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.

Licence to Kill (1989)

Where I thought The Living Daylights was a welcome return to form for James Bond if a little unmemorable, I have much nicer things to say about Timothy Dalton’s second outing as the British superspy.  Although Licence to Kill isn’t a perfect Bond film, it does make me wonder what a third Dalton entry might have looked like.

After his old pal Felix Leiter is attacked on his wedding night, James Bond (Dalton) springs into revenge mode against the man responsible, drug lord Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi).  Cut off from official British support and on the run from his own friends as well as Sanchez’s, Bond teams up with Sanchez’s pilot Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell) to bring the kingpin’s empire down around him.

If The Living Daylights was a throwback to the Sean Connery era, Licence to Kill is definitely a precursor to the current Daniel Craig incarnation.  Dalton’s Bond is dead serious here, more so than in his debut film.  In fact, Bond only starts cracking one-liners at the very end.  It’s entirely consistent with the tone of the film, which is really quite grim, though it does seem a little less like James Bond and more like a generic action hero.  Either way, Dalton is an infinitely compelling lead; his determination and moral outrage is very well played, and it’s great fun to watch him scheme against Sanchez.

That level of intellectual sophistication is another very welcome tonal shift in Licence to Kill.  Where some Bond films have been content to let Bond blunder into the plot (or, more frequently, have the plot assigned to him), Dalton’s Bond takes charge almost immediately, shooting out when necessary but also – and this is something I’d love to see Bond do more often – setting up dominoes and tricking Sanchez into knocking them over.  It’s nearly impossible for me to reconcile the fact that this film is directed by John Glen, who previously inflicted Octopussy upon us.  It’s probably Glen’s best directorial outing; he keeps the pace moving for the entire runtime with no real dead spots.

In a weird way, Davi fills the humor void left by Bond with a litany of droll puns; for example, after feeding a man to a shark, he notes wryly, “He disagreed with something that ate him” (a line from Fleming’s Live and Let Die novel).  Elsewhere, he carves out a romantic rival’s heart and calls it “my little valentine.”  Davi and/or the screenplay is obviously trying to set Sanchez up as Bond’s true opposite number, though the comparison doesn’t quite work with such a humorless Bond.  It does make Sanchez a memorable villain, a nice change of pace from the world-domineering evildoers who’ve preceded him in this franchise.  (Keep your eyes peeled for a very young Benicio del Toro as Sanchez’s creepy crony Dario.)

Licence to Kill is a very gritty Bond, and for me that’s really not a bad thing.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say that this film is actually quite underrated in the Bond canon.  True, it’s not an honest-to-goodness Bond film without the punchlines, but it melds enough of the Bond trappings – including a much-enhanced role for Desmond Llewellyn’s gadget-happy Q – with classic late-80s action flair to create an entertaining and enjoyable Bond film.

Licence to Kill is rated PG-13 for “for action violence and drug content.”  This is definitely the bloodiest Bond to date (and maybe still is to this day):  men are fed to sharks, exploded in compression chambers, ground up in a shredder, shot, impaled, exploded, and lit on fire – all in unflinchingly graphic detail.  (I cringed twice, and I’m made of relatively stern stuff.)  Drugs are mentioned, sold, and processed on screen, though none are used.  As far as sexual content goes, this is probably Bond’s least libidinous outing.

James Bond and The Cinema King will return in a review of Goldeneye (1995) on June 7, 2014! 

The Living Daylights (1987)

If nothing else, thank God the reign of Moore has ended.  I can’t tell whether I like Timothy Dalton yet or whether it’s just ABM (Anyone But Moore) syndrome, but The Living Daylights is a welcome return to serious form, a bit like For Your Eyes Only both in that sense and in the sense of being ultimately underwhelming.

After saving a Russian defector’s life from cellist/sniper Kara Milovy (Maryam d’Abo), James Bond (Timothy Dalton) finds his head spinning after said defector is apparently abducted by KGB agents out to kill all spies – “Smiert Spionom.”  The head of the KGB, though, denies any involvement, which puts Bond and Milovy on the trail of loony arms dealer Brad Whitaker (Joe Don Baker), whose plan is honestly a bit of a headscratcher.

