Black Adam (2022)

While DC Comics has been the elder statesman of the publishing world, having virtually invented the superhero genre with Superman in 1938, Marvel Comics positioned itself in the Swingin’ 60s as the scrappy underdog, even as its sales began to outstrip its “Distinguished Competition.” Not so in the world of the box office, where Marvel’s stock continues to rise, raking in the big bucks despite (in this critic’s estimation) creatively lackluster fare of late; DC, meanwhile, has struggled to get its act together, firing then rehiring its flagship director while losing studio heads and repeatedly scrapping and reconfiguring plans for an extended cinematic universe. DC lacks, it would seem, a central creative captain, a Kevin Feige to guide their ships. (The two leading contenders, Zack Snyder and Geoff Johns, have seen their fortunes wax and wane at parent company Warner Brothers.)

 

Has DC Comics found its cinematic savior in Dwayne Johnson? The internet seems to have anointed him so, even if critics are less impressed with his DC debut as the titular Black Adam. What is clear is that Johnson is DC’s most vocal hype man, funneling all his powers from his pro wrestling days, and one wonders if the price of Black Adam’s existence is Johnson’s reliance on his own star power.

 
Johnson stars as Teth-Adam, an ancient champion who fell in battle during the twilight of Kahndaq’s golden age. Centuries later, Teth-Adam is awakened into a world he no longer recognizes, prompting Hawkman (Aldis Hodge) to assemble a new Justice Society to keep the champion in line; he and his old comrade Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan) are joined by newcomers Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell) and Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo), who find that Teth-Adam will be somewhat less than accommodating to the heroes of this world.
 
Fans and insiders have been waiting for this movie since its initial announcement in 2007 – and even before then, ever since the moment that some comics fan first noticed that the Black Adam comic book character looks a bit like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. It’s perhaps another indicator of how much trouble DC has had getting its properties on the big screen. (For context, 2007 was a year before The Dark Knight [and Iron Man] and a year after V for Vendetta, with not much else in the neighborhood.) And for months now, Johnson has been repeating the self-aware catchphrase, now memed into immortality, that “the hierarchy of power in the DC Universe is about to change,” while simultaneously teasing that a showdown between himself and Henry Cavill’s Superman isn’t far off.
 
And so it is impossible to watch Black Adam without being acutely aware of how forcefully insistent Johnson’s own personality has been in the creation and promotion of the film. Consequently, it is never quite Black Adam we see on the screen; it is always Dwayne Johnson picking fights and calling out antagonists, carving out his own franchise and demanding that the audience see him as the bringer of justice and the whetter of appetites. That the film features numerous sequences of bystanders chanting, “Long live the champion!” only furthers my belief that the movie is as much a love letter to Johnson as it is to the character he portrays. 
 
Director Jaume Collet-Serra, late of the uninspiring Jungle Cruise, returns to partner with Johnson, and while this film acquits itself a little more holistically than the theme park adaptation, there is still the sense of disparate parts never quite coalescing into a whole. The Justice Society, for example, boasts a roster of dozens in the source material, yet the film’s version feels cobbled together – quite literally, in an introductory sequence where Hawkman picks his team members with all the enthusiasm of dealing four playing cards from the top of a shuffled deck. Consequently, there’s never a sense that the Justice Society has any sort of an arc, save for Brosnan’s Doctor Fate (maybe); instead, their scenes come off as though Collet-Serra picked four action figures and threw them against his favorite toy. Put another way, you could sub in Wildcat or Stargirl, The Sandman or Liberty Belle, and the effect would be the same, giving the film the kind of careless team dynamic that marked early 2000s superhero films, which treated characters only as trademarked names recognizable to the initiated.
 
Then there’s the continuity detritus that Collet-Serra interposes, ostensibly to elicit a cheer from an audience who recognizes the references. Viola Davis video-chats into the film in a few scenes, suggesting that if the hierarchy of the DC Universe has indeed changed, it’s put her morally ambiguous (yet perfectly cast) Amanda Waller at the top of the heap. Elsewhere, Jennifer Holland reprises her role as Emilia Harcourt, wedding the film firmly to the dismal James Gunn iteration of The Suicide Squad. Meanwhile, Djimon Hounsou appears as the wizard Shazam, reminding audiences that this all started, more or less, with 2019’s Shazam! And while one character’s bedroom is adorned with the recognizable artwork of Jim Lee and Ivan Reis, one figure of note appears in a mid-credits sequence; I won’t spoil it, but it’d be a small miracle if you hadn’t already heard of this.
 
