are so simple yet go such a long way toward making movie characters real people. This shift in focus from one villain to the next, much like the shift from the TIGER to the Goldeneye, could have so mangled the plot as to destroy any of the pacing and flow. But in Campbell’s steady hands the shift from one focal point to the next is so expertly handled that it has the proper impact while remaining nearly invisiable.
Villain Actor: Sean Bean, a perfect choice to play Alec Trevelyan. As he proved playing Boromir in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) six years later, even when he is the good guy, he’s still got the coiled up intensity of a baddie. You just feel like he could jump over the line at any moment. I hear he’s also fantastic in “Game of Thrones” but I have yet to dive into the series. Hey back off, the wife is reading the books and wants to finish them first. Shesh. Gottfried John, who plays General Ourumov, was born in Berlin and after a quick glace at his IMDB page I think we can official name him the Samuel L. Jackson of Germany for his unwillingness to turn down any role offered to him. He is not pretty man but I just love his look. He looks like he would be at home in front of the local OTB picking up half smoked butts off the sidewalk and finishing them off. He would have no problem hanging out with those dudes who watch old boxing matches on the TV’s at Record Mart in the Times Square subway station. He has a face that just says Character. He’s seen it and you can tell just by looking at em.
Villain’s Plot: Alec Trevelyan planned this one out pretty well. As the head of the Russian space division, General Ourumov is above suspicion and therefore the perfect inside man to pull off the Goldeneye heist. Once he and Onatopp shoot almost everyone at the remote Siberian base that housed the Goldeneye, they use the super weapon to blow up the base and disable all the incoming MIG’s while they take off with the loot in the TIGER. A quick aside, to launch the Goldeneye weapon, two people must turn two separate keys simultaneously. This is a cold war film convention so common at the time as to be cliché, but I had completely forgotten about it. Seeing it again brought a nostalgic joy to my heart. But back to the grand plan, Ourumov, as the head of space division, heads up the investigation into his own theft which he pins on a band of separatist. Meanwhile Alec gets the prize and since he knows MI6 will send their best man after it, he gets revenge against Bond in the barging. It turns out that way back when, 006 didn’t not escape the Arkangel Chemical Weapons Facility unscathed. Thanks to Bond resetting the timers on the explosives from six minutes to three, Alec didn’t clear out of the room in time and ended up scaring the right side of his face. His gang is named the Janus group after the double-faced Roman God but he could have taken inspiration for the modern mythology of Bob Kane. Like Batman’s foe Harvey Dent, Alec is the physical embodiment of two faced; a man who betrayed Bond and MI6 and has the scars to show for it. So revenge is the motivating factor here, revenge against not only Bond but all of England. Trevelyan descended from Cossacks, a group of Russians that sided with the Nazis during WWII and surrendered to the Allies after Berlin fell believing they would join the Bits in fighting the communist. However, England sent them back to Stalin who had them all shot, including women and children. “Not exactly our finest hour.” Bond declares but I think one Lt. Aldo Raine would disagree.
You're going to take that uniform off, aren't ya? That’s what we thought...
Anywho, with his parents dead young Alec worked his way into becoming a deep mole in MI6 with the idea of avenging his families betrayal at the hands of the crown. In a related note, the 3 by 5 index card application that asked for name, race, gender and birthday in way of a background check for getting into MI6 has been abandon for a more thorough process in direct reaction to what is now referred to as “the 006 incident.” Now, Alec plans on using the Goldeneye to electro-nuke London. And since he knows all of MI6’s tactics, he very well could get a way with it. See, I told you he had this well thought out. It’s also a brilliant workaround as a plot device. Filmmakers solved the end of the cold war issue by just continuing it. Much like the Japanese on Lubang Island who continued to fight well after WWII had ended, the movie gives us isolated Siberian dead enders who are still ready to throw down with those capitalist pigs. These folks are more then happy to hitch their wagon to this very sinister and calculating baddie who is playing both sides against the middle. It all works quite well thank you but… but… but for some reason all of this is not enough for old Alec, or for that mater, the film. Before he blasts London back to Stone Aged level technology, Alec plans on hacking UK banking computers and making off with all the money right before the Goldeneye erases the records of said money. Truth be told, the film handles this development rather well and it almost avoids feeling like a tacked on thread but it’s also wholly unnecessary. I know it’s a quibble but the whole robbery bit kind of undercuts the Alec character. In fact, Bond himself points this out by calling Alec nothing more than a common thief at which point I expected 006 to get all Hans Grubber and scream “I’m an exceptional thief Mr. Bond!” Not that there is anything wrong with being a thief. As Clooney and crew prove in the Ocean’s films, it can be a noble occupation affording one the opportunity to romp around with your mates while correcting the injustices of the world through grand larceny. 
But back the impending destruction of London at the hands of old Alec. In Alec, we have a villain of Shakespearian scope, a man who literally has spent his entire life planning and scheming to visit tragedy upon many innocents all in the name of vengeance. What more motivation do you need? To add bank robber to Alec Trevelyan’s résumé cheapens it.
Villain’s Lair: When we meet up with Alec again, it’s in a junkyard full of broken imperialistic Soviet statues. The symbolism could be seen as a bit too on the noise but I think it works. Here we have a dead ender still fighting the cold war among the decaying symbols of that war, his face a battered and broken as those of the stone Lenin and Stalin. When not stomping around the junkyard Alec lives on an old train that was used during the cold war to store missiles. The idea was with the train always moving, the West could never track down the warheads. Alec uses this steal tank of a train to hide himself in similar fashion. He hangs out in an over appointed car with all the refinements of a 5 star hotel room while another car holds a helicopter in case he needs to get off the train quickly. (Spoiler alert: he does.) I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it, any movie with a train is a success on some level. Finally, Alec and crew manage somehow to take over a Cuban base containing the most advanced deep space tech on the planet, good for, say, controlling the Goldeneye 
bombs. This base is essentially one huge parabolic dish built into the side of a mountain and hidden under a lake. This is similar to the trick Blofeld pulled with the volcano crater in You Only Live Twice (1967) but Bond is still slow to recognize it. When Bond finally does uncover the base and sets about to stop the Goldeneye, there is a nice bit of fun in 007 stymieing the entire deal by literally shoving a pipe into the gear works; an old fashion low tech solution to disable the most advanced weapon in the world.
Villain’s Coolest Accessory/ Trait: Like all the classic Bond villains, Alec has a physical deformity but his was caused by Bond. The scaring on the left side of his melon has come to define the two-faced villain and it’s something he’s quite pissed about. 006 feels as if his old partner betrayed him when he halved the time on the detonators from 6 minutes to 3. This is a bit of the kettle calling the pot black since Alec was a double agent setting up not just Bond but all of England. And, let’s not forget that Bond thought he was dead; a death he faked to betray Bond. So yah, get over it jerk.
Badassness of Villain: General Ourumov, head of the Russian space division, betrayed and killed the best and the brightest under his command. He marched into the bunker where the Goldeneye was hidden and asked the man in charge to fetch the device. “I’m timing you” he announces as the poor bastard scurries off, grabs the dingus, and hand delivers it to the thief. For his trouble, he and (almost) everyone who works at the base get mowed down in a spray of machine gun fire. And Ourumov is just the opening act. For the main event Alec has mastered the mind screw. Both Bond and he were orphaned and adopted by MI6, so Alec is able to call out Jimmy B as only a sibling who is out for blood can. (To continue the analogy, that would make M the dad, regardless of gender, Moneypenny the mom and Q the crazy, drunk uncle.) Yes, Alec knows how to turn off Q’s hidden detonators but it’s when he calls Bond out for using martinis and one night stands to wash away the guilt he feels for all the men he’s killed that he hits a nerve. He is, in fact, one of the few villains to actually rattle Bond and it’s a thrill to see the unflappable 007 become flapped. All Bond can do is raise an eyebrow, curl his lips knowingly, and look to the ground as if to say “well played.”
Villain’s Asides/ Henchmen: Both henchmen are future X-men. This factoid has no doubt bridged the Bond/ Marvel universes in such a way that Daniel Craig’s 007 will report to Sam Jackson’s Nick Fury in The Avengers III: West Coast Avengers Assemble staring Ryan Goslings as Hawkeye, coming in the Summer of 2015 to a theater near you. Oddjob had his bowler, Jaws had his teeth, Necros had his walkman and Xenia Onatopp has her thighs. As Onatopp, Famke Janssen is deliciously campy and in full on femme fatale mode with the outfits and blood red lipstick to match. A black widow, Onatopp not only crushes her prey with her legs but appears to climax while doing so… unless she’s faking. In the wrong hands, err, legs, this could have been beyond silly and sucked us out of the film but here the gag is played with just the right tone as to be bizarre, a little hot, and in one scene, delightful fun. A dozen years before Viggo Mortensen’s rightly celebrated naked sauna brawl in Eastern Promises (2007), Brosnan and Janssen slammed each others heads off the title in a steamy Russian bath. Sadly, they are both wrapped in towels but it still registers as a violent and visceral scene, even if Pierce proves to be more of a gentleman then some of his predecessor and refuses to slap a lady around. Alan Cumming also goes balls out as the Russian computer nerd Boris Grishenko and while it works in some scenes, by the end he’s gone to 11 and it proves to be a bit much. That said Cumming is given an impossible role. With the invention of the internet thrillers have had to solve the problem of finding drama while characters type at a keyboard and stare into a monitor. See another film that came out in ’95, Sandra Bullock’s The Net (1995) for a master course in how difficult it is to make people working on computers exciting. Most directors solve the problem by having their characters scream at the screen like drunken football fans during the third quarter of the 4PM game. “Come on, down load GOD DAMN IT!!!!!” 
It seldom works. Cumming does all he can, spitting out “I spike dem, Slugheads” like a rabid weasel with Tourette’s and while it’s over the top, he is still entertaining at points, like when his jittery persona sets up a great gag involving his nervous clicking of a pen.
Bond Girl Actress: Izabella Scorupco. The Polish born actress immigrated to Sweden as a child and appeared in a few films before making her English language debut with GoldenEye. More beautiful then hot she is a throw back to the good old days of classic beauties playing Bond girls. The problem is she’s in the same film as Famke Janssen and well, when you’re up against Marvel Girl crushing men with her gams, you’re going to be runner up every time.
Bond Girl’s Name: Natalya Simonova, a handle even Bond has trouble getting his tongue around. The two at introduced in one of the better meet cutes Jimmy B has had. Bond has been knocked out and tied down inside the cockpit of the TIGER. He is awakened by Natalya, who is tied up in the seat behind him, screaming and kicking. “WAKE UP!” Again, we have seen Bond do so many amazing things we sometimes take the “smaller” moments for granted. So, picture, if you will, you’ve been knocked out and when you wake up your tied in the cockpit of a helicopter with a strange Russian woman behind you screaming and kicking your seat while the stinger missiles from the chopper launch, crisscross in a 180 degree turn, and are now haling ass right at you. Me personally? I would need at lest two cups of coffee before I could even consider my options. Not Jimmy B. He head butts the seat eject and that folks is why he gets the girl, every time and twice on Sundays. Well, not at first. Natalya gives him a swift kick in the shin the first chance she gets but she comes around, they all do. She is a computer programmer who survives Ourumov’s attack on the Goldeneye base and therefore knows the General and her co-worker Boris are with the Janus group. The scene is one more example of the film playing with the idea of technology failing. Surrounded by flames and exploding equipment, Natalya can’t get out of the collapsing base because the voice recognition lock is destroyed. She climbs the crippled satellite antenna, not unlike the survivors of the capsized Poseidon climbed the Christmas tree, to escape the base only to find herself standing alone, in only a blouse, in the Serbian night. She is saved by a decidedly low tech dog sled. As a skilled technician she is not the useless damsel in distress but she still falls into Alec’s clutches and needs to be rescued. However, this routine story point remains fresh thanks to the absolute creepiness of Alec. “You know James and I shared everything. Everything…” Gross.
Bond Girl Sluttiness: There is a scene on a Cuban beach that could have been something more. Natalya calls Bond out in a way no Bond girl ever has. He’s distant and she chastises him for not letting her in. Bond then feeds her a line about needing to keep his angst close and inside. “It keeps me on the edge, sharp, where I got to be.” Actually, that was Pacino in Heat (1995) which I’m sure was playing across the hall when I saw GoldenEye in the theater but you get the idea. And besides, Al says it better. Anyway, Natalya takes this macho posturing and throws it back in Bond’s face “No, it’s what keeps you alone.” This one exchange hits harder and is more “dark” then anything Dalton ever did with the character. Sadly, it’s also totally undercut by the fact that (a) Natalya enters the scene wearing a white bikini that (b) we see in a close up crotch shot. One of the few missteps in the film.