There’s no denying that The Living Daylights is meant to return Bond to his pre-Moore incarnation; he’s grimly sardonic, ruthless in dispatching his enemies, and even occasionally violent to women.  Basically, he’s Sean Connery circa From Russia With Love, and indeed The Living Daylights – on the 25th anniversary of the franchise – recalls its predecessors with more attention to international espionage, even amid the cooling tensions of the Gorbachev era. 

Dalton acquits himself well as a sterner Bond, gruff and distrustful of the move toward global peace.  He has his moments of chivalry – as when he spares the life of a female sniper early on – but most of his time is spent growling at the baddies, especially in a fun precredits sequence.  Fortunately, though, he’s not above a good one-liner, and even more fortunately the script knows not to toss them at us rapid-fire (as in one of the better scenes of The Spy Who Loved Me).

The rest of the script, though, is reminiscent of For Your Eyes Only in the sense that I really couldn’t tell you much of what it was about.  The plot is quite thin, usually an excuse to move from one rousing action sequence to another, and furthermore it’s unnecessarily complex; Bond aside, every character double-crosses another at least once, and by the time we get the expository monologue from the main villain it’s really not clear how each of the moving pieces contributes to the plan – which I’m still unclear whether it was about weapons, embezzling, drugs, or human trafficking.  It’s a bit silly to go into a James Bond film looking for logical consistency, because this is a movie that otherwise ticks the boxes quite nicely – Bond sleeps with a lot of women, blows a lot of things up, and stops the Russians in the end.  I just don’t know what he stopped them from doing.

But as I said, the rest of the film plays pretty well.  There’s a nice supporting role from John Rhys-Davies as the bewildered and beleaguered head of the KGB, though Joe Don Baker’s role as the villain comes off a little too campy, his gee-whiz obsession with military conquest more like a holdover from a Roger Moore film.  d’Abo is a competent Bond girl; one senses that she’s not just playacting at playing the cello or at aiming her sniper rifle, though it’s a shame that the movie kind of forgets about her halfway through, reducing her to arm candy and bedsheet occupation.

All of this is coming off negatively for The Living Daylights, but I didn’t actively dislike it, as has been the case with some of the more recent entries in this review series.  Maybe it’s due to the John Barry score, or maybe it’s just Moore fatigue, but I’m actually kind of excited to see more Timothy Dalton.  Even if no one else in the film production crew is, at least Dalton seems to be taking it seriously.

The Living Daylights is rated PG.  Surprisingly for a Bond movie, there are two shots of a topless woman and one of male rear nudity.  The violence is what we’ve come to expect – occasionally bloody shootouts and explosions.

James Bond and The Cinema King will return in a review of Licence to Kill (1989) on May 7, 2014!  Meanwhile, stay tuned to The Cinema King later this morning for Captain America: The Winter Soldier!

Monday at the Movies - June 11, 2012

Welcome to Week Twenty-Two of “Monday at the Movies,” in which the Cinema King revisits some of his childhood favorites.

Dick Tracy (1990) – Of the two films under consideration this week, Dick Tracy is the one that has not had the same effect on me in the twenty years since I first saw it.  If nothing else, Dick Tracy is as close as film came to translating comics (before Sin City came along, at least).  Its colors are vibrant and its morals are downright Manichaean, making it an easy film to watch.  Director Warren Beatty also stars as the comic strip detective in a yellow coat, but it’s the criminals at whom he fires his signature tommy gun that steal the audience’s attention: Al Pacino as Big Boy Caprice, William Forsythe as Flattop, and Madonna as torch singer Breathless Mahoney.  But while the colors look great and lend the film a very intriguing visual style, the film hasn’t aged well in terms of substance.  Some of the performances come across as wooden (though I suspect Beatty is deliberately one-note as the do-gooder, Madonna’s work isn’t captivating), while others (ahem, Pacino) are overly blustery and cringe-worthy.  What sells the movie is that it’s populated by tons of high concepts and interesting visuals, characters with cool faces or wacked-out wardrobes, but Dick Tracy is almost overpopulated, and as a result some elements don’t make sense at the end.  I’d have liked to have seen more of Dustin Hoffman as Mumbles (an apt moniker), but as it is I’m still not certain what motivated a few characters, especially The Blank (“No-Face” in my childhood parlance).  Rewatching Dick Tracy brought back memories (especially of the complete trading card set I collected), but through my rose-tinted glasses I recognize that there is a truly great movie waiting to be made with Chester Gould’s source material.

