For many of us James Bond has been a constant. For more than 50 years a series of actors have taken on the role over the course of twenty-four officially sanctioned movies. He has been, by times a killer, a clown, a lover, a sinner and a saint. In “Spectre,” the latest edition of the Bond Follies, he is all those things and more.
The new film opens just days after the events of “Skyfall.” M (Judy Dench), Bond’s boss and confident, has been killed and 007 (Daniel Craig) is fulfilling her last request. He’s in Mexico City (just the first of many exotic locations in “Spectre’s” travelogue) to assassinate an Italian mobster through a crowded Dia De Los Muertos parade. It’s a wild scene—involving thousands of extras, helicopters, exploding building and a serious fall broken by a well-placed sofa—that sets the tone for the rest of the film; Big, loud and slightly silly.
Information gathered from the mobster’s widow (Monica Bellucci) leads Bond to Rome and a meeting of the super-duper, top-secret terrorist organization SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion) led by evil genius Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz).
Back in London the new M (Ralph Fiennes) is defending the 007 program from C (Andrew Scott), a bureaucrat who snidely says, “We’re going to bring British intelligence out of the dark ages and into the light.” In other words, on-the-ground agents and their licences to kill are about to be replaced with drones and high tech surveillance and security. The plan is to unite the defence systems of the world and dispense with Bond’s human touch.
Meanwhile Bond is still globetrotting, now with Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) on his handsomely tailored arm. She’s the daughter of a former SPECTRE member and just might hold the key to infiltrating the organization.
“Spectre” is worth a look for the scenery alone, and no, I don’t just mean Daniel Craig’s Tom Ford suits or Monica Bellucci’s jewels. From Rome to Tangiers to Mexico City and beyond the movie is a parade of beautifully shot tourism brochure-ready landscapes.
The stuff that happens in front of those landscapes is worth a look too. Director Sam Mendes keeps the pedal to the metal, tossing out implausible plot twists and action scenes with great regularity. City blocks blow up, airplanes chase automobiles and, of course, the classic ticking bomb makes an appearance. As usual the body count is high and there’s even a wild areal fight sequence before no more than four lines of dialogue have been spoken.
There’s all that and a lighter tone then the other Craig Bonds. The grim-faced 007 has been replaced by a slightly-less grim faced Bond. Craig isn’t channelling Roger Moore or anything quite so broad, but there are laugh out loud moments as “Spectre” simultaneously plays up to and satirizes Bond stereotypes. In one scene Dr. Swann and Bond fall into a surprise embrace. In any other Bond movie they would kiss and tumble into bed. Here she says, “Don’t think for a moment this is where I fall into your arms,” effectively satirizing the Bond as lady-killer stereotype and making strides for Bond Girls everywhere.
Too bad there’s no such reinvention of the Bond villain. As Oberhauser Christoph Waltz is a bit of a dud. His backstory is interesting and he certainly has evil intent, but he comes across here more as a bully than a supervillain. Waltz doesn’t come close to the menace he brought to “Inglourious Basterds’” Col. Hans Landa. He’s barely in the film but casts a long shadow… a long shadow that could have been much darker.
If there is a message in “Spectre” it has to do with new versus old. C represents a dangerous future where drones and surveillance put enemies at arm’s length. M and Bond represent tradition, a more gentlemanly form of killing where you have to look into the eyes of the person you’re about to off. It seems to be asking if James Bond is of the past, a dinosaur. I’d say no, not as long as the 007 movies are as entertaining as this one.
Richard reviews “Fifty Shades of Frey,” “Kinsmen: the Secret Service,” “The Last Five Years” and “What We Do in the Shadows” with “Canada AM” host Marci Ien.
Like a violent “My Fair Lady,” “Kingsman: The Secret Service” takes a guy from the wrong side of the tracks and transforms him into a Kingsman Tailor. They are a super spy organization with manners that would make Henry Higgins proud and gadgets that James Bond would envy.
Harry Hart (Colin Firth) is a Kingman, codename Galahad. He’s a dapper Dan and a dangerous man who takes rebellious teenager Eggsy (Taron Egerton) under his wing, in part to repay a debt owed to the boy’s father, in part to groom him to join the organization.