All of this is to say that the film is so distractingly composed to declare, “Don’t worry, we know what we’re doing,” so focused on projecting a corporate confidence, that it never quite finds its own feet as a narrative proper. Callbacks and references do not a shared universe make, nor does the peculiar brand of hero worship we see in Black Adam. Robert Downey Jr. waited until Iron Man 2 to appear alongside a standing ovation for himself; perhaps Johnson might have done better to wait for his sequel before anointing himself ruler, protector, and champion of the DC Universe.
 
Yet if anything sobered my take on Black Adam, it was hearing the little kids leaving the theater behind me, shouting onomatopoeias at each other and assuring one another, “That was awesome!” I know I’ve written a version of that sentence before, acknowledging that I’m getting older and maybe I’ve seen all of this before and grown jaded by it. So if the DC Universe belongs to the next generation, God bless them. And indeed, there were some very solid eyeball kicks to be had in Black Adam – Teth-Adam hurling his enemies into the sky, Atom Smasher enlarging himself and bumping into things, and the special effects bonanza of the film’s climax. It was all quite fine, and if others loved it more, a rising tide lifts all ships in this genre. Roll on, Adam v Whomever; I’m on board for whatever comes next.
 
Black Adam is rated PG-13 for “sequences of strong violence, intense action and some language.” Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra. Written by Adam Sztykiel, Rory Haines, and Sohrab Noshirvani. Based on the DC Comics by Otto Binder and C.C. Beck. Starring Dwayne Johnson, Aldis Hodge, Noah Centineo, Sarah Shahi, Quintessa Swindell, and Pierce Brosnan.

Monday at the Movies - February 1, 2016

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” We haven’t done one of these in a while, but it’s a bit of a dry spell at the box office, and I couldn’t very well review Lego Marvel’s Avengers, could I?

A Long Way Down (2014) – There’s something very British in the idea of making a dark comedy about four people who decide not to commit suicide because they’ve all ended up at the top of the same tall building. The thing is, this adaptation of the Nick Hornby novel struggles to capture the complexity of the characters and, more importantly, never quite figures out whether it wants to be a dark comedy, a sentimental tragicomedy, or a slice-of-life character sketch. Consequently, it comes off very unevenly, failing to navigate the mood swings that Hornby’s text deftly juggled. The good news, however, is that A Long Way Down isn’t unwatchable, and its ensemble cast acquits themselves admirably and compellingly. Pierce Brosnan plays a jaded broadcaster with a criminal record, while Toni Collette is gently heartbreaking as the helpless mother of a disabled son. But it’s Aaron Paul as the disaffected guitarist and Imogen Poots as the spirited Jess who manage to walk off with the film wholesale, spot-on casting from the novel. It’s a shame, though, that these two have the bulk of their characterization stripped in the transition from book to film, such that there’s actually a moment – I kid you not – where Jess asks the rest to sum up their reason for suicide in one word. The internal monologue from the novel was much richer, but as cinematic adaptations go A Long Way Down isn’t a catastrophe. It’s a pleasant enough diversion, and at ninety-six minutes it has the good sense not to overstay its welcome.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

The James Bond Countdown

Welcome back to the ostensible finale of the two-year Double-Oh-Seventh celebration of the James Bond franchise.

What a time for it, too, with Thursday’s announcement that “Bond 24” will be entitled Spectre (release date October 23, 2015 – so expect our review on October 26).  The title has such delightfully ominous associations in the world of 007.  The official plot synopsis:

A cryptic message from Bond’s past sends him on a trail to uncover a sinister organisation. While M battles political forces to keep the secret service alive, Bond peels back the layers of deceit to reveal the terrible truth behind SPECTRE.

With Lea Seydoux and Monica Bellucci as the Bond girls, Ralph Fiennes and Ben Whishaw returning as M and Q, and Christoph Waltz and Andrew Scott rumored to be playing the villains, perhaps the most exciting news is that Sam Mendes is back after a franchise high-point with Skyfall.  It seems like he’ll be picking up on plot points from the Craig era – secret organizations, political pressure against MI6, further exploration of Bond’s heretofore unseen past.  All good news, especially for someone who loved Skyfall the way I did.

But just how much did I love Skyfall?  At the end of two years’ worth of reviews, what do I make of the entire James Bond film series?   You’ve come to the right place; after the jump, you can read my James Bond Countdown, ranking all twenty-four 007 movies.