Bond’s Best Pick-up Line: “Now now, no more foreplay” says Bond while pointing a gun at Onatopp to end the Russian bath house fight. “Hummmfff” responds the disappointed and deflated lady.
Bond Girls Best Pick-up Line: Natalya. “Do you destroy every vehicle you get into?”
Number of Woman 007 Beds: Two. We barely get settled into our seats and have yet to open our Milk Duds and Bond is boffing a babe in the middle of the road. (Cue the Beatles “No one will be watching us, why don’t we do it in the road?”) More notable on the location front, this make-out session is taking place in an Aston Martin. Now, I know Q has put some extra options on the car but dude, that’s a tight fit with an inconveniently placed stick shift. Bond and Natalya get off to a slow start, what with the exploding chopper and shin kicking and kidnapping and all but then after fleeing an exploding train Natalya proves that she knows Bond, perhaps even better than his late wife. She looks at 007 and asks “Do you destroy every vehicle you get into?” Bond turns and stares into her eyes as if to say “you understand me so well” and the two go at it for the first of three confirmed times. While in Cuba they engage in the Havana Mahna Mahna (Do do daaa do-do) at least twice. They try for a third before getting caught up in the proud tradition of getting caught. All the baddies are dead, all the bases have been destroyed, and Bond and Natalya are all alone in the jungle. Or at least that’s what Bond assures his lady until they are interrupted by the CIA and US Marines who insists the couple march off to be debriefed at the near by Guantanamo Bay Navy base. Wow, remember when Guantanamo Bay was nothing more than a place where Jack Nicolson was God Damn right he ordered the code red and not a living, breathing monument to our national shame? Ahhh, the 90’s what an innocent time.
Number of People 007 Kills: Classified. Or more accurately, the official Blog, James Blog spotter can’t confirm an accurate number. Such was the killing in GoldenEye that our official body count man not only lost track but curled up into the fetal position and begged for Ben & Jerry’s. Needless to say we wish him well and hope he recovers in time for Tomorrow Never Dies (1997). And with that, onto the carnage! In the open Bond gets his hands on a machine gun (you already see the spotters issue) and did in at least five Ruskies while running about with his finger firmly on the trigger. Then, after he jumps off the cliff to catch the plane to pull up and fly away the entire base explodes. We know Alec made it out with roughly 90% of his face intact but as for the others? Bond again gets a hold of an automatic weapon when fleeing a St. Petersburg jail and mows down at least ten more. He then manages to use the machine gun like a snipers rifle and shoot old Ourumov in the head while missing Natalya who the General was using as a human shield. He kills a helicopter pilot while someone is tied to said chopper (that someone to be revealed below!) and shoots at least three guards while escaping the Cuban dish base; a base that yes, gets blown up and unlike the Dr. No (1962) lair destruction, we don’t see any baddies running out before the big boom. So yah, countless folks met their end at James’ hand including one Alec Trevelyan. I’m happy to report that the final battle between 006 and 007 lives up to its billing as the title bout. The hand to hand feels tougher then some fights we’ve seen in Bond films which is to say when the punches land, they hurt. Yes, by the time the two combatants end up hanging on the end of the satellite antenna like Luke under Cloud City it’s a bit much and your right; Natalya showing up in the helicopter to scoop up James as Alec falls to his death is a huge cheat but since our official spotter had his face in a pint of Chunky Monkey by this point we missed it and just enjoyed the whole rig falling on Alec’s crippled body stuff. “For England James?” “No, for me.” Kick ass!
Most Outrageous Death/s: Bond actually opens his eyes twice to find himself in helicopter danger. The first time he is blasted into consciousness by Natalya kicking his chair. This time he wakes up to Onatopp kicking him in the face. She comes slipping down a zip line hooked to a helicopter that hovers overhead and proceeds to get all crushy with her python femurs. Bond gets out of this tight spot, which is to say between Onatopp’s legs, by getting a shot off. Not at Onatopp but at the chopper. Since his assailant is still tethered to the aircraft when it goes crashing down she goes flying up to be crushed between to huge tree branches. “She always did enjoy a good squeeze.” The other outrageous death involves the other henchman, Boris. Just as Natalya stood alone in the burning ruins of the Goldeneye base, Boris finds himself the soul survivor in the destroyed deep dish Cuban base. As he raises his hands in victory a bath of liquid nitrogen washes over him freezing him in his Rocky pose. Those damn chemical vats again. There are several circular and repeated themes that tie GoldenEye together and it just a delight to have someone behind the camera thinking about these things after the flat set up/action/switch location/repeat formula the Bond films took on for the 1980’s. After the Glen years I almost forget Bond films can be so well crafted.
Miss. Moneypenny: Samantha Bond. The latest Moneypenny has the correct look, demeanor, and yes, age. Caroline Bliss was a little too young and a little too hot. Samantha is a more sophisticated beauty and she has the wisdom to pull of the witty banter. “What would I do with you Moneypenny?” “As far as I can remember, you’ve never had me James.” That’s good stuff. Loyal readers know about Blog, James Blog’s soft spot for dear Moneypenny and while we think we will grow to like Samantha, she has too little screen time in her debut so the jury is still out. We hope to see more of her in the future. The other point of note here is MI6’s offices have been blasted out of the 60’s and landed squarely in 1995. Gone are the classic wooden desks and grand book shelves, replaced the sleek, sterile, teck look of Silicon Valley chic. While I will miss the warmth of the old office, this is 100% correct in keeping with the times. Bond has always been about technology when it comes to the gadgets and the British secret service office should be a buzzing war room full of the latest and greatest inelegance gathering gizmos. Thumbs up.
The first female head of MI5, Director-General Stella Rimington (1992 – 1996)
M: Dame Judi Dench. In a first when it comes to recasting in Bond films, Dench doesn’t seamlessly replace M. In the past when a new actor came in for James, Moneypenny, Felix and even M, that actor simply became that person. No one in the Bond world acknowledged the new face associated with the name. Felix was always just Felix. Dench does indeed come on board as M, the head of MI6, but she is not Sir Miles Messervy. Her M is Barbara Mawdsley and the characters in the film know she is not the same person who sat behind the desk in the past. Dench’s M proves to be the deepest and best established of the series in her very first film. In the past, hints of M as a person were given but basically he existed to (a) offer exposition and (b) harrumph and wring his hands when Bond Fed up. Dench’s M is a three dimensional real life boss and I have a feeling that Dench being cast in the role had a ton to do with the deeper direction of the character. She can act and carry the weight of anything she is handed and unlike past M’s, she has, in her words “the balls” to trade body blows with Bond. She kicks it all off with a wonderful entrance. While king douche Mr. Tanner is insulting her as the “evil queen of numbers” she appears behind him. The scene establishes her as a modern intelligence officer, one who analyzes the data and makes decisions based on research. She sees Bond as a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur. A relic of the cold war.” Bond and M mistrust each other from the get go and even chafe on the most baseline issues. “Your predecessor kept some brandy in the cupboard” Bond offers as both a way of being polite and proving he knows the ins and outs of MI6. “I prefer bourbon” M shoots back. Touché. By the end of the exchange, M has verbally put Bond in his place and all he can do, like any good poker player, is fold, go out into the field, and hope to draw a better hand. This is a classic “Moneyball” conflict, new fangled smarts vs. old school gut reactions. I couldn’t be more thrilled. This is the kind of boss Bond should have, one who is just as smart and serves as a counterweight to his swashbuckling pirate. Goldeneye does so many things so well but this reimagining of M might be the masterstroke simply because it lays a foundation on which future films can build. Oh, and Dench, as always, is flawless. She even hits the humor with pitch perfect delivery. “Unlike the American government we prefer to not get our bad news from CNN.” If just for M alone, I’m beyond optimistic about the Brosnan era moving forward.
Q: When Pierce walks into Q’s lab it’s like Norm walking into Cheers after he’s been gone for two weeks. He looks around and exhales; even though he’s been gone everything is in place and as it should be. This is Desmond Llewelyn 15th Bond film and at 82 years old he is absolutely thrilled to be back after 6 years. Showing more energy then he has in years, Q jokes (“Sorry about the leg Q, skiing?” “Hunting”), makes like its 1964 and breaks out Goldfinger (1964) era lines (“I’m particularly proud of this, headlight singer missiles!”) and even turns his cranky character upside down. When Bond reaches out to touch a sandwich on a plate, Q scolds him as he would if Bond were about to touch an explosive device. “Don’t touch that!” He then picks up the sandwich adding “It’s my lunch.”
List of Gadgets: The winch/laser cutting gun at the top is not the sexiest gadget but it’s the unsung hero in making the extremely sexy bungee jump possible. Moments later 007 uses a keycard lock pick for a blink and you’ll miss it break in. After racing Onatopp down the mountain Bond takes her photo and with the push of button sends the image from his camera to Moneypenny at MI6 who faxes him Onatopp’s bio, a fax he receives on his car fax machine. This is another in a long list of Bond gadgets that were fantastic at the time but have becoming commonplace in the world of today. Q hands Bond a few goodies while he’s in the lab including a watch that can trigger a bomb and shoot lasers, a belt with a 75 foot repelling cord built into the buckle, (which gives us the opportunity to learn Bond has a 34” waist), and a pen that doubles class 4 grenade. Three clicks arms the four second fuse, another three clicks disarms it which plays beautifully into Boris’ nervous tic we mentioned above. Q also has a tea tray the doubles as a document scanner just incase you forgot this is after all England.
Gadgets/British Government Property Bond Destroys: Bond manages to get both cars, the Aston Martin and the Beamer back in one piece. However, the French owned multi-million dollar prototype TIGER does not make it back. This is huge lose when one considers the never previously, and never will again, develop a weapon.
Other Property Destroyed: Indeed, Natalya could have said “Do you destroy everything?” and left it at that. Yah, he drives a motorcycle off a cliff and blows up a base in the open but here is the larger question. To get to that base, he jumped off a dam. Now, I think it’s safe to say that when one explodes a chemical faculty attached to a dam said dam is not going to be in good shape. So, how much of the Russian country side ended up swimming around like Clooney and crew at the end of O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000)? In addition to the TIGER, Bond downs the Onatopp chopper and while it’s technically Natalya and Boris that blow up the deep dish Cuban base, Bond wreaks enough havoc to keep a dozen insurance adjusters busy for years. Then there is the historic city of St. Petersburg. Located at the mouth of the Neva River, this port city was renamed Leningrad in 1924 and like the rest of Russia was shut off to the outside world for most of the cold war. Then, in ’91 after the fall of the wall, St. Petersburg retook its original moniker and opened up its doors reminding the world that Russia’s second largest city was home to some of the most stunning architecture in all of Europe. Four years after that James Bond tore it all down. Natalya is kidnapped by General Ourumov. They take off into the streets of St. Petersburg in a government car and Bond grabs the only set of wheels, err, treads available, those under a tank. The first shot where we see Bond come crashing through a brick wall is in 2D better 3D then anything any director not named Martin Scorsese has ever done. Perhaps inspired by 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis’ famously wrong headed photo op, Bond proceeds to drive the tank with his head pop out of the top while wearing a suit. And just like that photo destroyed Dukakis’ presidential run, Bond destroys all of St. Petersburg. He barrels the 12 foot wide tank down six foot wide allies, he crushes car after car and wall after wall, until finally, in what is played for humor more than blatant product placement (although it is also that) Bond splits a Pierre truck in two sending bottles of water flying everywhere. And for his parting bow, 007 rams the base of a bronze horse statue in such a way that the horse becomes perfectly balanced on top of his tank until it’s knocked off, a la the double-decker top in Live and Let Die (1973), by a low bridge. 
But Bond still has one more trick up his sleeve for the encore. Ourumov and Natalya join Alec and Onatopp on board Alec’s iron plated missile train. Like Alec did twice before, Bond appears from the shadows to surprise his former comrade, only this time the shadows are the mouth of a railroad tunnel the train is rushing toward and the gun is the barrel of a tank. James jumps clear before the unstoppable train hits the unmovable tank and while not as thrilling at the train derailment in The Fugitive (1993), it’s a hell of a wreck.