The Kingsman are the modern day knights; their finely tailored suits are their armour. If Eggsy makes it through “the most dangerous job interview in the world” he will adopt the name Lancelot and take his place in a glamorous and dangerous 007ish world of intrigue.
While Eggsy is in training Galahad is investigating the interesting case of internet billionaire Richmond Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson)—imagine a more malevolent Bill Gates or Steve Jobs with aspirations of world domination… oh wait….—and his evil plot to save the world by destroying it and starting again.
At one point Galahad says, “Give me a farfetched theatrical plot any day,” and director Matthew “Kick-Ass” Vaughn grants that wish. Working from a 2012 spy comic book series written by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons, the director has embraced the story’s absurdity, delivering a demented movie that is at once an homage to James Bond and his ilk and a satire of spy movies.
Then idea of the gentleman spy is played out to the nth degree—a proper Kingsman even has his own martini, gin, stirred for ten seconds while glancing at an unopened bottle of vermouth—but this isn’t a genteel movie. Ultraviolent—one frenetic fight scene makes the shooting, stabbing, punching and impaling of the bloody “Walking Dead” look like “My Fair Lady”—and raunchy—a smirky sex joke at the end would make even James Bond raise an eyebrow—“Kingsman: The Secret Service” pushes the limits, and is as extreme as it is entertaining.
Vaughn clearly has franchise hopes here and lays a good foundation despite some lapses in taste, but it is difficult to see how much more he can push the envelope before even the not-easily-shocked Galahad might think it was too farfetched.
“The November Man,” a new spy thriller starring Pierce Brosnan, has some James Bondian elements. There’s Olga Kurylenko, who was the Bond girl in “Quantum of Solace,” loads of intrigue and exotic locations. What makes this character different from Brosnan’s Bond are the gadgets. There aren’t any. The only gadgets he has here are two fists and a gun.
Brosnan plays Peter Devereaux, a violent CIA agent nick named the November Man, because once he passes through, nothing lives. He’s given up his lethal ways, and now enjoys a quiet retirement in Switzerland. When the proverbial one last job— extracting his former wife out of a sticky situation in Belgrade—goes wrong, he gets embroiled in a case that sees him protecting a witness Alice Fournier (Kurylenko) who could bring down the next president of Russia and dodging bullets from his former CIA protégé David Mason (Luke Bracey).
Based on Bill Granger’s novel “There are No Spies” from the bestselling November Man book series, the movie begins as a taut thriller but soon turns from perfectly functional espionage story to a messy tale of personal grudges and unresolved daddy issues.
The story splinters off in several directions, making perhaps one too many u-turns along the way, but ultimately succeeds because Brosnan brings the Bond. Sure, it’s more the violent Daniel Craig style 007, but it’s great fun to see the actor back in action man mode.
He punches, shoots and kicks his way through the movie, even when the story threatens to overpower him.
Director Roger Donaldson (“The Bank Job,” “No Way Out”) stages several exciting chase scenes and builds tension and even develops some subtext about the consequences of leading a violent life—“You can be a human or a killer of humans, but you can’t be both.”—but veers off into melodrama every now and again. By the time a bad guy says (NO SPOILERS HERE), “You just doomed us to another decade of conflict,” you could be forgiven for thinking “The November Man” was a cold war thriller parody.
As it is the movie is a somewhat generic thriller buoyed by Brosnan’s badass Bondness.
SYNOPSIS: Ex-Marine Jack Ryan is back on screen after a twelve-year break, but this time he looks like Captain Kirk. As played by Chris Pine (taking over from Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck) CIA field agent Ryan discovers evidence of an upcoming terrorist attack. Leaving his suspicious girlfriend (Kiera Knightley) behind, he is sent to Moscow to continue the investigation by Intelligence boss Agent Harper (Kevin Costner). Dodging bullets and bad guys, he encounters Viktor Cherevin (Kenneth Branagh) an evil businessman with a plot to destabilize the global economy.
