Goldeneye (1995)

There is a distinct sense with Goldeneye, even more so than in For Your Eyes Only and Licence to Kill, that the filmmakers are declaring quite emphatically, “All right, enough kidding around, here’s your James Bond for the modern era.”  Third time’s a charm – Goldeneye is an unqualified success, arguably one of the better Bond films in the franchise.

In a distinctly post-Soviet era, James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) finds himself butting heads with the new M (Judi Dench) while the Janus syndicate steals military-grade weaponry as part of a revenge plot undertaken against Britain by Alec Trevelyan (Sean Bean) and the lethal Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen).  But for Bond, this one is personal – Trevelyan was once his partner, the presumed dead 006.

Nearly everything about this film screams “New Direction,” and looking back on it I’m finding it difficult to say bad things about it.  You know I like to get the bad news out of the way first – and I don’t want to call Goldeneye a perfect movie just yet, because as good as it is it still isn’t that distillation of quintessential Bond that Goldfinger was – but there’s really not bad news to be given here, other than perhaps the fact that the soundtrack is a little dated, a very clear artifact of the mid-90s action movie boom.

But other than that, it’s a rousing smash of a film, exuberantly entertaining and all in a very rightly earned show-offy kind of way.  It reinvents a number of wheels, most successfully the arrival of a female M, played brilliantly by Judi Dench.  Dench brings all that classic Judi Dench-y quality, for lack of a better term – she’s spirited and confident, taking none of Bond’s chauvinistic attitude and even turning it around on him in one of the more memorable speeches in the franchise.

Bond himself gets a new coat of paint here, and I’m not just referring to the new lead actor.  Brosnan is impeccable in his first outing as Bond, completely nailing a more human characterization without sacrificing any of the secret agent’s notable tongue-in-cheek nature.  Indeed, Brosnan finds a fantastic middle ground between Timothy Dalton’s sturm and Roger Moore’s drag, ladling on the innuendo without feeling like he’s breaking character to do so.

The most remarkable thing about Goldeneye is the quality of action setpieces, which could make or break a Bond film.  Fortunately, the ones in Goldeneye are all memorable, very entertaining, and most importantly relevant to the plot.  Director Martin Campbell makes these scenes very personal, keeping the camera tight in and snapping out for perspective; the fact that there’s little digital fakery only makes the film more appealing.  Easily the standout sequence is the chase through St. Petersburg, in which the villain drives a getaway car while Bond pursues in a tank.  It’s an idea that doesn’t work on paper, but it’s executed in a very clever way that never gives a campy wink to the audience about the sheer impossibility of the feat.  Instead, we’re allowed to revel in the sheer fun of it, right down to the beat when Bond straightens his tie.

It’s a moment that tells us so much about Brosnan’s Bond.  He’s able to do insanely cool things and look damned good while doing them.  It’s an apt way to describe Goldeneye itself, because it is one of the best Bond films in the canon, certainly the best in a long while in the history of this review series.  Bond really is back, and golly are we glad to have him.

Goldeneye is rated PG-13 for “a number of sequences of action/violence, and for some sexuality.”  By this point, we know what to expect from a James Bond movie – lots of explosions and gunfire, mostly bloodless.  Bond beds three women, and the villain makes leering remarks at one of them; the lead female villain kills men with her thighs, and Bond nearly kills the audience with some really heavy innuendoes.

James Bond and The Cinema King will return in a review of Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) on July 7, 2014!