Felix Leiter: I guess that whole having his leg bitten off thing sidelined the CIA’s man of lukewarm mediocrity. In his stead the US chose to send their latest medical and scientific break through, Agent Jack Wade. Agent Wade is the first and to date only known successful patient to come out of the super double secrete program known as Operation Zombie or Oz for short. This experimental and highly controversial program involves collecting the deceased from government assassinations; in this case the body of international arms dealer and all around nut-ball Brad Whitaker who was killed by British agent 007 in Tangier in 1987, and reanimating these once dead enemies as a CIA agent. You figure with this technology the US could just grow another leg for Felix but truth be told, Wade is just more fun. The man wears Hawaiian shirts for crying out loud, you know he’s a blast. OK, that zombie stuff is all bullshit (or is it?) Truth is, EON probably felt bad about saddling Joe Don Baker with the worst villain in Bond history and decided they needed to make it up to him. The Jack Wade character is basically the rube American Sheriff J.W. Pepper updated for the 90’s minus the slapstick and racism. And you know what; I like him, especially when he calls Bond Jimbo. In everyway the anti Bond, Wade drives a piece of shit car, he looks like a goof wearing the big Russian hat, and he has a tattoo on his waistline that says “Muffy.” And of course, just when you start to think he’s as useless as Felix, he comes though in a pinch and keeps Bond on the right track. Bond also has a contact in the Russian underground and in a film chock full of great names like Xenia Onatopp and General Arkady Grigorovich Ourumov, I must give the blue ribbon to Valentin Dmitrovich Zukovsky. As played by Robbie Coltrane the ex-KGB man lives up to his fabulous handle and before we even met him he’s a legend. When Wade tells Jimbo a man with a pronounced limp named Zukovski is his contact, Bond is none to happy. “You know him?” “I gave him the limp.” Bond visits the underground boss in his night club and introduces himself by … stepping out of the shadows and putting a gun to his head. (Man that happens a lot in this film.) Zukovski, without looking to see who is holding the gun, delivers a line for the ages. “Welter PPK. Only three men I know carry one and I believe I’ve killed two of them.” Ladies and gentlemen, if you ever find yourself in a spy film, you want that to be your first line. None to happy about the limp, Zukovski is even more reluctant to help Bond after 007 insults his mistress Irina’s singing. (Hey look! Irina is played by Minnie Driver!) I’ve touched on this in the past but anytime Bond hooks up with underground contacts I’m a happy guy, all the more so if there is a history. For a spy, Jimbo doesn’t do enough of this.
Best One Liners/Quips: Valentin Dmitrovich Zukovsky, mulling over why he should help Bond; “He stole a helicopter? I have 6.” “Three” Bond corrects him, “and none that fly.”
Bond Cars: Back again to this idea of balance. For every new update Bond gets in this movie Campbell wisely gives us a link to his past. Nowhere is this more pronounced then in Bond’s two cars. The first shot we see of Bond after the opening credits has him racing on a cliff side road in the classic grey Aston Martin DB5. My neighborhood of Astoria Queens is home to the largest population of Greeks in the world outside of Greece. Whenever the older Greek men and women walk past an Orthodox church they cross themselves in a sign of reverence and respect. I do the same thing when I see Bond driving a grey Aston Martin DB5. But this is also a 90’s Bond and along with that comes product placement. I remember when this film was in theaters much was made of the multi-picture contract BMW signed with EON. The blitz was huge and even featured Bond tie-ins to BMW ads in print and on TV. If I may for a moment, I watch a ton of sports. 85% of the ads during any giving sporting event are for alcohol products or cars. Now, when I’m watching the game and see an ad for say Jim Beam, I may say to myself, “Hummm, it’s been a while since I’ve had some bourbon. I think I’d like some now.” However, I can’t picture getting up for the seventh inning stretch and thinking “You know, maybe I will drop $45,000 for a two seated car that gets shit gas millage and can’t move more then two blocks if there is a flake of snow on the street.” I could be wrong about this, I haven’t owned a car in years and clearly companies wouldn’t be spending money on ads if they didn’t work but still, who the hell buys a car because they saw an ad for it on TV? Right, BMW Z3 Roadster, baby blue convertible with the Q adjustments that Bond never gets to use. Cool looking car. Maybe I should look into getting one…
Bond Timepiece: A handsome Omega Seamaster. What appears to be a black face is actually blue on this stainless steel cased chronographer with precision Swiss automatic movement and stainless steel interlacing band. It’s also got a laser.
Other Notable Bond Accessories: You mean other then his smile, his charm, and ability to turn every head in the room? Oh that Pierce is just dreamy…
Number of Drinks 007 Consumes: … and he can drink! He keeps a bottle of chilled Bollinger in the armrest of the Aston Martin. You know, just in case. Not two minutes after popping the cork on that baby he’s tableside in the casino ordering a martini, shaken not stirred. He has a bourbon on the rocks with M and though we don’t see it I’d bet dollars to doughnuts he has a glass of vodka with Zukovsky.
Bond’s Gambling Winnings: And we get some baccarat! Oh be still my heart. Martin Campbell once again proves he’s done his homework by giving us a similar set up to the baccarat scene in Dr. No where Bond is playing against a sultry woman who he is simultaneously trying woo and beat. She takes the first hand we see and proposes rising the stakes. An 
agreement from Bond and a nod from the pit boss and the next hand is double or nothing. Bond takes the pot down and Onnatop storms off. Bond catches up to her and wonders why she’s so sour. After all, “One rises to meet a challenge.”
List of Locations: Unable to sit around dormant for six years Pinewood went ahead and rented out the 007 studio for a variety of productions. Hey, we all gots to pay the bills. When EON finally came calling the soundstage the Bond built was booked. Long time Bond set designers Peter Lamont found an abandoned Rolls-Royce factory at the Leavesden Aerodrome in Hertordshire, England and converted it to create, say it with me, one of the largest soundstages in the world. I think working in this new location was key in helping Brosnan feel like he could make Bond his. Extremely conscious of the legacy of past Bond’s, Brosnan talks on the DVD extras about the “factory having a good feel because there are no ghosts of Sean or Roger.” (Funny, he never once mentioned Timothy.) Shooting inside Russia for the first time, St. Petersburg is the background to the biggest set piece, the tank case. That said, several St. Petersburg streets were recreated on a back lot so the tank could smash walls without smashing real walls. Cuba however was still a no go zone so Puerto Rico stood in for the island nation. The deep dish base is actually a real dish radio telescope located at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Also seen in Contact (1997), the 1000 feet wide dish with a 500 foot transmitter is used to look for signs of alien life and is the largest radio telescope in the world. The Principality of Monaco, a country so small it could fit inside Central Park, is home to the Casino de Monte Carlo where Bond first meets Onnatop. The opening bungee jump took place at the Verzasca Dam in Locarno, Switzerland where tourist can bungee jump from the same perch as Bond if they are so inclined. MI6’s new exterior is the actual Ministry of Intelligence building on the River Thames which is just so cool. Finally, the train and tunnel bit was shot on the same stretch of track as the Octopussy circus train sequence. I thought I recognized it …
Capt. Sully, real life james Bond.
Bonds Special Abilities Displayed: Let us get the driving bit out of the way shall we. He drives a boat, a Russian tank, and a motorcycle which he jumps off a cliff to catch a plane. Speaking of airplanes, at one point Jimbo is piloting a Cesena which catches on fire. So, Bond simply makes like Captain Sully and lands the plane in a creator lake. He not only smacks the eject button on the TIGER with his brow but he uses his head in others ways. Thank you! Try the veal. After taking Onnatop’s money at the tables Bond figures out her game by picking up her Georgian accent and IDing the license plates on her red Ferrari as fake. This is no small thing since it’s this bit of info that prompts Bond to tail her so he learns she ripped off the TIGER which is linked to the Goldeneye which gets Bond in touch with Wade who leads him to Zukovsky who hooks him up with Alec which ends with Bond saving the world. It’s all in the details.
Final Thoughts: If Goldfinger (1964) is the high water mark by which all Bond films are judged then GoldenEye comes damn close. (And look, both titles are gold body parts!) The script is one of the best Bond has ever had to work with. It’s rich in detail and the twists and turns keep us (and Bond) on our toes. In many films, we as an audience know what’s going on well before the characters and it makes the hero seem dumb for not picking up on the dropped hints. Here, we learn everything with Bond, and therefore experience the same emotions he does. It’s a basic but fundamental element of the film that sucks us in and makes us care about Bond and everything going on around him. I’ve written at length about the balance and repeated themes that Campbell brings to the film and not since Terrence Young has someone so well understood both what makes Bond tick and what makes for an exciting Bond film. The subtle but ever present theme linking the fall of the Soviet Union to failures in their overreliance in technology and rigid ideals hits home more today then it possibly could have in 1995. Are we in The West not now seeing the fall of our society and culture due to faith in technology that gave us incomprehensible financial models and the ability to move billions of dollars in mere seconds? 
Are we still to this day not continuing to rocket forward with this failed system under the false idea that this is what capitalism is a about? Heavy stuff for sure but this Bond movie has a thought or two in its head and as much as it tied to a time and place, the newly free Russia of the early 90’s, the timeless theme of governments collapsing under their own hubris then needing to reinvent themselves hangs over everything. So we have that, plus a rock ‘em sock ‘em, gadget filled, sexy, slick Bond film; everything humming along in perfect balance. In the past, I’ve complained about Bond filmmakers feeling the need to go big, and here, from the first shot, everything is big. The difference, it not just the explosions but also the themes and ideas that are big and thanks to the balance between all these moving parts, it all works. As for Pierce’s debut, I will say this; in GoldenEye, he gives the best Bond performance since Connery. I know I’m touching the third rail here but please understand, I am not saying Pierce is the second best Bond (working on the assumption Connery is the best), but simply that in this film, taken as a single entry, Pierce’s performance as Bond is better then any of the previous entries going back to the Connery days. Let’s put it another way. If a 12-year-old boy came up to me today and asked “Who is James Bond?” out of all the 17 movies up to this point, GoldenEye is the film I’d show him. Is it the best one yet? No. Maybe not even top 3. But the 17-year-old and counting GoldenEye still feels up to date enough to hold the attention of a kid raised on Harry Potter and “Halo” while also laying out all the classic elements that define Bond and Bond films. While watching the helicopters fly off into the sunset in the final shot, I did think of Pierce and Campbell and Wilson and Lamont and everyone else involved in this project as heroes. With GoldenEye, they made the movie that saved the franchise.
Martini ratings:
Title: Licence To Kill
Reported Budget: $32,000,000 estimated. This too is an issue. To keep the budget about where it’s been for the last five or so films, producers were forced to abandon their beloved Pinewood Studios. New tax codes in England would have pushed the cost of filming up by an estimated 10%. So, the entire cast and crew relocated to Mexico where a majority of the surrounding country was used for location shoots and Churubusco Studios in Mexico City served as the sound stage and home base. While the last few films weren’t the run away spending spree that the earlier Bond films where, they never felt like they were cutting corners to make the film on the cheep. In the Licence to Kill, the lack of funds can be seen on the screen. This hurts the film in countless ways and further degrades what we have learned to be Bond’s world.