Star Ratings:
Richard: 2 Stars
Steve: 2 Stars
Richard: Steve, Shadow Recruit is nothing fancy… and it’s also nothing Clancy. As the first of the Ryan movies not based on a Tom Clancy novel it feels quite generic. There is the usual intrigue and a couple of tense scenes but what the movie doesn’t have is the ear for dialogue of the other Ryan films. When you have a senior CIA agent muttering the line, “This is geopolitics, not couple’s therapy,” it’s hard to know whether this is a satire of spy films or just badly written.
Steve: It certainly wasn’t inspired writing, that’s for sure. I get the feeling the genesis of this film came straight from a money-angling producer who somehow decided to attempt reviving a 12 year old movie character like Jack Ryan would be better business sense than creative endeavor. The problem is, even if you look at the previous incarnations of the CIA operative – he’s pretty indistinct. He’s no James Bond. And vanilla Chris Pine doesn’t add much to that blandness.
RC: True, but I really think that this is a case of a director with no affinity for the material. It’s almost as if the movie was pieced together by people who had seen a lot of spy movies, but didn’t really understand them. Add to that action scenes so frenetically edited it’s often hard to see through the flashes of light on the screen to see who is punching who. A little clarity in those sequences would have gone a long way to make up for the ridiculous dialogue and under developed characters.
SG: Absolutely. I had a hard time making sense of the action sequences since they were filmed with shaky handheld cameras and in what seemed to be extreme close-up. Perhaps filmmaker Kenneth Branagh was focusing less on direction and more on playing the Russian antagonist in the film, which he does effectively enough in spite of the formulaic dialogue. Keira Knightly too, in the pretty unremarkable role of Ryan’s unwitting operative wife is fine – although I’m not sure what her attraction to the part was.
RC: Knightley was fine, but I thought Branagh played Cherevin with all the nuance of a Bond villain. He’s ruthless, flamboyantly accented and super smart. Smart enough to bring down the global economy but not smart enough, apparently, to see through Chris Pine’s terrible drunk act near the climax of the film.
Steve: True enough. And that probably exemplifies this film’s biggest flaw. As much as the action is set at the pace of an over-caffeinated ferret, this thriller is pretty much boilerplate material with any subtle intricacies simplified for the sake of the neatly-capped plot. In the end, it’s a pretty plain spy flick that’s easy to unravel.
In the first five minutes of Quantum of Solace, the twenty-second official James Bond picture and the second to star Daniel Craig in the iconic role, hundreds of bullets are fired, a building is destroyed, a truck totaled and several cars trashed and one blown up in spectacular fashion. By the time the opening credits roll the body count is already in the double digits and any thoughts that first-time Bond director, Mark Monster’s Ball Forster would make a ponderous, slow-moving movie are erased.
The story of Quantum of Solace combines elements of the Jason Bourne movies, Chinatown and, of course Ian Fleming’s novels to create one compelling, but slightly confusing plot line. As we meet Bond (Craig) he is grief stricken from the death of his girlfriend Vesper Lynd. His quest for revenge in her death leads him to Dominic Greene (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’s Mathieu Amalric), CEO of Greene Planet, an environmental company that is actually a front for much more nefarious activities (think John Huston’s character in Chinatown only on a massive scale). Bond’s single-minded search brings him into conflict with his biggest ally—M (Judi Dench)—and brings him an unlikely partner (Olga Kurylenko).
Forster does his best to keep the action moving along at a feverish pace. At 106 minutes this is the shortest ever Bond picture and it flies by in a flash of fists and fast edits. There are Bourne style battle scenes—brutal, up-close-and-personal fist fights—wild chases and huge explosions, nothing exactly new for the Bond franchise, but here is where the film is earning its harshest criticism.
Forster sets up the action scenes nicely, and in several cases pulls off some exciting, breathless work, but too often his sense of screen geography gets away from him and the actors get lost amid the shaky, hand held camera work and frenetic fight choreography. Several times I wondered who was punching who and there is an extended plane chase that is a bit too sloppy to be truly exciting. The sheer spectacle of it all will entertain the eye well enough, but the action doesn’t have the high octane bite it could have had.
