Amph 60+ Years of James Bond 007

Although I would prefer a more vulnerable/less-efficient Craig, I don't recall him using anything greater than a handgun in most of his action sequences.

 

I stand corrected! Must have been my aging and faulty memory, but:

http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Main_Page

... agrees with you for the most part.

 

Yeah, the issue is more automatic weapons being used against Craig. Both in GoldenEye and Casino Royale, Campbell displays a clear weakness for scenes of bullets spraying around in full auto, no matter how nonsensical it is. Brosnan gets in on the machine-gunning action more than Craig does, but the biggest emphasis is on entire sets being torn apart by soldiers spraying bullets at Bond. Especially egregious is in Casino Royale when the local cop trying to shoot out the tires on the fuel truck at the airport is, for some reason, attempting to do so on full automatic. It's a general weakness of modern action movies, but Campbell is especially susceptible to it for some reason.

 

I have to point out that Brosnan hated the over-the-top gun play. He was always given roles that emphasised his charm and how much he looked the part - which he hated. There were moments when he was so wonderful in the role but they are, regretfully, just moments.

You can see what Brosnan was therefore angling for in The Tailor of Panama.

Also, damn. I agree with dp4m re: TWINE.

 

EnderSai: Having seen his highly effective work in The Tailor of Panama and The Matador, I can now say that Brosnan, though rusty in Goldeneye, could have been a great Bond. He is in fact capable of exuding the cavalier insidiousness necessary for the role; sadly, the producers handed him mediocrity after mediocrity.

Dare I say those two films served as Brosnan's protests, as if to say, "That is not the Bond I wanted to play!"

 

This is exactly it. As others have already said, Brosnan was simply a victim of the growing standard set by the modern action movie. Ironically though, the new level of gunplay matches up to the increasing level of missions 007 was being assigned. An endless chicken and egg loop perhaps?

My absolute favorite scene of any Bond film was from Dr No, when Connery's 007 waits for the one doctor, passes time by casually tossing cards into a hat, and then kills him in cold blood with a quip "that's a smith and wesson, and you've had your six..." I understand that was taken directly from Flemming's pen, even though the movie gets the specific pistol wrong. Even better was when Bond blew the lingering smoke from his silencer with a slight look of distain? regret? duty? That's what a license to kill is. It wasn't over the top, and the entire scene was extremely sedate. But Bond's missions quickly moved away from the low key into the fantastic. Because what there has never been is mission specific equipment. As an example, for as much as I liked the scene above, in the very same movie, Bond assaults an island that he knows will be crawling with bad guys, and all he has is his PPK. For different reasons than the phenomenon above, it's also the height of absurdity to be firing a small caliber handgun against an armored vehicle "dragon monster." You mean to tell me Bond wouldn't bring along a Sten, Sterling, or maybe even an Uzi submachine gun? I don't mean so he could just rock n roll full auto, but the additional firepower would seem..prudent. It seems that with Bond movies, it's either way over the top, or bare bones minimalist-an extreme either way.

E_S mentions Tailor of Panama, which I'd echo. It should have been the flavor of Brosnan's Bond, but never could be. Even then, I'd also say that Bosnan's "feeling" in that movie would have been Dalton's last Bond had he gotten Goldeneye.

 

But that's also nearly precisely why I love that bar scene in License to Kill and Carey Lowell's introduction there.

She doesn't go over the top with anything more than a shotgun (military grade, but still) which is doable down there -- but Bond also still packs his PPK and she's disdainful but he does the whole thing with basically just that.

 

Ug, Carey Lowell again... But seriously, I almost completely agree with you. Lowell's character fit the situation. Because it's two sides of the same coin. Just as it shows how invincible Bond is to have dozens of enemies all shooting automatic weapons and all missing, even as Bond empties his magazine full auto just to be as cool as them like Brosnan, it's also unrealistic to show Bond dispatching bad guys with just a PPK. The pocket pistol like the PPK is good for taking out enemies close up and personal. It's probably not even accurate beyond 3 meters away. In other words, it's the perfect spy pistol. But to have Bond join a gunfight in a bar full of baddies with nothing but is silly. It shows again how invincible Bond is, ala... other mere mortals need things like a shotgun to stand up to bad guys. All Bond needs is a defensive pocket pistol, and he not only holds his own, but wins. There were shades of that in LOLD when Bond switched to his .44 magnum, but that was in response to "beefing up" Bond because of Dirty Harry, and Moore's Bond didn't use the hulking pistol properly anyway, so it was kind of moot. Somewhere in the middle of the two extremes is the ideal portrayal. After Brosnan- with the new focus on the reboot- Craig finally captured the middle ground, or at least was allowed such a portrayal, which Brosnan wasn't allowed to do.