Opening Action Sequence: The first shots of Bond in the last film featured him all in black. His feet having barley touched the ground he went sprinting into action. The first shot in this film features Bond and two other tuxedo clad men sitting three abreast in the back seat of a car. The tuxes are a tip that a wedding is in the future. The fact they are driving on the Seven Mile Bridge in the Florida Keys is a tip that cars will flying off the bridge and sinking in the wet in the future. Indeed, its Felix’s wedding day and the three men are trying to get to the chapel on time when they are interrupted by Felix’s “partners at the DEA.” The feds have the notorious drug dealer Franz Sanchez in their grasp and they need Felix’s help to nab him before he makes it into Cuban air space. Felix jumps on their helicopter and brings James along “strictly as an observer.” However, he does give James a gun “just in case.” We then cut Sanchez, who has risked stepping foot on U.S. soil for a woman; a woman he finds in bed with another man. “What did he promise you, his heart?” Sanchez asks while his men hold the guy at knifepoint. “Give her his heart” Sanchez says as they drag the man out. He then proceeds to whip the woman with a stingray tail. This would be the most badass intro of a villain ever, except the scoring is so ridiculous as nearly ruin the scene. Nearly, but it still manages to work and in a bigger sense sets a precedent that will play out for the entire film. Mainly, the bad guys are the only thing in this movie that’s any fun or works well. Bond villains are always a blast but this is the first film where I found myself enjoying the villain stuff so much that when the film goes to the Bond stuff, I couldn’t wait to get back to the villains. Case in point, when we rejoin Felix and Bond they are screaming at each other in the copper to be heard over the motor. It is jarring and simply bad sound editing. Then, when the chopper lands we are presented with a shot that would be embarrassing in the Bad Boys 2 (2003) trailer. Felix, in his tux, carrying a machine gun, runs straight at the camera, flanked by DEA agents on either side doing the same … in slow motion. I literally couldn’t believe it but I swear it happened (I watched the film twice, I didn’t dream it.) I could be wrong, but I think this is the first slow motion shot in all of the Bond films, and yes, it further destroys the world of Bond. Speaking of, I love when Bond does outrageous shit that works within the rules we have so firmly established. Hell, it’s why we watch Bond in the first place. But nothing, nothing has set up a universe where a helicopter can catch up to a crop-duster plane, have Bond repel out of said helicopter and land on the tail of said plane, hook a cable to the tail, and the helicopter then takes off with the plane dangling under it like a cowboy that has just lassoed a bull. Well, that’s how they get Sanchez as he’s trying to escape and “oh look, it’s the wedding down there. And it’s yours Felix! What say we … drop in?!?!” I wish, but that would be too Moore. Now I want to pause at this point and make this about me, if you will indulge such a detour. I enjoy the hell out of this blog. It’s also a lot of work. It’s work I enjoy or I wouldn’t do it but it consumes a ton of time to come up with different angles and a bunch of tweaking of ideas to make them fit into the context of the big picture. Anyway, some stuff I think works OK and other stuff I’m really proud of. One of the things I thought was quite good and fairly witty was my parachute principal for Bond openings that I came up with for 
Villain’s Name: Franz Sanchez. If you haven’t gathered yet, Bond sucks in this film. Thank EON for Sanchez. It’s only while sharing the screen with slippery snake that the Bond character is elevated to the Jimmy B we know and love. Our baddie is all you want in a Bond villain; he’s sinister, scary, shrewd and charming as hell. Whether he’s feeding CIA men to sharks, beating his girlfriend with a dead animal part, or schmoozing investors to get them to come in on his cocaine empire, he always has the same calm exterior that almost succeeds in obscuring his steal-eye intensity. While Bond spends the film flailing about and getting his friends killed, Sanchez is always in control, until he’s not. While the press material says Sanchez was based on Manuel Noriega but he’s more of a Pablo Escobar like figure, a man who is simply more powerful then the government of his nation. His coke operation basically makes up the bulk Isthmus’ GNP and he therefore has every pol, policeman, and peasant in his hip pocket. He ruthlessly rules through fear, intimidation, and insistence upon loyalty. The first two serve him well but it’s his high ideal of honor among thugs that proves to be his downfall and not coincidentally, the only hook in the film on which we can hang our hat. Take Ed Killifer, the CIA man who sells his buddy Felix out for $2 million. Sanchez uses such a man while finding him despicable exactly because he does sell his friend out. Then, he pays him anyway. Sanchez did after all give his word. The reason Sanchez whips his woman while his flunkies get all Mola Ram on her lover’s chest? Not because of the physical act of sleeping with another man, but because she was unloyal. This character trait is the only thing in the movie that allows Bond to shine and be Bond. In an expertly executed bluff, Bond, Jiu Jitsu like, turns Sanchez’s code of loyalty against him. By sowing seeds of doubt about his trusted henchmen, Bond twists Sanchez in to such a state of distrust that while Sanchez never gets high on his own supply, he still ends up just as paranoid as Tony Montana in Scarface (1983). And like Pacino’s South Florida coke baron, Sanchez ends up imploding and killing everyone he once trusted. (Side note: In another reference to Brian De Palma’s llello opera, one of the CIA guys figures Felix’s missing leg was thanks to a chain saw “They sell more then they do in Oregon down here.” Good stuff)
about a baron of blow building a home where everything from floor to ceiling in bone white. Also, let’s take a moment and silently bow our head’s for the poor cinematographer who had to figure out how the hell to shoot this place. Cameras and white don’t get along at all and add the sun reflection off all that water…well lets just say I hope our DP has recovered from the stress nightmares that most certainly plagued him during production. Well done good man, and know it was worth it; the place is simply breathtaking. The same cannot be said for deep forest hideout. After all the talk of a new, dark, Bond that audience will barely recognize, Glen and Co. rely on the most tired and boring of all Bond clichés for the films third act. Everything comes to a head at the villain’s ultra modern over-sized lab (in this case, a coke possessing plant) that is hidden in an agent over-sized wonder of the world (in this case, a faux Aztec temple that is also the home to a Jonestown like cult) that inevitably catches fire and explodes moments after Bond, with girl in tow, escapes. At least in the past with the volcano lair de Blofeld, or Drax’s temple come lunching pad or Scaramanga’s sea side cliff/solar power plant or Stromberg’s octopus garden or even Dr. No’s shanty nuclear powered fishing wharf rocket jamming digs, we had a sense of the place. (Not so with Mr. Big’s voodoo shark aquarium but hey, the graveyard was cool!) Sanchez’s joint just seems to have random rooms that kind of pop up just to serve out whatever purpose the film demands. It has a TV studio with a lion head waterfall, an underground helicopter parking garage, a cocaine-refining assembly line, a huge trucking doc, and a soundproof rape room cheekily referred to as a “meditation chamber.” None of these locations has any relation to the other and the rooms aren’t even visually consistent enough to be close to existing in the same space. But it all blowed up real good, which I guess, is the point.
agent, suspended over a shark tank, asks about his new bride, “we gave her a nice Honey mooooon” with his voice rising to emphasize “oooon.” Even his wardrobe, which looks like something one of the dancers from Michael Jackson’s “Bad” video would wear, he somehow makes cool. He’s the perfect man behind the man, always present and ready, but also fading into the background when not needed. Next we get Milton Krest who is the only non-reoccurring character in the film to come from Fleming’s pen (the short story “The Hildebrand Rarity.”) Krest is a rich American though how he made his money is unclear. Now, Krest earns a living using his fleet of boats and submarines as well as his Florida Key warehouse to smuggle Sanchez’s blow to a beeper carrying street level pusher near you. One more note about his warehouse, it holds every variety of aquatic life imaginable (sharks, electric ells) for no real reason and has a variety of containers that say ACME on the side. Perhaps Krest makes his money selling gadgets to Wile E Coyote? Anywho, as played by Anthony Zerbe, a character actor who has earned “Oh, that guy!” status, Krest is one smarmy guy. He gets one scene that is absolutely riveting and more frightening then the Sanchez woman whipping incident. In both scenes, Sanchez’s lady, Lupe Lamora, is in bed, this time on board Krest’s boat. Sanchez is not on board and Krest has been drinking. Because Zerbe plays the scene like he is truly inebriated and not like a cartoon stumbling drunk, he gives off the unsettling feeling that he is capable of anything, at any moment. So when his mood starts to sour Lupe is justifiably terrified. She attempts to defuse the situation by playing her ace and threatens to tell Sanchez if Krest touches her. This backfires horribly as Krest moves in for the kill. “I’ve known Sanchez a long time…. And I’ve seen girls like you come, and I’ve seen girls like you go.” Mercifully, he is interrupted by the ships captain before things truly take a turn for the worse. I wanted to know everything about Milton Krest. Who is he? How did he get involved in this business? How did he and Sanchez meet? What’s his drink of choice? Who is his favorite baseball player? Before we can learn such things he ends up loosing both the shipment of coke AND the money and scratching his head looking for excuses when Sanchez comes calling. I have a feeling this will end badly for old Milton… Between Dario and Krest, we would have had two classic henchmen. But then we get, and I must admit, I somehow forgot he was in this film, Mr. Las Vegas himself, Wayne Newton!!!!!!! Forget everything you know about this movie. Now, picture yourself sitting in a bar, waiting to meet a friend. That friend enters and says, “I just heard the craziest thing.” “What?” you ask. “OK, Wayne Newton just came out with a movie where he plays a character named Professor Joe Butcher. Professor Joe is a preacher who has a Pat Robertson’s like TV show but it’s really the front for a cult in Mexico somewhere. Everyone in this cult walks around in white robes. As initiation, all the women are taken to a sound proof room when Newton has sex with them. Oh, and Newton drives around this place in a golf cart. OK, to get money, he sells a book he wrote which has a photo of a half naked woman in a yoga posses on the cover and is titled “The Secretes of the Cone Power Reviled.” The other way he makes money is by selling cocaine over the air but only a few distributors in the states know this.” “Wait, what?” you ask. 
“Shut-up, I’m telling you” your friend answers. “Newton goes on his TV show and sets a goal for pledges. Like he will say on the air he needs to raise $18,000, and then that’s the price for the shipment of coke. So say you’re the Chicago supplier, you call in, pledge, send the check, and then that’s the payment for the coke. He then ships it out of his temple where he also processes the stuff. And here is the best part about all of this, it’s a Bond movie!” Wouldn’t you spit your Anchor Steam on the floor, throw a $20 on the table, and run out to the nearest theater to buy a ticket that second? Hell yes you would and I would be right behind you. And that’s not to all; Newton totally nails the part! I’m not kidding. At one point, the Bond girl shows up at the compound, dons the white robe and pretends to be a fawning follower. Prof. Joe takes her to the pyramid like bedroom, which is decorated with copies of his book, to make the moves. When she pulls a gun on him, is he upset? No. He loves it! As she is locking him in this room, a sound proof room (all the better for raping), he smiles at her and says “Bless your heart!” the same way he says it to the dups on his TV show. Even later, when his temple is blowing up and his entire lives work is literally going up in flames, he is fleeing with a bag of money, the last thing he has in the world. The Bond girl comes up behind him, riding in HIS golf cart, and swipes the money. He stops running and looks at her with a smile of deep admiration. “Bless your heart!” It is a part and performance for the ages and you know what, it still gets buried by this shit pile of film. Honestly, it takes a special kind of suck to blow Wayne Newton’s Professor Joe Butcher.
Bond Girl’s Name: Pam Bouvier. Despite how stunning Ms. Bouvier is, Bond doesn’t recall the first time he met her at Felix’s wedding. At least when they meet up again at the ZZ Top redneck bar he doesn’t let on that he remembers. Strange. Bouvier is some kind of mercenary, its never really clear, who partnered with the CIA on the Sanchez missile sting. She can suck down a martini, handle herself in a barroom brawl and bails Bond out of trouble more times then I can count, including one hell of shot to take out Benicio who literally had Bond dangling over a barrel. Her thanks? Bond screams at her. At another point she somehow resists the temptation to smack Bond when three seconds after lecturing her about her professionalism, his getaway boat runs out of gas. “They must have shot the fuel line.” Uhhuhh, that’s what they all say. Yet, despite the fact that Bond treats her like yesterday’s papers through the entire film, like say when he takes too much pleasure putting her down in front of people while she is playing his assistant, she still falls for him. This isn’t the usually babe in the woods Bond girl who would be wowed by the spy. Nor does he give her the respect of treating her like an equal. So why would she fall for him? And this just adds to the Dalton problem, his Bond is a jerk, and not a fun one. And to a larger extent, the film as a whole is kind of mean to the women, perhaps thinking “dark” means “cynical.” How else can you explain Glen’s choice to make Bouvier weep when she learns Bond is messing around only to be won back after he throws her in a pool? Cynical.
Bond Girls Best Pick-up Line: “Why don’t you wait until you’re asked?”