Forster is much more at home with the more personal elements of the movie. He keeps the tension in the dangerous character triangle between Bond, his boss M and the villain Dominic as taut as a bowstring. This tension gives us the most conflicted Bond ever.
Torn between his lust for revenge and his duty Bond goes rogue and is more dangerous than ever. Craig, when he’s not performing stunts of daring do—he was injured several times while making the film—is cold, emotionless, a killer who will stop at nothing until his bloodlust is satisfied. This is a much more serious Bond than your father’s 007.
The funny lines and puns of the Moore and Brosnan years have pretty much evaporated, replaced by much darker humor. When M asks Bond about the whereabouts of Mr. Slate, an informant he has just dispatched, he says with no hint of a smile, “Slate was a dead end.” Later M tries to end his killing spree with, “If you could avoid killing every possible lead that would be much appreciated.”
Quantum of Solace is a tough movie, the good guys do bad things and the bad guys do even worse things, and in the end the morality of right and wrong is left twisting in the wind.
Just when it seems like everything that could possibly be written about James Bond and the 23 official movies chronicling his super spy exploits, along comes “Skyfall,” a movie that pays homage to the past, while redefining the future of the franchise.
After a mission in Turkey goes awry, James Bond (Craig) is presumed lost. His boss and mentor M (Judy Dench), declares him deceased, but when a terrorist hacker leads a deadly cyber attack on MI6 headquarters 007 returns to his post, tired, haggard and injured but eager to get back into the spy business.
Retrained—ie: various shots of Craig doing push and chin ups plus a word association game where Bond associates “murder” with “employment”—Bond is sent back into the field to track down the villain behind the attack. His investigation leads him to Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem), a psychotic criminal mastermind in the best Ian Fleming tradition. Except that Silva isn’t interested in a ransom of “one mee-lee-on dollars” or aiding Soviet missile development. No, he wants something more personal and deadly—revenge.
The movie’s tone is established in the opening moments of “Skyfall’s” stylized opening sequence. It’s a psychedelic montage in traditional Bond style, set to a new Adele song that evokes the Bond themes of old—before they started hiring Duran Duran and a-ha to warble the opening numbers—but despite the nod to the history of the series, it feels fresh. A blend of old and new, it shapes the understanding of Bond as an old dog in new times, who, by the end of the film will literally and figuratively blow up the past to ensure the future.
It is the most thematically mature Bond movie yet—even the action sequences are a comment on old versus new, pitting Bond’s street smarts and savvy against Silva’s high-tech machines of destruction. A new Q (Ben Whishaw) spends more time behind a computer keyboard than devising gadgets.
Of course, most of us don’t go to Bond movies looking for subtext. We want a Bond girl, a fight scene or three, at last one cool gadget and a cackling villain.
“Skyfall” delivers on most of that. Bérénice Marlohe and Naomie Harris split Bond girl duties, while Craig battles bad guys, feeding one to a hungry reptile. As for gadgets, director Sam Mendes seems to understand that less is more. “Exploding pens?,” Q says at one point. “We don’t really go in for that anymore.”
As for the villain, Javier Bardem, who doesn’t show up for over an hour, makes a quiet but spectacular entrance, with a speech worthy of the best Bond villain. With wild blonde hair, and an uncharacteristically (for a baddie at least) understated demeanor he oozes Oedipal menace. He is a Bond bad guy for a new generation, and his presence is one of the great pleasures of the movie.
The connection between Bond and M lies at the heart of the film. For the first time their relationship is explored, revealing a deeper connection than has been hinted at in the past. Dench’s performance adds dimension to a relationship that has been taken for granted in previous entries.
A near perfect blend of old and new, “Skyfall” is a heady mix of action and intellect that will leave you shaken and stirred.