Die Another Day (2002)

After forty years and half as many movies, the James Bond franchise has legs like few others (Godzilla comes to mind for longevity), and on the surface Die Another Day pays homage to a lot of great moments from the long history of the series.  The film itself, however, is the epitome of a trainwreck:  it starts strong and quickly derails, all the while remaining a ruin away from which you can’t tear your eyes.

After months of torture in a North Korean prison camp, James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) is released in a hostage trade orchestrated by M (Judi Dench) to root out a British conspirator.  Bond pursues Korean terrorist Zao (Rick Yune) to Cuba, where he learns that American spy Jinx Johnson (Halle Berry) is also on the case.  Together, the two follow the trail to British diamond baron Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens) and his orbital laser satellite.

From that plot synopsis, you already have a sense of the biggest problem with Die Another Day – its staggering unevenness.  The film sprints from setpiece to setpiece with little connective tissue between scenes other than someone coming in and expositing to Bond, “This is where you need to go next.”  The more dangerous message of these weak transitions is the intimation that Bond is rusty and doesn’t know his way around a secret mission anymore.  Consequently, the inorganic quality of the plot results in a film that is neither a triumph nor a catastrophe.  There are moments when Die Another Day is quite entertaining, but the moments when it isn’t prevent the whole from coalescing into a fulfilling moviegoing experience.

Case in point – at about the midpoint of the film, there’s a fantastic fencing match between Bond and Graves.  It’s energetic, fantastically choreographed and directed, and essential in developing the personalities of the two men.  The stuntwork is quite excellent, and the scene positively crackles.  Like any good setpiece, it’s easily divorced from the larger narrative, enjoyable on its own merits, but everything surrounding the duel is incomprehensibly disconnected; it’s anyone’s guess why the two men duel in the first place, nor does it make much sense for Graves to invite Bond to his secret lair after the duel.

And when the whole film proceeds in such a way, it’s just exhausting.  The fundamental flaw of the film is that in nearly every aspect of the narrative, Die Another Day is unable to commit to one direction.  In the character of Jinx, the filmmakers have an opportunity to give Bond an equal number, a female American agent every bit as skilled as he is; instead, Jinx is as often (if not more frequently) a damsel in distress.  Halle Berry is very good in the role, equally smart and sexy, but the role itself is somewhat thin.  After one particularly great fight sequence in the bowels of a plummeting airplane, Jinx dispatches her adversary and then quite literally sits down and waits for Bond to save her.

The Jinx of the first half of the film would never have done that, but it seems that halfway through Die Another Day everything in the film goes topsy-turvy and stops making sense.  The film’s opener, with hovercrafts and silly puns, is ludicrous enough but remains safely within the loose realism of the Bond films.  Once we get into the second half, with space lasers and ice palaces, the film surrenders entirely to poor CGI effects and absurd gadgetry far beyond what the boundaries of credulity can accommodate.  As if the invisible car weren’t preposterous enough, the film sees Bond surfing multiple times, and in the film’s climax Gustav Graves dons an electrified suit of armor for no apparent reason whatsoever; there’s a gag about making his suitcase device more ergonomic, but you won’t find this gizmo in an IKEA near you. 

It’s a real shame that Die Another Day goes so far off the rails, not only because it’s Brosnan’s final outing as 007, though it is tragic that the promise of Goldeneye was never fully met during Brosnan’s tenure.  The presence of story beats that actually work well – the motivation of the villain to live up to his father, the traitor within MI6 as an update on the classic henchman trope, and M’s unwavering faith in Bond – each make the film that much more excruciating because there are glimpses of a Bond film that could have been.  Instead, we get a movie with more explosions in the opening sequence than any other entire Bond film, turning up the volume instead of the intellect.

Perhaps the worst aesthetic offense is the moment when M tells Bond, “While you were gone, the world changed,” suggesting a post-9/11 self-awareness and a recognition of the new state of geopolitics.  Unfortunately, though, the film never really engages with that idea.  While positing a new paradigm for Bond, the film goes for broke in the direction of the worst excesses of the franchise; the space laser recalls Moonraker, while the hyper-technology seems like an unironic version of the exploding pen Never Say Never Again pulled off with a knowing wink.  With all the other callbacks to earlier films – Jinx’s bikinied exit from the ocean a la Dr. No, the Union Jack parachute ripped from The Spy Who Loved Me, and even more overt allusions like the Thunderball jetpack’s cameo, among others – the fortieth anniversary of the film franchise seems to attempt to argue implicitly that Bond doesn’t need to change.  The end result, however, tells an entirely different story; this is a Bond in desperate need of a new wind of change (so long as he doesn’t attempt to surf on it).