M: Robert Brown. I always felt Brown was a dick as M and he absolutely confirms it here. In the past, M would “officially” dismiss Bond when the political heat was coming down and then support him on the sly. Not here. Universal Exports commandeers the Hemingway House, a fact I enjoyed immensely. While several six towed cats and armed men watched, M dresses Bond down for undermining the CIA’s case on Sanchez by going on his “personal vendetta.” The thing is, M is kind of right here. But now, see if you can follow this. Bond says he will resign if not permitted to stay on the case. “This is not a country club” M hisses at his best agent. I guess what he means by that is one can’t just walk away from being an agent, you know kind of like “No one leaves the KGB!” (I miss General Gogol) Fine, but then in the next breath M tells Bond to hand over his gun and 00 licence to kill. Is this some kind of “Oh you can’t quit because your fired” argument? I don’t get it. Then, Bond takes a swing at another agent, steals his gun, and jumps off the balcony. There are several MI6 dudes who have a clear shoot at this man who just committed treason against the crown. But then M tells his people “Don’t shoot.” If he said so because he trusted Bond or didn’t want his best agent to get killed or anything other then “there are too many people around” it might have worked. But here’s the thing, they are at the Hemingway House which is walled and cut off from the 
public. They could shoot all they want in the courtyard and the only causality other then Bond would be a few six toed felines. It’s 100% M’s fault Bond got away so what does he do? He takes it out on poor dear Moneypenny. “There are five typing eras on the first page alone” he barks before literally throwing the paper at Moneypenny. What a dick.
Gadgets/British Government Property Bond Destroys: His career, future pension and possibly the James Bond franchise.
Look, these two men now have both been widowed on their wedding day thanks to the violence that comes part and parcel with their chosen professions. Is that dark enough for yah? Think there are some larger ideas that can grow out of this? Do James and Felix form a bond over this incredibly traumatic event in both of their lives? Nahhh, they don’t even discuss it. Felix’s bride is given just enough screen time to smooch Bond and then get killed off so the plot can get rolling and then she’s forgotten. Again, I can’t decide if this film is just super lazy or so cynical as to not even care about her or Felix or the audience. I suspect all of the above. Felix by the way was played by David Hedison who becomes the first and to this point only actor to reprise the Felix role. For those keeping score, he was Moore’s NYC docent in Live and Let Die (1973).
Number of Drinks 007 Consumes: One of the other things is Bond’s drinking. I tipped my hat in admiration when Bond checked into his hotel and ordered a case of Bollinger for his room. While depositing millions into Sanchez’s bank, Bond enjoys a glass of bubbly. He has another when touring the coke bottling plant with the Asian inverters. Bond orders his signature drink, a medium dry martini shaken not stirred, but he must leave before he gets to enjoy. No worries, Bouvier downs it in one slug. I also loved that while in the ZZ Top bar, Bond is served a Bud with a lime and he doesn’t even consider soiling his pallet with such swill. Flashes of the Bond we know and love.
It’s a shame because hustling at blackjack is a rather novel idea. While tanking on purpose is rather straight forward, going on a $500,000 plus run is not easily engineered. I’m not sure how you can do it without cheating so I would have liked to have seen how Bond pulled it off. However, the only way we learn about what Bond is doing at the table is from other characters dialog breaking one of the cardinal rules of filmmaking; don’t tell it, show it. We have no idea of how Bond switched gears to go on a ½ million dollar positive swing simply because the film finds it unimportant. The blackjack game is an excuses to get Bond in a tux, two ladies in evening gowns and then it’s simply a bridge to get Bond though Sanchez’s door. As a result, this is the most disappointing 007 gambling scene to date.
Title: The Living Daylights
Film Length: 2 hours 11 minutes
more than one observer found themselves asking if EON was truly ready to let Bond trade in his cuff links and tails for a leather jacket that to quote Chill Palmer is “like the one Pacino wore in Serpico.(1973).” This is after all, the most successful film franchise of all time (and reminded so until this year when a little punk named Harry Potter took the lead) and Hollywood’s first rule is you don’t mess with success. So, are the guys in charge going to let the new guy just waltz in and do his own thing?
Reported Budget: $30,000,000 estimated. Same as Glen’s previous film but the money is much better spent here. Instead of rampaging through the streets of San Francisco in a fire truck and blowing up blimps, Glen puts the budget toward create a world of shifty Eurotrash types playing a high stakes game. The gritty look is consistent with these characters and frankly, I was surprised by how “right” the atmosphere in much of the film felt. There is a whole lot of screen space delegated to military iconography giving the film an overall feeling of occupation which is appropriate. The Eiffel Tower of the last entry gives way to remote airstrips in the Afghani mountains where horses (beautify shot in the desert land scrape) are ridden by hardened Arab rebels; not privileged breeders. Sure, we still get planes flying into the sides of mountains, but not before a hand to hand battle takes place on a cargo net hanging out of the back of said plane to give us one of the tensest Bond moments in a long time. EON even put a few bucks down on a brand spanking new Aston Martin. Smiles all around.
oriented Bond. Further, the fact that a paintball exercise becomes a real fight with real bullets is a clever device. It’s a signal to the audience, letting us know that before it may have been a game but this time it’s for real. That said it’s still a Bond picture so of course Jimmy B must get the girl with a cheeky remark. Bond checks in with headquarters, informing them “I’ll report in an hour.” “Won’t you join me for a dink?” “Better make that two.” Dalton’s smirk when he delivers the line is as close to Connery as you can get without being the genuine article. We are off to an excellent start.
“I only kill professionals, that girl didn’t know one end of a rifle from the other.” It was this decision to trust his gut that eventually allows Bond to unwrap the villain’s scheme. If Bond killed the woman, as Saunders points out he was order to do, the baddie would have succeeded and Bond most likely would be rotting away in a Gulag camp. Stuff my orders indeed. It’s a neat trick to play on the audience, taking our perception of Bond and his known soft spot for the fairer sex and turning it upside down. It’s also a sly and engaging way to reinvent Bond. A lesser film would have had an over written and awkward scene to tell us “this is a new Bond,” but here it’s seamless woven into the story.
going to bump-off. MI6 buys the lie and Bond is ordered to bump off Pushkin. No sooner is Georgi’s plan set in motion then he is immediately “kidnapped” by the KGB but not before the kidnapper and a faceless MI6 guard get into an amazing fight in the kitchen. Everything from an electric knife to a flaming grill to a scaling hot pot of water comes into play. It’s the best hand to hand fight scene in the film and Bonds not even in the building. It’s a strange choice and it’s also the point in the movies where things start spin a little out of control. Sadly, the film makers never quite catch up.
Villain’s Lair: Georgi is on the run and unable to return to the Soviet Union until his plan plays out so he spend most of his time at Whitaker’s compound lounging around the pool. This Moroccan base of operations is hidden in plain sight in the middle of the bustling city of Tangier. The massive building, situated on a cliff overlooking the sea, was actually owned by billionaire and motorcycle enthusiast Malcolm Forbes. Forbes housed his collection of 120,000 lead soldiers in the spacious home and was kind enough to let Bond producers use them in the film.
Badassness of Villain: Setting up your girlfriend to be killed by the Brits to legitimize your apparent defection is not a nice thing to do. Dealing weapons and drugs to finance freelance assassinations of high level government officials on both sides of the cold war certainty ups ones bad boy cred. But you want true badassness? Check this out. You know those big ass military cargo planes that can open up in the back so you can drive a dozen tanks onto the thing? There are big. I’d also imagine when they come in for landing they would be moving at a pretty good clip. Right, so if you put one of those planes coming in for a landing on one side of a runway and you had a Jeep speeding toward it from the other side of the runway, who do you think would win this game of chicken? Well, I don’t know who was piloting the plane but Georgi was driving the Jeep and the two hit head on. This would most likely reduce the Jeep to a grease spot but at the very least it would stop the Jeep dead in its tracks. However, the Jeep as driven by Georgi somehow goes through the cargo plane. I say somehow because we never see it happen but as the two collide we see an explosion the next shot shows the Jeep continuing forward but on fire. A dazed Georgi with a little dirt on his face is still at the wheel and jumps out of the Jeep which continues to roll along and then explodes. So yah, defying every law of physics to survive a head on collation with a plane while suffering not a scratch is rather badass … and bad directing. I’m calling you out here Glen. You had the dude jump out of the Jeep after he hit the plane. Why not have him jump out of the Jeep before the collision? A simple flip-flop of shots in the edit room would have done the trick.
Bond Girl Actress: Maryam d’Abo. A former model of French and Dutch decent Abo parleyed her Bond girl role into additional “exposure” (wink, wink) in the September 1987 Playboy. In the issue she and other “Women of James Bond” take off all their clothes in a celebration of what it means to be a Bond girl. D’Abo can be seen posing with a white cat and cello. She also hosted a 2002 TV show called “Bond Girls Are Forever.” I love the idea of exploring what it means for actresses to be a Bond girl and the impact it had on their carrier etc. but the parts of the special I watched on Youtube don’t gets past the whole “I always dreamed about being a Bond girl” sound bites. I feel like the Playboy issue was more reveling. Thank you and good night! Don’t forget to tip your bartender. You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here. Thank you!
Bond Girls Best Pick-up Line: “Don’t. It’s impossible. I’ve known you only two days and all I can think of is how we would be together.” Bumper cars will do that to a woman.
hanging out of the back of an airplane that is (D) being piloted through the Afghani mountains by Kara who (E) doesn’t know how to fly. This is so much cooler than fighting on top of a Lear jet as Bond and Gobinda did in Octopussy. It’s also 1000 times more terrifying. The long shot shows the net bouncing up and down behind the plane like a tube being dragged behind a boat. At any moment the net could smack the fuselage and by-by buddies. And yes, they did indeed stick two stuntmen on a net hanging out of the back of a plane. After going at each other and dumping the net’s cargo Necros finds himself hanging onto Bonds boot for dear life. In a water torture moment Bond takes a knife and slices his shoe lace ever so deliberately until final his footwear comes off and Necros is sent hurling earthward still clutching the boot. Freaking awesome. Finally, Bond appropriately employees a gadget to take out Whitaker. Bond is pinned down in the toy soldier wing of the faux General’s lair. Whitaker is spraying the room with bullets while Bond takes cover behind a statue. “I should have known you would hide behind that vulture Wellington” Whitaker bellows. I know nothing of Wellington’s military exploits but I find his beef to be most enjoyable. Anyway, Bond puts his key ring, which is ridged with an explosive, on the back of Wellington’s head and when Whitaker gets close enough “BOOM!” The statue smashes down on Whitaker who crashes into one of his glass cases. Busted by a bust.
This proves to be the bit of info that Bond needs to link Georgi and Whitaker. Well done and all that but really, Moneypenny in her new capacity (More on that below) could have just as easily provided this info. Anyway, Saunders gets up to exit and thanks to a Necros booby trap is wacked with the sliding door which kills him instantly. This is actually a lot cooler than it sounds and not at all what is outrageous about this death; its Bond reaction to the death by door that makes this murder noteworthy. Now remember, Saunders sucks. He’s been all problems few answers. But when Bond sees Saunders has been killed, he flips. I mean he gets crazy pissed and completely looses his head. So bonkers and blind with rage is Bond that he recklessly runs out into the amusement park and accidently pulls his gun a 10 year old kid. Jesus man, you’re a pro, keep it together. And by the by, why weep for this incompetent douche? In researching the movie it’s clear that the whole “Bond gets angry thing” was very important to Dalton and that’s fine but he needs a reason to get mad. If Kara was wacked I would get it. But this jerk? And then to go and pull a gun on a kid? It’s a choice that backfires badly. Instead of making Bond look harder and darker it makes him look unfocused and unusually vulnerable.
I’m over the moon that it was Moneypenny who broke the glass ceiling. Who knows, maybe one day a woman may sit behinds M’s desk? When searching for female KGB assassins Q comes up with Helga who uses her thighs to strangle and a girl who uses teddy bears to bomb. However, it’s Moneypenny who IDs the cellist Kara Milovy. Not only is she now contributing in a more productive way, I dig the new look. The whole deceptively shy eyeglass wearing librarian with the guarder hidden under her skirt thing works quite well. Keep up the good work Moneypenny.
Gadgets/British Government Property Bond Destroys: The paint job on the Aston Martin didn’t survive the self destruct.
Bond have a drink together and then…Felix says something about working the same case from different angels and … oh screw it. Nothing. There is no reason, at all, to even remotely include Felix. He contributes zip, zero, nada. His return, after six films and 14 years means absolutely less than nothing. Have I mentioned how it’s time for Glen to be shown to the door, impolitely if necessary?