 

I've only read one of the Flemming books, but I seem to recall Bond had a secret compartment in his Bentley which hid a 45 caliber pistol; this seemed fairly sensible to me: a small, single stack pistol for concealed carry, and a larger, more powerful weapon nearby in case of an actual firefight.

 

Yeah, that would make sense, and would be the prefect balance, while also showing that Bond is highly trained with a host of weapons. Instead, it's a series of extremes in either direction. I suppose it's the extremes that has kept Bond movies part of pop culture for so long though. As you mention, I've only read a smattering of the books as well. Is there a more broad portrayal of Bond in the novels as opposed to the film series?

 

Sorry to derail, but this: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/62457

Nolan approached to direct next Bond... potentially...

EDIT: Sorry, just realized the source was Daily Mail so unlikely...

 

The comments after that article are really funny.

 

That was his Bentley 4.5 Litre Blower, from the first three novels. Such a wonderfully British car though, in pure heresy, it was painted battleship grey and not the appropriate green.

It's worth noting that the .45 Colt revolver in the glove-box complimented not the PPK but a .25 Beretta 418.

 

Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

Behind the scenes

In 1996, Albert "Cubby" Broccoli, the only individual still with the series from Dr. No onward, died at the age of eighty-seven. His interest in the franchise passed on to Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, who continued the role as producers they'd begun with GoldenEye. This gave the next film the dual burden of being the first without Cubby Broccoli and of following up the massive success of GoldenEye.

Wilson and Broccoli tried to lure GoldenEye director Martin Campbell back, but he declined. They settled instead on Roger Spottiswoode, director of such all-time cinematic classics as Terror Train, Turner & Hooch, and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. Spottiswoode got involved in revising the script, which GoldenEye reviser Bruce Feirstein had written from another writer's treatment. The script, which involved the Hong Kong handover, was problematic, because the handover would happen months before the movie's late-1997 release. Spottiswoode brought in teams of scripwriters to brainstorm and revise the script, under severe time pressure as production was about to start. Spottiswoode and the producers couldn't agree on the revisions, and supporting actors Jonathan Pryce and Teri Hatcher weren't happy with the changes made to their characters. The producers got their way, and brought Feirstein back to re-rewrite the film with only two weeks until production started.

The film's title was the first to have nothing to do with Fleming's work or his life. Desperately casting around for titles, the team was inspired by the Beatles' Tomorrow Never Knows to go with Tomorrow Never Lies as one of the possibilities, riffing on the name of the villain's newspaper. Through some kind of error in the process of faxing the list of potential titles to MGM, Tomorrow Never Lies became Tomorrow Never Dies, which MGM fell in love with. The error became the film's name.



The role of the villain was initially offered to Anthony Hopkins, who turned it down. Jonathan Pryce became the villain instead. Hong Kong martial arts star (and ex-wife of Dickson Poon; I couldn't not mention that name) Michelle Yeoh was cast as the leading Bond girl, making her big Western film debut. Teri Hatcher beat out Monica Bellucci for the secondary Bond girl role, which she performed while pregnant.

Tomorrow Never Dies marked the installation of David Arnold as the composer for the series. He got the job after doing an album of Bond theme song covers; write your own punchline. He submitted an attempt at the theme song, sung by k.d. lang; Sheryl Crow got the title song, but Arnold's submission became the end credits music and its melody got used throughout the film, because it pays to be the composer.

The film also marked the installation of the new Walther P99 in place of Bond's classic PPK, which would last throughout Brosnan's tenure in the role. Bond's use of BMW cars, begun in GoldenEye under a deal with the company, continued.

Production and post-production were completed within the year, getting the film out in December, though the budget ballooned to nearly twice GoldenEye's in order to make it happen. Despite opening opposite Titanic, it was a big success, again topping the $300 million mark.

Plot

The film opens with Bond spying on arms dealers in Central Asia, where hacker-terrorist Henry Gupta buys a GPS encoder. The Navy launches a missile at the arms depot, but rather than get out, Bond goes in after spotting nuclear warheads aboard a fighter jet up for sale. He steals the plane and flies out of an explosion. The audience now considers James Bond far more badass.