Die Another Day is rated PG-13 for “action violence and sexuality.”  There’s a quick flash of blood in one scene of impalement and an occasional slash during a duel sequence; other characters die with no blood visible, while the film shows glimpses of Bond being tortured in North Korea.  As noted above, nearly everything explodes in this film.  Bond sleeps with two women (a low number for him), but all we see are bare backs.

James Bond and The Cinema King will return in a review of Casino Royale (2006) on October 7, 2014!

The World Is Not Enough (1999)

For those who play the role long enough, there’s a Rule of Three for Bond actors, suggesting that the performer’s third outing is his best.  Sean Connery’s got a perfect film in Goldfinger, Roger Moore has The Spy Who Loved Me, and Daniel Craig has the knockout Skyfall.  We’re at Pierce Brosnan’s third with The World Is Not Enough, which turns out to be the exception to the Rule of Three.  It is far and away Brosnan’s most boring outing with only a few redeeming features.

After the murder of a leading industrialist, James Bond (Brosnan) assigns himself to protect the dead man’s daughter, Elektra King (Sophie Marceau), while she moves to continue her father’s work on an oil pipeline.  Bond and M (Judi Dench) suspect that the terrorist Renard (Robert Carlyle), who had kidnapped Elektra years ago, is behind the new wave of attempts on her life.  Denise Richards appears in a soulless performance as nuclear physicist (ha!) Christmas Jones, whose skills include wearing tight clothing and wearing wet clothing.  (The less said about her, the better.)

In a franchise full of diabolical villains, gorgeous women, and legendary action sequences, the worst thing a Bond film can be is boring.  But for the most part, The World Is Not Enough is exactly that – horrifically dull.  It’s not quite as dull as, say, Octopussy; TWINE does contain what is, for my money, the best opening sequence in the entire film series, in which Bond dodges a sniper before giving pursuit in a half-finished Q-boat through the Thames.  It’s a great action sequence with a fantastic score by David Arnold.

It is, however, the only great action sequence in the film.  Judging on this movie alone, Michael Apted is not an especially gifted director of on-screen action.  Aside from the linearity of the boat chase opener, Apted’s action scenes are muddled by angles akimbo and editing which makes it difficult to tell from which direction the baddies are coming.  In one scene, aerial and ground troops attack a dockside caviar factory, and it’s downright dizzying trying to keep track of who’s firing on whom; the shots are arranged in no particular order and defy Eisenstein’s idea of the montage to the point where the viewer simply gives up on trying to make sense of the collision of images.

The film’s other action sequences are a bore – a sinking submarine, a ski chase that comes nowhere near The Spy Who Loved Me’s opener, and a subterranean tunnel shootout – and the rest of the film isn’t much better.  There’s a lot of talking about the plot and where it’s going, but there’s little in the way of development until the third act. 

It becomes impossible to talk about the film without spoiling the big twist, so step down to the next paragraph if you prefer to remain unspoiled.  For those that are still here, I’m speaking, of course, of the reveal that Elektra King – ostensibly the Bond girl – has been conspiring with her former kidnapper to take over her father’s empire.  It’s actually a rather clever turn in the plot, and it takes the franchise somewhere it’s never really been; we’ve had evil women like Rosa Klebb and even most recently Xenia Onatopp, but the reveal that the Bond girl is also the Bond villain is quite smart.  As Elektra, Marceau is a very strong performer, and I wonder why her international career seems to have fizzled out.  In a better Bond film, Elektra might have been a top character, because Marceau handles the turn from performative victim to snarling villainess with ease.  As it stands, though, she’s a bit of a diamond in the rough here in the sense that the film insists on focusing on the thuggish Renard, whose fascinating character conceit – that he is a dying man who literally feels no pain – is fumbled and never given the life that a comparable character like Jaws had.

So between that and the memorable opening sequence, The World Is Not Enough simply lives up to its title – what we have in the film is not enough to be a winner.  Usually in moments like this, especially in reviewing the Bond films, I find that the good often outstrips the bad, as was the case with Tomorrow Never Dies.  But here there’s just not enough of redeeming value beyond a great set-piece and a great idea.  After a brilliant debut in Goldeneye, I do hope that Brosnan goes out with a bang in his next and final entry, but – spoiler alert – I’ve seen it before, and as I recall he doesn’t.

The World Is Not Enough is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of action violence, some sexuality and innuendo.”  Bond beds three women, one of whom wears only a strategically-placed bedsheet in two scenes.  There’s a series of sexual innuendoes, including a particularly graphic one punning on the frequency of Christmas, and as far as action violence is concerned it’s a lot of shooting and exploding but with little to no blood visible.