Not quite as strong as say Don’t Look Now (1973) or the underrated Munich (2005) or the incredible The Third Man, but Glen does a very good job of using cold war Europe to establish a tone which keeps the audience aware that no one is to be trusted. This film is at its heart a first class cold war thriller and therefore unlike any other Bond and the intrigue is heightened by locations both grand and simple. The apartment where Bond first encounters Kara is everything I would think of a European city flat. From the height of the ceilings to the tiled floors to the long windows and wall paper between everything feels right. I was reminded of Krzysztof Kieslowski “Three Colors Trilogy” which simply blew my mind when I fist saw it. Red (1994) in particular just grabbed me an put in Europe unlike anything else I had ever experienced and while The Living Daylights doesn’t come close to that, it has shades of it. Glen, as much as I’ve been dumping on him, deserves great praise for making me feel like 
I’ve stamped my passport in a way that only From Russia With Love, Thunderball, and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service have when it comes to past Bond films. It just a shame he couldn’t hold this sense of place for the entire film like in the fairgrounds or the final joke of a scene. The Afghani desert stuff is first rate and the Tangier scenes are equally strong making it all the more disappointing that the illusion was crushed by a few missteps. I also feel the need to point out, for no reason at all, that whenever I hear mention of Tangier I immediately begin to sing “If you see her say hello…” If you understand, you are indeed a fellow traveler.
However, John Glen doesn’t do his new leading man any favors. Let’s once again return to the idea of timing. Take the scene where Bond fights Necros on the cargo net. Earlier, Bond had set a bomb to go off on the plane. Now that he finds himself and his lady on that plane, he must disarm the bomb. Bond gets up to leave the cockpit and Kara asks “Where are you going?” “To defuse a bomb” Dalton replies in an over delivered line straight out of the Bill Shatner playbook. He then encounters Necros in the back, they fight, and Necros falls out of the plane clutching Bond’s boot (which is freaking awesome.) When 007 returns to the cockpit, Kara asks “What happened to Necros?” This is a Bond staple that has been used in at least half of the films up to this point; Bond kills bad guy, Bond girl asks what happened to bad guy, Bond gives a piffy, punny response. But Glen steps on the punch-line. Dalton’s delivery of “He got the boot” is literally cut into so as to bury the line and kill the joke. Then, Dalton goes to leave the cockpit again and Kara once again asks “Where are you going?” “To drop a bomb.” Dalton delivers the nearly identical line in a nearly identical situation with the same urgency he used not 5 minute previous. Yes, Dalton oversells the line but make no mistake; this was not Dalton’s fault. Glen has his actor running around the plane like he’s Benny Hill chase women around a park bench and the director has no apparent interest in beating out the scene. It’s like he said “Oh man let’s just get thought this so we can watch the plane blow up, OK?” This is not Glen’s first rodeo; he and the writers need to support their new guy. Making him do all this unnecessary business, stepping on his lines, making him fall in love, having him pull a gun on a kid, putting him on freaking bumper cars… it’s no good. As I pointed out above, everyone working on the movie needs to be in the same ball park and at times it feels like Wilson, Glen and Dalton aren’t even playing the same sport. I can’t emphasize enough how much of a drag this is because Bond 15 does things no previous Bond has, does them well, and when it works, it’s enthralling. Glen actually manages to create atmosphere at points and individual scenes and sequences, especially at the top and in Afghanistan, are fantastic. The problems is other scenes are complete off tonally and as the movie progresses it looses focus until it’s one big mess. By the end the film has no clue what it wants to be. I’m reminded of a line from Roger Ebert’s (in my opinion overly positive) review of You Only Live Twice (1967). He called the film a “million-dollar playpen in which everything works but nothing does anything.” The Living Daylights is the other side of that coin. It’s a multimillion-dollar playpen which tries to do everything and in the end it doesn’t work. Timing.
Title: A View to a Kill
Above all, he represents the crown with dignity and is a natural ambassador for all the ideals England holds dear. In 1985, the States too had an action hero who represented everything Americans wanted to be in their wildest fantasies; Rambo from Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985). This John Rambo was very different than the one we met three years earlier in First Blood (1982). While that film was ham fisted and leaned too heavily on stereotypes, it was none-the-less an attempt to explore some heavy ideas. In the movie, Rambo is a Viet Nam vet who returns to find a very different America then the one he thought he was fighting for. Yes, the film finds him running around the North Western woods killing off redneck cops but he was also a deeply conflicted man who was at war with himself, unable to come to terms with being treated like an obsolete tool of war. The film was critical of our treatment of the men and women who served bravely in that controversial war and it didn’t paint the good old US of A in the best light. Rambo 2.0 on the other hand was a recruitment poster boy. He practically had “Be all that you can be!” tattooed across his six pack, a red, white, and blue propaganda action-figure selling Reagan’s vision of America. First Blood Part II gave us a steroid jacked, monosyllabic, one-man army recruited to single handedly correct the history books. (He even gets the line “Do we get to win this time?”) For $2.75 moviegoers got more explosions than the Fourth of July and as much nuance as you find at the bottom of a Bud pounder. Rambo was ugly, loud and carried a big stick called a freaking M60E3. He was the anti-Bond. (See also Schwarzenegger in Commando (1985)) Perhaps feeling their man could use a 1985 update, Cubby and Co. decided it was a good idea to shoehorn Bond (the film more so than the character) into this mold of the Ronald Reagan era action hero. It didn’t work out so well.
Film Length: 2 hours 11 minutes. It feels like 5 and change.
Director: John Glen, at the helm for the third time with 007 License to Dangle officially became the incredible shrinking director. After bursting out of the gate with For Your Eyes Only (1981) and hitting a triple with Octopussy, Glen himself admits on the DVD extras to having used up all his good ideas. He talked about how hard it was to “scour (his) brain” to come up with things for Bond to do that “we haven’t seen before.” His solution? A fire truck. “I mean, what little boy doesn’t love a fire truck?” he chuckles. Perhaps, but I think you’ll find, Mr. Glen, that you are not making Goonies, Police Academy II or Back to the Future, all 1985 films aimed at a younger demographic that, incidentally, beat your movie at the box office. I mean, what little boy doesn’t love pirates, cops who make funny noises or time traveling Delorean? Never the strongest director when bullets weren’t flying, Glen was always extremely talented when it came to putting together action set pieces. While there are strong moments in this film, most notably the base jump from the Eiffel tower and the brief shot of horses racing though the woods, these moments are swamped by what comes before or after. Most of the action sequences make absolutely no sense (the horse jumping bit) or are meant to play for laughs and are simply unfunny (the fire truck chase.) This is a movie where a woman is running on the ground and manages to get scooped up by baddies chasing her in a freaking zeppelin. A bit of free advice; if you find yourself on foot being chased by a zeppelin, a quick step to the right or the left ought to do the trick. Zeppelins are not known for their ability to corner tightly. Glen gives us detours involving Russians and audiotapes that take forever to develop with minimal pay-off. There are clichés from an elevator crashing to the ground seconds after characters escape to a drawbridge that is jumped by the chased but foils the pursuers. All the while Bond is dangling off this and that like a ragdoll in the wind. An example off all of the above rolled into one ugly mess; Bond has to save the girl from San Francisco’s City Hall before it’s burnt to the ground. Carrying her fireman style slung on his back, Bond makes his way to the roof as fire trucks arrive and a crowd gathers. We get a shot of a park bench across the street from city hall and see a drunk bum out of central casting. Bottle in hand, he is awaken by the chaos and looks across the street. As we cut from shots of Bond carrying the woman down a ladder on his back to fire fighters fighting the blaze to on lookers gasping and ohhhhing and ahhhing, we for some reason keep coming back to this drunk, watching the goings on in wide eyed amazement. At one point, Bond slips down one rung and the drunk drops his bottle. When Bond finally gets to the bottom, the faceless crowd cheers over the Duran Duran theme song being played triumphantly on horns. We never see the bum again. Why was he the surrogate for the people of the Bay Area? Was the experience mean to change his life? Did he run out and join the San Francisco Fire Department? Did he move into the burnt down city hall where he squatted for the next few years? Did he piss on a fire fighters leg? Did he drop to his knees and praise Jesus? We have no clue. This bum was made to be a big deal and literally zero happens with him. This is a microcosmic of the entire film. There are several characters that are introduced and dropped with no real flow or pacing. All they do is break up the action and then disappear without any real meaning for their existence. It’s like the editor traded in his Steenbeck for a blender.
Reported Box-office: $49,667,000 USA and $152,400,000 worldwide. Not a bust but down considerably from the $57,403,139 USA $187,500,000 worldwide numbers for Octopussy. While Sly Stallone was redefining what it meant to be an action hero in Rambo II and Rocky IV (#2 and #3 at the box office in 1985) Bond found himself sandwiched between Chevy Chase in Fletch (#12) and European Vacation (#14) for good old lucky #13. No mater how you slice it, this was the worst return on investment in Bonds 23 year history. In fact, the past few films have been soft at the box office and getting worse. Like many icons from the 1960’s, Bond was lost in 1980’s and didn’t truly rediscover his stride until the 90’s. (See also Neil Young, pre Untouchables (1987) Sean Connery, women who don’t shave, Charles Manson) One last note, Dolph Lundgren, who played Ivan Drago in Rocky IV has a blink and you’ll miss it role as KGB agent Venz in this movie.
sport of skiing that didn’t come ONLY in neon. You absolutely had no chose if you hit the slopes between ’84 and ’89 than to have some neon somewhere on your body. Anyway, a woman unzips her shirt to revile the films title which is clever I guess, and then amongst the neon is a fire and ice motif as chicks with Gene Simmons eye make-up (in neon) dance and do their thing.
According to the handy-dandy booklet that comes with the Ultimate Edition DVD’s, after shooting was finished EON discovered a fashion designer by the name of Zoran owned a company called Zoran Ladicorbic Limited which sounds Bondian indeed. Fearing Mr. Zoran may no longer feel special after learning about Max and would then use Zoran Ladicorbic to destroy the world, not clothe it, EON’s lawyers insisted on the legal speak at the top. We then cut to Siberia where Russians are skiing around on the ground and flying around in the air up to no good. We know they Russians because they have a big red star painted on the side of their helicopter and snowmobiles, we know they are in Siberia because there is snow, and we know they are up to no good because they are Russians. We then see Bond looking not unlike Paul Simon on his eponymous album cover. You know those guys who walk about the beach with metal detectors?
loud, EON has a hit song full of energy from a super popular band that was record for this movie! Stick the Duran Duran tune in there if you need something. I think, think, this was all supposed to play has funny, and perhaps 1985 moviegoers were slapping their parachute paint cover knees, but I seriously doubt it. It’s simply not funny. So, to recap; we have third rate rip off performing a reference that makes no scene and stops the film dead while simultaneously sucking all the cool out of anything Bond maybe doing and is so unfunny as to be cringe worthy. Sadly, you can take the last sentence and apply it to 85% of this film. The one thing this open got right; it lets us know exactly what we’re in for.
entire film unfolds, which is to say it goes all over the place while standing still. Wouldn’t MI6’s equestrian expert, one who can quickly get himself and Bond an invite to this exclusive auction, have known about said event? This means Bond traveled all the way to Paris for nothing. Well, not nothing. If he didn’t go to Paris we wouldn’t get the fishing hook murder, the Eiffel Tower base jump, or the split car case scene. And why the hell do we care about the horse racing mystery in the first place? This is a very long walk away from that whole Russian’s steeling microchips thing that got 003 killed wouldn’t you say?
British secrete service … license to kill … extremely dangerous; Walken puts forth a little snort and giggle as if he can’t believe his good fortune to have been matched with such a skilled adversary. He has one more scene with Grace Jones that is note worthy but that’s kind of it. Much hay is made about Walken being the first Oscar winner (Best Supporting Actor for Deer Hunter) to play a Bond villain but they don’t do much with him and his talents are pretty much wasted. Perhaps because of Max’s ridiculous back-story, the writers had no idea who Zorin was or what to do with him. I’m sure Walken had no clue. It’s just one more missed opportunity in a film chock full of em.