Here’s where it all began to fall apart. In 1964’s Goldfinger Sean Connery (the original and uber Bond) zoomed around Fort Knox in a tricked-out Aston-Martin. This car could do it all – it had an ejection seat and other deadly gimmicks – and it became part of 007’s folklore. Perhaps too much. It’s been a long time since the heady days of Swingin’ London when Bond was a rough and tumble action hero who used his wiles to outsmart villains. In the last 38 years the gadgets – beginning with the car – have slowly taken over the franchise. Interchangeable Bonds – from George Lazenby to Roger Moore to Timothy Dalton to the latest incarnation Pierce Brosnan – have become merely the keepers of the doodads. The actor playing Bond doesn’t matter so much as the cool weapons he uses. And so it goes for Die Another Day, probably the most critic proof movie to be released this year. Brosnan is this year’s Bond model, an effective enough master spy, and while he maybe getting a little longer in the tooth, with the help of lots of CG he can still drive an invisible car with panache. He’s no more or less effective than those who have gone before him, and that’s the point. The films, which have now become huge cash cows, aren’t about Dalton or Pierce or whoever (I think Clive Owen would make a good Bond), they’re about spectacle and hubris, with a few corny jokes thrown in to break up the action sequences. The James Bond series has been spoofed so often and so well – Our Man Flint and Austin Powers to name just a couple – that now, 40 years since Dr. No hit the screens that it is hard not to see Die Another Day as a parody. Humor has always been a part of the Bond movies, particularly during the Moore years, but when Brosnan and co-star Halle Berry exchange randy pillow talk it’s not much of a stretch to imagine Austin Powers delivering the same lines. Die Another Day isn’t good and it isn’t bad, it’s just more of the same. The names and faces may change, but the formula remains largely unaltered since Goldfinger. In the latest installment Bond’s boss M tells him, “While you were away, the world changed.” The world might have changed, but Bond hasn’t, he remains the cinema’s most enduring character, and that’s just the way the audience seems to like it.
The much anticipated rebooting of the James Bond franchise is finally in theatres after months of controversy. The unceremonious canning of Pierce Brosnan, who had played the role for the better part of a decade, and the hiring of Daniel Craig, a blonde largely unknown actor, generated hate amongst Bond die-hards. Websites like craignotbond.com—and others with names I can’t repeat here—sprung up all over the net and it seemed like the barrage of bad pre-release publicity might sink the new movie before it even opened in theatres. The Craig-bashing is likely to cease, not only because it is unwarranted, but also because after seeing the movie nay-sayers may fear for their safety.
Craig is an inspired choice to reinvent Bond for a new generation. He’s a good actor—check out his turns in Enduring Love and The Mother—and he’s good looking, but in a more dangerous way than Brosnan or Roger Moore, the slickest of the Bonds. Craig has the looks of a leading man, but is lean and mean, and seems like he could punch you in the mouth and not think too much of it. Not since Sean Connery has a Bond been so volatile.
Craig takes the formerly bloated Bond franchise in a new direction. Gone are the high tech gadgets, the lasers and the pens that contain nuclear bombs. This Bond, built like a muscular British bulldog dispatched bad guys the old-fashioned way—with his hands. In one scene when he is asked how one of his victims died he replies with a wink, “Not well.”
The story, based on the first Bond novel by Ian Flemming, is typical Bond. A series of missions in far-flung corners of the world leads Bond to a high-stakes poker game hosted by an international banker who launders money for terrorists. Bond’s goal is to bankrupt the banker at the poker table so the Secret Service can use financial leverage to get the banker to turn on his terrorist contacts. Along the way there are beautiful girls, exotic locations, a great bad guy who cries blood tears and lots of over-the-top action.
Casino Royale isn’t your father’s Bond. It may, however, be a little closer to your grandfather’s. Sean Connery officially hung up his Bond tuxedo in 1971 (we won’t count Never Say Never Again, the 1983 non-starter) and since then the franchise has drifted, becoming a cartoony, pun spewing vision of the Cold War spy. Craig (with the help of a script by {Paul Haggis) brings the franchise back to its roots. His Bond is a vicious anti-hero who happens to be on the side of right. He is at once the most contemporary of heroes and one of the most old-fashioned. He’s savvy enough to understand the intricacies of the international espionage but primitive enough to use force when necessary.
For many of us James Bond has been a constant. For more than 50 years a series of actors have taken on the role over the course of twenty-four officially sanctioned movies. He has been, by times a killer, a clown, a lover, a sinner and a saint. In “Spectre,” the latest edition of the Bond Follies, he is all those things and more.