Gupta is working for Elliot Carver, a media mogul who uses the GPS encoder to scramble a British ship's systems and draw it into Chinese waters, where Carver's stealth boat attacks both it and the Chinese fighters challenging it. He hopes to spark a war on which he will have the inside scoop, propelling his media business and brand-new cable news network to the top, because this is clearly the best use of a stealth boat, which of course every good media mogul would have. He steals one of the sunken ship's missiles. Upon receiving the news that the Chinese destroyed a British ship in international waters and massacred its survivors, the British Navy sends a great big fleet to the South China Sea, giving 007 only two days to figure out the true nature of the incident and prevent war from breaking out.

Suspicious of Carver's near-instant access to the news before people such as the Navy, or anyone else on the planet -- a flaw Carver never could have realized might blatantly give him away -- Bond goes off to investigate Carver at his news network launch party, which he cleverly infiltrates in order to accuse Carver of complicity in the incident, get ignored, and hit on Carver's wife, whom Bond used to nail. He gets beat up by Carver's thugs, which is the best way for Carver to establish his innocence, and then goes off to his hotel room, satisfied that he's got another 24 hours to figure this thing out, much like an undergrad with a term paper. Then Carver's wife shows up, and it's not just "used to" anymore. She gives him information about Carver's operations, which he uses to get into his headquarters and steal the GPS encoder, while also running into Chinese agent Wai Lin, who conveniently happens to do every single thing at the same time Bond does it. Carver figured out that something was up, probably when his wife didn't come home, and had her killed in Bond's suite. Bond returns and finds that Carver's assassin has set him up for murder, but he kills the assassin and escapes using his tricked-out upscale rental car.

Bond then goes diving at the wreck after using the GPS encoder to determine its true location, coincidentally at the exact same time as Wai Lin, and discovers the missing missile. He then gets captured by Carver's assistant Stamper, who also happens to be hanging out at the wreck at the exact same time, completely by happenstance. Bond and Wai Lin escape, but only after being brought before Carver so he can monologue at them. They start working together after warning their respective governments that Carver and his Chinese inside man, who is apparently a really important part of the scheme but never appears in the film and has no resolution, intend to fire the missile at Beijing, sparking a war which the inside man will end once the leadership is eliminated, making him a heroic dictator and Carver slightly richer and also far more likely to spend the rest of his life in prison.



They go looking for Carver's stealth boat, and they find it. Bond sets off an explosive to make the ship radar-visible, after Wai Lin is captured and then freed after a confrontation with Carver, and then they go off and do more boat sabotage and have another confrontation with Carver, who dies this time. Bond prevents the missile from firing and gets in a fight with Stamper. The missile explodes, destroying the boat and Stamper, but not Bond or Wai Lin, because they are in water. Bond decides that having sex with Wai Lin on top of flaming wreckage in the open ocean and maybe being completely missed by rescue teams is way better than being rescued and having sex with Wai Lin in a five-star hotel. Fin.

Bond himself

However much Brosnan may wish to play a harder, more serious Bond, he no longer has much in the way of real material to work with. He is basically called upon to be a suave male model who fires guns and occasionally makes quips. In a film this completely insubstantial, there is not a lot of opportunity to imbue the material with anything more powerful. Probably the only really notable development, in terms of Bond's character, is that we see him seduce a married woman for the first time. He'd seduced villains' girlfriends and mistresses before, but never a wife. Bond also has a romantic past with her, an element that's likewise new to the scene (the history of on-the-job flirtation with TMWTGG's Goodnight isn't quite the same thing). Unfortunately, the film doesn't know how to mine it for anything other than shallow cliche that gets nodded at for all of two scenes, so that concept has yet to see real, full exploitation.

How it fits into the series

Tomorrow Never Dies is the point where the pendulum swings back yet again, and Daltonian grit is tossed out in favor of mindless formula. The big success of GoldenEye had the studio chasing box office success again, and as all too often happens, they apparently stripped their conception of what the components of that success were down to "big, loud, lots of big action, some quips, some sex, stars James Bond." The result is that the series is, yet again, attempting to adhere to formula without bothering to fill that outline with substance, rather than building up a substantial, quality story and then letting the formula conform itself to the story. The result is a big, empty blockbuster that's completely brainless in every dimension. We're back to the Moore-era paradigm, except this time, instead of trying to ape kung fu or blaxploitation or itself, it's trying to be just another big summer blockbuster (released as offseason counterprogramming) with a James Bond twist.

As the first post-Cubby film, it's a failure. You can give it credit for the rushed, chaotic rewrite progress, but the fact is that the film that emerged was a creatively bereft money-chaser, its only small glimmer of an idea -- media satire -- buried under dreadful execution.