Villain’s Coolest Accessory/ Trait: You mean besides being a steroid pumped, psychotic, KGB, capitalist, Jewish, billionaire, jockey? Well, I’d go with the hair. That blond dye job just screams “I’m crazy!” If you saw this hair on the subway, you would think “that’s something,” and then say something. The other interesting thing about old Max is he has more gadgets then Bond. He retrofit his 17th century stables with a huge cargo lift; good for transporting horses underground to conduct steroid experiments in private. The way the drug gets into the horse is thanks to an implant that holds the drug until it’s administered by the push of a button hidden a jockey’s whip or a gentleman’s cane. You would think the two devices would be able to talk to each other via a simple radio wave an you’d be correct, but somehow a microchip is involved and waalaa, the horses and Silicon Valley are connected. Weak sauce. Zorin, mad genius that he is, had the forethought to rig his steeple chase course with gates that can be raised and lower at the push of button in case, say, he’s ever on the course and being chased by a British agent. Zorin also has a camera hidden behind a gorgeous mirror in his office. This camera is hooked up to a device with advance face recognition software that reminds us how cool it is when stuff in Bond movies that seemed outlandish is commonplace 25 years later. Much ink has been spilled pointing out how similar Zorin and Auric Goldfinger’s plot for taking over the world are but I see the two as kindred sprits when it comes to large three-dimensional maps. Both baddies just can’t wait to get a room full of men to watch as they pull the maps out of the floor and dramatically spell out their plans for world domination. In fact, both men as so proud of these maps that if someone in the room doesn’t care for the presentation, they are killed off immediately; Goldfinger’s detractor in a industrial car compactor, Zorin’s by being dropped from a blimp via a trick staircase. The blimp itself is quite a nifty gadget that when deflated can look just like a run-of-the-mill-motor-home and with one push of a button becomes a high speed air-to-ground kidnapping device.
over the top and leading to this moment. The graphic slaughter in the first act of Saving Private Ryan (1997) brings home the horrors of D-Day and in a larger scene, war. Seeing Zorin kill hundreds by drowning and shooting has zero value and is beyond gratuitous. It draws attention to itself for all the wrong reasons because it has no context within the film and even less in the James Bond canon at large. It doesn’t even add to Zorin’s badassness, it’s just shoves more garbage into this ass bad film.
Not because helium is flammable you see (it’s not) but because it a bad idea to fumble dynamite when your in a enclosed container a few hundred feet off the ground. Lastly there is Scarpine who besides having a neato scar, looking like a soccer hooligan, and shooting up rooms full of men really serves no purpose.
Bond Girl’s Name: Stacey Sutton. What? We go from Octopussy to Stacey Sutton. There’s not middle ground here folks? As we discussed above, she took over an oil company from dear old granddad, studied geology in college and then…Zorin! Despite her credentials she spends the entire film saying the most moronic things and is not one bit of help in cracking the case. When she isn’t talking she’s simply a girl on Bonds arm and not the sexiest one at that. With her blond feathered hair she looks like every girl I went to school with in the 1986 or every housewife in the greater Milwaukee metro area in 2006. Considering the devastatingly sexy Grace Jones is over on the other side I’d say Bond got the short end of the stick in this adventure.
M: M and his Soviet counterpart, General Gogol get some of the best lines in the film. After briefing Bond on the microchip deal, M looks at the three piece suit sporting 007 and tells him to “get properly dressed.” A funny line because he his always so. General Gogol gets to yell at Zorin “nobody leaves the KGB!” and also gets the biggest laugh in the film. After all is said and done and Bond is still thought to be dead, Gogol shows up at Universal Exports to present “The Order of Lenin for Comrade Bond. The first time ever awarded to a non-Soviet citizen.” M seems perplexed “I would think the KGB would applaud the destruction of Silicon Valley?” “On the contrary Admiral” the giggle Gogol responds “where would Russian research be without it.” This is funny, and we could have cut to Bond in the bath here keeping Moneypenny out of it. There is also the MI6 equestrian expert Sir Godfrey Tibbett who is an interesting enough character and presents a good comic foil for Moore. And for the record, when he was running around the stables at night in a black leather jacket I was reminded of John Belushi sneaking around campus in Animal House (1978).
Felix Leiter: Having given up on Felix after his rather sold performance in Live and Let Die the CIA sent Chuck Lee who was played by David “I go first Indy” Yip of Temple of Doom (1984) fame. Since it’s not Felix we can assume the CIA agent will serve the same purpose as a red shirt on an USS Enterprise away team and sure enough poor old Lee gets it before we really got to know him. As always, the rules from Zombieland (2009) are wise to keep in mind at all times and not just during the end of days. After all, if Lee followed rule # 31 (Check the back seat) he would still be with us today. And that goes double for Sir Godfrey Tibbett.
Bond Timepiece: None which is better than the digital crap we’ve dealt with the last few films.
Every story point, location, character, line of dialog, costume, etc. etc is a choice. And then within those choices there are hundreds of more choices made by hundreds of very talent people working very hard to put out a film that they will be proud of and that audiences will enjoy. I have such appreciation for everything these craftsmen and women do. Added to which I have a nearly bottomless reservoir of good will for James Bond. I’m willing to overlook a lot, especially when everyone involved is working to get it right. But here, the entire crew just made bad, lazy, and all together wrong choices across the board. It gives me no pleasure to rip this thing up, but ripped up it must be. Octopussy may have been lacking on the plot front but it was fun as hell and everyone involved seemed to be having a blast. A View to a Kill is dreary drudgery that’s as much fun as the debt ceiling debates. No one involved seems to give a toss, almost like they are punching the time clock and looking forward to time off. Let’s just stick Bond on the screen, have him do something outrageous, and call it a day. The audience will feast on anything we feed ‘em. How else can you explain a movie where a cat food bowl with “pussy” written on it passes as wit? And I didn’t even get into the fifteen minutes of painful keystone cops antics. It was right about the point when half a dozen cop cars were falling off a rising draw bridge that I called bullshit on the entire affair. I simply gave up. Why not? 
The crew gave up on this puppy long before I did. Grace Jones is the only one even trying and she got labeled a diva for her efforts. When I finally got done watching I felt duped, cheated, like a sucker. “Step right up, step right up, see the most famous action hero of all time James Bond….” Only Roger Moore was right, this was not James Bond. It’s truly a bummer that this is how Moore and Maxwell leave the stage. By the end of the film, I got the feeling that even Glen and crew knew they had a clunker on their hands. For the first time ever, the end credits don’t give us the title of the next Bond movie, they simply promise “James Bond Will Return.” Well, that’s good news. He sure as hell wasn’t here for this crap fest. I truly hoped I would never have to issue this rating at Blog, James Blog but A View to a Kill earned every last drop.
Title: Octopussy
Film Length: 2 Hours 11 minutes
throws everything he’s got up onto the screen, including the kitchen sink. As you’d expect, some of it sticks, some of it doesn’t, but man it’s exciting to watch. The movie is fast. At one point, Bond is involved in a pedicab chase through the streets of India and a crowd has gathered to watch. They look left to right and back again in unison, as if watching a tennis match. It’s the perfect metaphor for the film audience. As Bond is thrust from one action set piece to the next, we crane our necks to keep up. But this is not a modern slash and burn, shaky cam sense of speed. As he always has, Glen proves himself to be a master at assembling action sequence. I was planning on dissecting one of these scenes, the fight in Octopussy bedroom, but after three pages I realized I’m not teaching Film 101 at the local county college. Lets just say the editing, pacing, and camera angles always keep us in the moment and establish a true sense of space so we feel as if we are able to understand exactly who is where doing what to whom. This is no small thing and it’s such a treat to see action sequences that are not just story boarded but crafted with love and logic. It’s so rare to see this in action films today that the whole thing seems almost quant. Add the fact that as early as 1983 directors knew their movies were going to get killed by pan and scan when converted to the 3 by 4 ratio of home video releases and many filmmakers just gave up trying to use the full screen and proper editing to tell a story. I always think of Armageddon (1998) when it comes to an easy illustration of how not to make an action sequence. I know the movie is crazy old by now but I always return to it because it was the first time I remember literally throwing my hands up while sitting in a theater. I challenge anyone to tell me who is doing what where for the entire finally 1/3 of that film. It’s like a game of 52 pick-up, just throw images at the audience and leave it to them to sort through and make sense of it. That not a movie, it’s an assault on the eyes and brain. But I digress. The point being, Glen cares and even gives Bond fans a bunch of winks and inside jokes. We get a pidgin flying out of a window to startle Bond while he scaling a wall, much like the pidgin did when he was climbing the cliff in the previous film (I saw an interview with Glen at some point where he said he tried to get a shot of a pidgin into all his films, like a trademark akin to Hitchcock appearing in all his films. Something to keep an eye out for going forward.) We get the guy seeing an impossible Bond stunt who then stares at his bottle gag. There are reference to classic Connery moments like the eyeball reflection in Goldfinger (1964), a car on two wheels like Diamonds Are Forever (1971), Octopussy leads a circus of woman performers much like Pussy Galore lead a flying circus of female pilots, (why must women have “pussy” as part of their name to have authority in these films?) and while there is not a fist fight in a sleeping car, we do get a classic and super exciting train battle. Glen even gets meta; when Bond arrives in India, he identifies his contact, disguised as a snake charmer, when he hears the notes to the James Bond Theme played on the flute. “That’s a charming tune.”
Reported Budget: $27,500,000 (estimated) $4 million of which went directly into Moore’s pocket which I suspect EON saw as a bargain considering the 1983 release landscape. At twenty-one years old, Bond was no longer the “A game” in town. I’ve never seen anything to confirm this, but I would wager Broccoli was wise enough to know he wasn’t in the same league as Return of the Jedi (1983). Likewise, he wasn’t going after the same 13-year-old girl audience as Flashdance (1983) (the first Simpson/Bruckheimer mega-production.) However, there was one film hitting theaters that was directly in Broccoli’s crosshairs. It was imperative, from both a business and personal standpoint, that this one particular Warner Bothers release be demolished by Octopussy critically and more importantly at the box-office. While Broccoli was courting Brolin, he had to have known that in order to win this battle, Roger Moore was essential. Cubby needed a familiar face in the role of Bond, since the man who invented Bond for the big screen was once again going to don a hairpiece and play 007. Way back in 1965 Kevin McClory co-produced Thunderball (1965) and somehow, someway got his hands on the rights to make a “sequel” with license to use the Bonds character. EON and UA have always guarded the rights to Bond more tightly then FOX News guards the GOP and Broccoli sued for copyright infringement. This lead to years of legal battles that ended up, among other things, holding up The Spy Who Loved Me for years and sucking up millions in legal fees, almost sinking Broccoli right around the time the was putting more money into Moonraker (1979) than any other Bond film. Finally, by 1983 EON had lost and McClory paid a kings ransom to Sean Connery to reprise the role of James Bond in the aptly titled Never Say Never Again(1983).
Why is there an equestrian event happening in spiting distance of this top secrete military hanger? Shut-up and watch the movie kid. Act II, our hero tied up in the back of jeep, surrounded by men with guns. Escape is impossible, but what is that? Here comes the lady driving a convertible with a horse trailer hitched to it. A convertible sports car with a trailer hitch you ask and I again ask you to lay off any and all questions regarding horses, OK? The lady pulls up next to the jeep, shows a little leg, and catches the eye of the two men charged with guarding Bond. A quick move by our hero and the two guys are up in the air, their parachutes having been deployed and pulling them off the back of the jeep. Safely in the car with the lady Bond then forces the jeep off the road and into a chicken coop. I found it interesting that Bond let all four of these men live, perhaps out of respect for fellow oglers of woman. Bond kisses his rescuer, telling her “Ill see you in Miami” which I assume is coded “spy speak” for we will fornicate when I get to Florida. End Act II. Having been rescued, Act III is about completing the mission that was foiled so long ago back in Act I. The horse’s ass in the trailer rises and out shoots Bond in a single-seat spitfire of plane known in aviation circles as the Acrostar BD-5. As soon as Bond is airborne he sees a heat-seeking missile in his “objects are closer than they appear” rearview mirror. Three years before Maverick, Goose and the Ice Man would rip-up the friendly skies with F-16’s (not to mention melt hearts with karaoke renditions of Righteous Brothers tunes) Bond was flying under bridges and over clouds in simply breathtaking aerial shots as the missile bears down on him. This would cause panic in a mere mortal but Bond sees an opportunity to turn sidewinders into lemon-aid. That is, after all, why he gets paid the homerun money. In a stunning move that makes the helicopter-in-the-warehouse trick from the last film look like amateur hour, Bond barnstorms the hanger and bursts out the back door, sending the missile into his original target to kill two birds with one stone; he evaded the missile while destroying the original target. As the building explodes in an incredible ball of flame behind him, Bond flies off into the sunset, and scene, But wait, a coda! The jet is low on fuel. Bond makes an emergence landing on country road and comes to a stop directly in front of a gas station. Setting the humorous light-hearted tone for the rest of film, Moore waits a beat, looks at the attendant, and smirks. “Filler up please.” This high octane set piece, by far the most jam packed and, one would assume, expensive Bond open, was actually scripted for Moonraker. However, it had to be shelved due to lack of funds, partly because of the big bucks space station set at the end of the film but also because the money originally set aside for the sequence ended up going to legal bills to pay for the battle with Kevin McClory. It’s ironic (don’t you think?) that just like Bond got a twofer in his escape/competition of the mission with his single barnstorm move, the barnstorm open was implemented by EON to take on whatever McClory came up with to open his Bond film after being shelved four years earlier because of McCloy’s film.
scenery, he vomits it back out and dances a jig on the remains. When his plan for world donation is shot down by the “old men who lack vision” he retunes to his chair to sulk like a three year-old who was told to go to bed without dessert. That is, until he decides to take things into his own hands Whaaa-haaaa ha ha ha ha! Orlov is by far the most fun and over the top Bond villain in some time and I wish he had a larger role. The fact the he and Bond only have one fleeting scene together is tragedy.