The Rocketeer (1991) – The Rocketeer, however, has aged remarkably well and remains one of my all-time favorite superhero movies (a list, I suppose, I’ll have to make once I get around to Top-10’ing this site).  It might even be one of my all-time favorite movies, period, if only because I can’t watch it without my mood changing for the better.  If you’ve never seen it, for shame.  Billy Campbell stars as Cliff Secord, who discovers a rocket-pack designed by Howard Hughes (Terry O’Quinn); with the help of his mechanic Peevy (Alan Arkin), Cliff becomes The Rocketeer to save his girlfriend Jenny Blake (Jennifer Connelly at her most beautiful) from dashing Nazi actor Neville Sinclair (Timothy Dalton).  Really, the only thing preventing this film from being a perfect one is that it’s a little cheesy in parts, but I’ve found that a bit of nostalgia goes great with cheese.  The performances here are solid and endearing, and the 1930s atmosphere is pulled off with such grace that it’s no wonder director Joe Johnston was later asked to helm another period-piece superhero flick, Captain America: The First Avenger.  The Rocketeer is a lot like the Indiana Jones franchise, but with more heart than you might expect; while the superheroics are all top-notch, the movie is surprisingly earnest in its sentiment.  Campbell and Connelly are almost star-crossed as lovers, and the development of their relationship over the course of the film elicited a surprise mistiness in my ocular region.  That’s right, true believers, a more emotional filmgoer might have wept at The Rocketeer.  Even if you don’t cry, The Rocketeer is such delightful fun that you’ll want to watch it again once the credits roll.  Oh, hell:  maybe it is perfect.

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

Hot Fuzz (2007)

I've been an unabashed fan of Edgar Wright since taking the advice of a dear friend and renting - later purchasing- his zombie (the Brits call it "the Zed word") spoof masterpiece Shaun of the Dead. So when Wright decided to go for the cop film's jugular, I was more than willing to go along for the ride.

And the team doesn't disappoint, although it's not as inspired a venture as Shaun was. Hot Fuzz is the story of Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg), a cop who's so good at his job that he's reassigned to a small hamlet for "making us all look bad." There he meets Constable Danny Butterman (Nick Frost, "Ed" from Shaun) and Danny's dad, Chief Frank Butterman (Jim Broadbent, who's as creditable a casting choice as he always is). As a series of grisly murders seize the town, Angel begins to believe that these are not, as the rest of "the fuzz" believes, mere accidents (for instance, the florist may not have actually fallen throat-first on her enormous shears). He finds Simon Skinner (a delightfully suspicious Timothy Dalton), a local supermarket baron, to be Suspect Numero Uno.

Like Next, Hot Fuzz tries to be two things - simultaneously a cop film and a dissection of that genre. Unlike Next, Hot Fuzz succeeds in its endeavor to keep one foot in each sandbox, only it doesn't do it quite so well as its "Zed word" predecessor. Hot Fuzz, you see, certainly leans more heavily toward cop film than satirization. Though that's not to say the film suffers for it - Hot Fuzz is a great cop film; it's just not as funny as Shaun of the Dead. That's my lament. (Look for a parallel observation when I review the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy.)

The cast is superb, from its aforementioned headliners to cinephile's-dream cameos from Bill Nighy, Martin Freeman (Tim from The Office UK), and even Cate Blanchett (apparently a big Shaun fan). As the exasperated Angel, Pegg does a firstrate job of bouncing between understandable frustration and guffaw-inducing cliche-bashing. Frost is more than comfortable in the shoes of dimwitted but lovable Danny; although at times he seems more like an overeager Ed than a totally new character, he's adorable - and funny - enough that it doesn't really matter.

Wright's direction is showy, calling more attention to itself than I remember in Shaun (maybe it's time to re-view and review?), though again - and here I invoke Jerry Seinfeld - not that there's anything wrong with that. Cop films are often showy spectacles, so why should this one be any different? The editing deftly works with Wright here, delivering an adrenaline shot of chuckles from a well-placed cut.

I've pointed out that the movie takes itself seriously - but fortunately not too seriously. That's why Hot Fuzz works at being of two minds and - oh, let's keep kicking Nic Cage - Next didn't.