Review

A big step down from GoldenEye. Brosnan's run hasn't bottomed out yet, but Tomorrow Never Dies is one of the worst-plotted Bonds so far, the villain doesn't hold up, and aside from some good action scenes, there's really nothing to recommend it.

The core concept of the film just sucks. Rupert Murdoch Elliot Carver is a media mogul who is insanely rich. So he builds a super stealth boat and uses it to engineer a war so that he can marginally increase the ratings on his new cable network and make slightly more money. That's right. A media mogul has a stealth boat for no reason, and uses it in a grand plan to start a war to . . . make minimally higher profits. You have to have the ambitions match the scheme, and the means match the character. Nothing lines up, and it just comes off stupid. Even worse, Carver's plan is in cooperation with a Chinese officer, for no particular reason other than to make his stealth boat marginally more plausible, and what the Chinese officer has to gain out of it fits the stakes of the plan . . . except the guy isn't even in the movie. He never even appears. He's never even mentioned in the denouement. It's a major villain who's far better suited for the plot than the actual villain, but he never appears, is never addressed, and might as well not even exist except for the one or two scenes that mention him, so I really can't give the film credit for its quarter-assed attempt to excuse its own idiocy.

Even aside from that, the plot is broken anyway. 007 has to perform a high-stakes investigation of Carver in the forty-eight hours before the fleet starts sparking serious tensions with China. He accomplishes this by going to Carver's party undercover, talking with his wife about their past relationship, then just going up to Carver and being like, "So, you probably started this conflict, huh?" Then he goes to his hotel room and gets drunk on vodka. Look out, Batman, there's a new world's greatest detective in town! This is the kind of sloppy scripting that thinks having Paris show up out of nowhere and drop some information on Bond at his hotel room is the same thing as Bond actually investigating. Then, once Bond gets to the South China Sea, the plot depends on the massive coincidence of Bond investigating the sunken British ship at the exact same time as Wai Lin, and hey, even more coincidentally, Stamper is there at the same time and he captures them.



The rest of the writing is on this same generally infantile level. The reliance on overexposition is absolutely infuriating. Characters just drop reams of exposition, as if it's just too much of a chore to write it in naturally, and go over what you're seeing and just saw on the screen. "Remember, they stole a cruise missile from the ship," Bond says one time, recounting the information Wai Lin was there to see only a few hours ago within the movie, and that the audience saw in a scene like fifteen minutes ago.

Hey, Carver says bad things in his big debut speech, except then they're good things. I want power . . . to make the world sunshine and rainbows! What an awful, awful, dumb cliché. Or the evil news empire scene, when Carver (with plentiful abysmal movie-typing) acts cartoonishly evil. It's just a dumb movie that treats the audience like idiots. It's a like a Bond movie written by twelve-year-olds – they basically get what the formula is, they're just terrible at filling it in in an intelligent manner. Look, I could make fun of idiocy in this movie all night, but I've got to at least get my favorite in – Bond's BMW comes with bulletproof windows, supposedly indestructible. There's a whole scene of Carver's thugs trying to get into it, whaling away at the windows with sledgehammers and crowbars and everything. Not so much as a nick. Bond gets in the car and drives off. They start shooting. In the name of action, the windows disintegrate immediately. Genius filmmaking.

The concept of putting Bond in contact with an old flame is good, and surprisingly untouched, and it gives us an opportunity to finally see him seduce a married woman. I'd give the film props for that, except that it handles it in the most cliched, perfunctory manner possible, and uses Teri Hatcher as the old flame. Hatcher is extremely boring in the role; you can put her in all the cocktail dresses you want, but she has more of a soccer mom thing going on than international socialite. There's no chemistry. Nor is there any chemistry between Bond and Wai Lin, in yet another obnoxious instance of "Bond and the Bond girl have sex because . . . because! And it's totally a serious romantic relationship!" Ughhhhh. No chemistry, and two of the least-sexy Bond girls of all time. Nothing's working in that department. Wai Lin is supposed to be another "Bond's equal" secret agent, but it's hard to take her seriously when she's running around with two rifles, looking ridiculous, and shouting "Hiyah!" while shooting instrument panels. You show those panels, girl! It's just sort of a lame, less-tense, less-interesting, shallower version of the 007/XXX pairing.