Villain’s Lair: Two of the three baddies get their own Indian palaces, neither of which would look out of place sitting next to the Bellagio on Las Vegas Boulevard. The pool at Octopussy’s floating palace has more hot chicks lounging around it than Rehab the Hard Rock on a Friday night. The spacious rooms, the floor to ceiling windows, the endless balconies and the perfectly appointed furnishings and are all out of a storybook but are also grounded in reality as many of the sets in the past few Bonds have been. She also has a bitchin private train car that comes complete with a masseuse. Kamal has the Monsoon Palace which sits high above the city and is equally impressive, thought the talent level in the female department is far below the high standard set in the house across town. Orlov on the other hand seems to never be out of his uniform and exists only in war rooms and shady underground forger workshops.
Villain’s Asides/ Henchmen: All the asides in this film are thinner than one dimensional and distinguishable from other characters thanks to (a) a signature uniform and (b) a signature action. We’ve got the evil knife tossing twins Tomax and Xamot AKA Mischka and Grischka who loomed very large in my memory of this film but in reality spend very little time on screen. These two use more hairspray than any Bond girl and work for … I don’t know exactly. They do a blind folded knife throwing act in Octopussy’s circus, they dutifully kill 009 but they take orders from both Kamal and Orlov so it’s unclear who wanted the agent offed in the first place. Gobinda on the other hand is firmly in Kamal’s corner. The physical heavy to Kamal’s intellectual baddie, he’s kind of a turban sporting Jaws who’s able to crush dice with his bare hands and has expert balance whether navigating the exterior of a speeding train or a spinning plane. For her part Octopussy surrounds herself with nothing but woman, “runaway’s mostly,” and trains them in the ancient arts of smuggling, circus acrobatics, and sieging Indian Palaces like an Orc army at Helms Deep. This bevy of beauties dress in form fitting red jumpsuits reminiscent of Dr. Suisse’s Thing 1 and Thing 2.
is approached by the maitre d’. “Your table is ready.” “I didn’t reserve one…” “Your guest is waiting.” When Bond approached the table, he finds Magda who thanks to some unfortunate framing appears to have her breast resting in two water glasses. When Bond sits down he does not engage in the typical song and dance but cuts right to the nut. “What does Kamal want?” “The egg or your life.” At this very moment, both parties know they will be sleeping together later in the evening, and that by morning the egg will be in Kamal’s hands. The rest is simply going through the motions but what the hell, we’re here, the moonlight is beautiful, and the wine aint so bad either. I really enjoyed how Moore and Wayborn handled this scene, the unspoken understand was broadcast expertly. One more note about these ladies; other than the panic upon learning a nuclear bomb is 10 second away from going off, neither of these Bond girls is ever in the thankless role of the victim. They kick ass in a fight, stand up to the men, and yes, Octopussy must be saved by Bond in the end, but she never comes across as a damsel in distress. She plays the scene more like a partner that needs to be bailed out this time, and then she will have her partners back the next round. As my Great Uncle King would have said, “I like those gals, they’ve got spunk.”
Bond Girls Best Pick-up Line: Bond “What is that?” Magda “That’s my little Octopussy.” They are talking about her tattoo.
someone? This would be like Wolverine sucking in his claws and shooting his opponent with a ray gun. It’s completely out of character. Anyway, Bond and Gobinda end up fighting on top of a Lear jet at 25,000 feet. Don’t worry, it makes no sense in the film either. Bond grabs the antenna on top of the plane and pulls it back, lets it go, and smacks Gobinda in the face, sending him hurling into the mountains below. Bond also had the forethought to cut the fuel line while monkeying around out on the plane’s wing so Kamal, the pilot, crashes the plane into the side of a mountain. Action sequences are Glen’s bread and butter and almost every one in this movie is expertly crafted, very exciting, and quite memorable, save one.
and save the great man his dignity? Things improve as Q once again goes out into the field, this time serving as a lookout for Bond. During this assignment, Q is lucky to dodge a bullet, or should I say Black n Decker yo-yo, that fell his counterpart. (More on that below) By the end of the film, Q is simply jubilant. He gets to pilot a balloon into the middle of a battle. Bond “I trust you can handle this contraption Q?” Q “It goes on hot air.” Bond “Oh, then you can.” And then when the balloon lands, Q is surround by Octopussy’s harem and even gets a little flirting time for good measure. See, it’s not just Bond who has all the fun.
Felix Leiter: Ladies and gentlemen, if you will please direct your attention to your program. For tonight’s performance the part of Felix Leiter will be played by Vijay who is played by Vijay Amritraj. Amritraj joins us while on break from the pro tennis circuit for this, his first appearance film. Producers use the casting stunt as another opportunity to get meta. Vijay’s character, Vijay, is an agent who’s cover is working as a tennis pro at Kamal’s private club “What have you learned so far?” Bond asks, “Well, my back hand has improved.” He even assaults a baddie by whacking him with a racket. Compare to Felix “the wet blanket” Leiter, Vijay is the life of the party. When he and Bond are being chased James announces, “I think we have company.” “No problem” Vijay responds “this is a company car.” In fact, “no problem” is Vijay’s mantra. If Bond asked for the moon Vijay would smile, say “No Problem” and promptly go about getting the moon. He’s a perfect sidekick to Bond and the two function almost like partners in a buddy-cop film. However, this is a partnership not meant to last. Poor old Vijay was taking over watchman duties from Q when he is grabbed and restrained by three men. A fourth, none other than Kamal’s right hand Gobinda, appears above him, staring down with those piercing eyes. Even worse for Vijay, he’s yielding the deadly saw blade yo-yo. A quick flick of the wrist, a horrible “snicked” sound, and a quick cut to birds flying out of a tree and we know that Vijay is no more. Game, set, match.
Best One Liners/Quips: This films chuck full of ‘em. “No ma’am, I’m with the economy tour,” “Having problems keeping it up Q,” “You better stick this back yourself” and even a perfectly time “umffff” when Bond is hiding in a body bag hoping to pass as a cadaver. But my favorite has to be when Bond comes across a tiger in jungle. The thing jumps out in front of Bond causing even the great 007 much concern. The look on Moore’s face is a perfect blend of fear, of shock, of annoyance, and of what the hell do I do next. Bond squares to the giant cat and though clinched teeth his hisses “SITTTTTTT – A!” and the tiger promptly obeys.
Number of Drinks 007 Consumes: 3. Bond’s evening with Magda starts with champagne pool side and ends with “a loving cup” in bed. When 007 breaks into Octopussy’s room she shakes and serves a martini before Bond even makes the request.
puts on the white tux when it’s time to carouse the casino floor. Our hero finds Kamal playing with the Major, who at present has the upper hand and giddily announces “you’ll have a job beating that.” “I feel lucky” the slippery Kamal counters “shall we double?” The Major takes half a beat, thinks his opponent mad, and agrees to 20,000 rubies. Kamal promptly hits his sixes to win the game. “It’s all in the wrist” he announces not knowing Bond spotted him introducing dirty dice into the game. “Shall we have another go?” “Yes” the Major replies “you luck has got to run out sometime.” (It should also be noted the Major is into Kamal for 200,000 rubies.) In short order the Major has once again backed Kamal into a corner and once again the prince wants to make it interesting, this time to the tune of 100,000 rubies. The Major feels his testicles crawl back into his inguinal canal and forfeits the game. “I can’t accept, not with your luck.” “I would have taken that double myself” Bond announces in one of his better introductions to a villain. Kamal, in black, arches his eyebrow and gestures to the empty seat across the table. “Why don’t you take the Majors position Mister ….” “Bond, James Bond. Thank you I’d be delighted” say Moore with a shit-eaten grin on his face screaming Ohhhhhh, you are going down BITCH! Game on. Have I mentioned I love when Bond gambles? Right, so the hero in white, the villain in black, the villain thinking he’s got this thing cinched with his loaded dice and the hero well aware the villain is cheating. Sitting back in his chair looking like a man who knows he can’t lose, Kamal casually rolls his double six. “It’s not such a good double to accept after all.” Bond does a little Hollywooding and swallows hard before picking up the betting cube to double. Kamal, not quite believing someone could be such a rube accepts. “You can only win with a double six. The stake is 200,000 rubies, do you have the cash?” Everything leading up this moment has been coming up Kamal, so when Bond places the very same Fabergé egg that Kamal had won at auction on the table as collateral, well… it’s the Gillette game changer and everyone in the room knows it. Kamal, for his part, keeps his poker face completely intact. “Play Mr. Bond, you need a great deal of luck to get out of this” states the cocky Kamal in a drastic overplay of his hand. Bond, who was shaking his own tumbler and about to roll dramatically stops and looks around until focusing on Kamal. “Luck? Well then I shall use player’s privilege and use your lucky dice.” And with that he grabs Kamal’s tumbler. The two lock eyes as Bond starts his roll. “It’s all in the wrist” Bond says without a hint of sarcasm and rolls. While never breaking eye contact with Kamal to look at the dice Bond announces “double sixes, fancy that, 200,000 rubies.” By this time half the population of India has gathered around the table so Kamal has no chose but to pay the man. He gestures for his checkbook when Bond pipes up “I prefer cash.” “Spend the money quickly Mr. Bond” and with that the gauntlet has been thrown down. As Bond leaves the table he passes the giggling Major and declares “It’s not really in the wrist you know.” A complete and utter take down on all fronts; never has there been such a decimation of an opponent. Any other man who received such a shellacking 
would slink home, crawl into a bottle of Jim Beam, and never go within 10 miles of a casino for the rest of his life. Kamal, however, is arrogant enough to think this is simply a bump in the road and continues to plow ahead like the Titanic in the northern Atlantic.
Bonds Special Abilities Displayed: You get the feeling that if Bond walked into M’s office and the boss man asked “What do you know about Babe Ruth 007?” Bond would cock his brow and respond “The sultan of swat sir? Born in Baltimore, George Herman Ruth Jr. started his Major League career pitching for the Red Sox where he threw seventeen innings including a Game 1 shutout for an ERA of 1.06 in the 1918 World Series before being sold to the Yankees where the three time MVP shifted to right field and hit .349 while slugging an unheard of .711 in twelve seasons to become what many consider the best to ever play the game. Hence the so called ‘Curse of the Bambino’ which wasn’t broken until Boston swept St. Louis in four on October 27th 2004. Why do you ask?” Well, that’s what he does in Octopussy but with Fabergé eggs. “Top marks 007!” He also manages to (deep breath) use slight of hand to steel an item from Sotherby’s, balance Spiderman like on the sides of buildings, avoid death while being hunted by an entire village not only from the men but also spiders, crocks, snakes, leaches, lizards and one big tiger, impersonated a dead man, a clown and gorilla, hang Spiderman like on the side of a speeding train, steal a car, break onto an army base, disarm a nuclear bomb, hang Spiderman like on a Lear jet, make love while in traction, and book a flight to Delhi before it is even official he is going. It’s this last thing that truly makes Bond Bond; he is always, without exception, one step ahead of everyone else. This is to say nothing of Bonds every growing list of stuff he can pilot, sail, operate, jockey and drive from point A to point B. In The Man with the Golden Gun we saw Bond