James Bond and The Cinema King will return in a review of Die Another Day (2002) on September 7, 2014!

Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

The obvious pun in any review of Tomorrow Never Dies would be, “Well, gosh, why won’t it just die?”  And for a decades-old franchise that’s up to eighteen official entries, that might seem appropriate.  Tomorrow Never Dies is not a terminally ill film, though it does suffer from a very bad case of head-scratching villainy and a distinct identity crisis.

After a troubling crisis between British and Chinese military forces in the Pacific, M (Judi Dench) dispatches James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) to investigate media baron Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce), who published key details in his newspaper before they’d been made official.  Suspecting Carver’s involvement, Bond reunites with his former flame, Carver’s wife Paris (Teri Hatcher) before teaming up with Chinese spy Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh) to stop Carver’s plot from triggering World War III.

As Brosnan’s second outing as James Bond, there’s much about Tomorrow Never Dies that does work quite well, and it’s largely due to the persona the franchise had previously assumed in Goldeneye.  It’s serious, but not lethally so; it’s fun, but not in the quantities we’d come to expect from the slapsticky Roger Moore vehicles.  Brosnan is still a more than capable Bond, equally at home in intense action sequences and in moments of levity, including my personal favorite “banter with Q” sequence.  And I very much appreciate the way Brosnan gives Bond a sense of backstory, without resorting to the heavy-handed “mention his late wife” trope the series usually employs.

The bigger problem with the film is that its central antagonist is a megalomaniac of the highest order whose plot centers on his willingness to endanger the entire world for media ratings.  It’s a viciously shortsighted plot, a scorched-earth approach that could truly eradicate the audience he’s conspiring to acquire.  Now there’s a bit of cleanup at the very end of the film to imply that it’s all smoke and mirrors, a “wag the dog” conspiracy, but for the most part Elliot Carver is a brutally cartoonish villain in the midst of an otherwise quite serious spy film.  Worse, the absurd scope of his plot makes everyone else look like loons for taking it seriously.  I’m not sure if it’s Pryce’s fault for overplaying the part or scripter Bruce Feirstein’s for undercooking the role, but it comes off like a less well-thought-out version of The Spy Who Loved Me (which also featured a submarine-eating aquatic headquarters out to spark global conflict).

The other thing about Tomorrow Never Dies – and this may be the thing that gets my goat the most whenever a film gets it wrong – is that it feels like two very distinct pieces.  At first, there’s a corporate espionage plot with war in the backdrop, but then the film shifts quite quickly into international conspiracy and terrorism.  Both of these could make very compelling Bond films, but they’re stitched together somewhat haphazardly, even marked by the fact that Bond has to change continents for no reason than just to get to the next act.  Once each of these halves is underway, it’s truly compelling stuff, but the seam in the middle is all too visible.

I think Tomorrow Never Dies had been my first Bond film as a child, and I came to it ready to recapture those rose-colored morsels of nostalgia, but I think I realize I was a somewhat uncritical child.  There is, to be sure, a number of very nice pieces in the film.  There’s a fantastic update on the “sinister henchman” Bond trope in the form of Vincent Schiavelli’s Dr. Kaufman, a torturer and forensics expert, and I don’t even mind that he only gets the one set piece.  It’s moments like that, and like the Lois & Clark-esque banter Teri Hatcher gets with Bond, her former lover, that suggest a much more compelling Bond film than is actually present.  Heck, even the remote-controlled BMW, as outlandish as the premise sounds, is played with such fervent earnest that it works far better than it ought to.  And let's give composer David Arnold a good heap of credit; his score is essentially a modern John Barry, in that he integrates the classic Bond theme with the film's main themes to give us some truly rousing music that works just as well outside the context of the film.

Having said that, if we’re willing to swallow the BMW, how outlandish must the villain’s plot be if it’s too implausible for this film?  Taken in macro, Tomorrow Never Dies just doesn’t work, but on a micro scale there’s enough enjoyable material to make this better than at least half of the Bond films I’ve already reviewed.

Tomorrow Never Dies is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of action violence, sexuality and innuendo.”  As per usual, there is a lot of shooting, exploding, and fisticuffs.  There’s not a lot of blood, but some of the violence is disquieting in the sense that it’s all very close and visible.  As usual, Bond beds several women, though we never see anything other than bare backs; as for the innuendo, TND is one of the racier screenplays chock full of groan-worthy puns.

James Bond and The Cinema King will return in a review of The World Is Not Enough (1999) on August 7, 2014!

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!