In the film's defense, I will say that it's functional as entertainment, a fast-moving bunch of setpieces that feature passable action. The handcuffed action sequence is the highlight; everything else is mostly just okay. Dr. Kaufman is an entertaining character, a businesslike, relatively mild-mannered assassin with a morbid sense of humor. Unlike the infinitely generic henchman Stamper, Kaufman is the kind of vivid, off-kilter supporting character who belongs in the Bond universe, livening up the villains' side. His death also gives Brosnan's Bond a great cold, Connery-style moment. As usual in Brosnan's films, Desmond Llewelyn is the absolute best thing in the movie, and his scenes are great. Moneypenny's flirting with Bond over his sexual escapades is solid, even if for some reason Moneypenny herself looks like a granny now. Also, there's a scene where Carver mocks Wai Lin's kick at him by going into an elaborate mock-kung fu routine, and it is completely ridiculous, totally awful, absolutely random and unexpected, and without a doubt the most hilariously awesome thing in any Bond movie ever.



Overall, though the script for Tomorrow Never Dies should be declared a crime scene, the movie avoids bottoming out in the rankings because, unlike so many other bad Bonds, it at least never goes dull – it skates along on decent action setpieces and maintains its energy. It keeps most of the disaster behind the scenes, in the storytelling mechanics and stuff you'll notice only if you're watching critically or thinking about it afterward, rather than on the screen, sucking aggressively. Oh, faint praise, how you damn.

Rankings

1. From Russia with Love
2. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
3. Licence to Kill
4. Dr. No
5. For Your Eyes Only
6. GoldenEye
7. The Living Daylights
8. The Spy Who Loved Me
9. Goldfinger
10. Thunderball
11. You Only Live Twice
12. The Man with the Golden Gun
13. Tomorrow Never Dies
14. A View to a Kill
15. Diamonds Are Forever
16. Octopussy
17. Live and Let Die
18. Moonraker

Questions for discussion

1. Am I right that this film has the worst Bond girls, collectively, of any film?
2. Can we talk about how terrible that movie poster up top is? Apparently what this poster wants to tell you is that in this movie, Teri Hatcher is really cold, and Michelle Yeoh either wants to shoot her, or thinks that the proper way to look badass is to slap a gun into your shoulder and stare slackly into the camera.
3. Does anyone care to defend the film?
4. ?

 

1) Not sure, as Yeoh was pretty good generically but Hatcher was the worst.

3) No, I loathe this film and would rank it lower than you have. There are some decent sequences, including the opening, but the movie as a whole sucks.

 

Media mogul who becomes a terrorist in order to get the best media ratings and dominant news outlet ever. \\

Not totally the best, but did have some good scenes. I liked Stamper, but mostly Stamper's mentor.

Stealth boat.....just for media ratings.

 

The best thing to come out of this film was that motorbike commercial, where all the action shots were briefly paused for the VoiceOver to give safety advice and directions on how to properly use the equipment.

 

Never saw this one, but the CBS Sunday Morning review has stuck in my head for years:

"James Bond and Communist China team up to defeat Rupert Murdoch."

That still makes me laugh just from how absurd it sounds.

 

Several points:

-- This is the worst installment in the franchise, supplanted a short time later by the even-more-loathsome Die Another Day. I have no tolerance whatsoever for wall-to-wall action; I don't play video games, and even if I did, I wouldn't expect a movie to unfold as such. Bond is NOT a one-man army, period.

-- Contrary to what everyone else believes, I find the conceit of James Bond vs. Rupert Murdoch absolutely inspired (as Siskel and Ebert pointed out, these are the guys trying to take over the world). A shame that the writers executed this in the most asinine manner possible, transforming what could have been a terrifying villain into the Blofeld of YOLT. I would love to see a loose remake for the Craig era, delving into the collusion of business, media and government.

-- The k.d. lang tune "Surrender" is among the very best Bond themes...the greatest composition John Barry never made. Thing of it is, IT'S CONSIGNED TO THE BLOODY CREDITS!!!!! What we get for the opening is some forgettable Crow ditty. God, the producers honestly have no clue, do they?

-- I don't care for the way Bond killed Carver. It crossed a line from ruthlessness to outright sadism.

 

You know, I'm pretty sure I've watched this one twice and I still remember absolutely nothing about it. It doesn't even have the courtesy to be loathsome or hilarious (Aside from a certain scene), it just... existed. That's a really egregious sin in film as far as I'm concerned, at least fail spectacularly.

 

I liked Die Another Day way more than this film (I actually kinda liked it more than I should); and I think the plot of Moonraker was way better than this.

 

Well, she's bland, and she's not particularly attractive. She's got this plain face that's all full of weird angles. She's not ugly, she just doesn't have what I'd consider Bond girl looks. She doesn't do anything to balance out the fact that the ultra-boring, generic Hatcher is the other Bond girl. They were absolute idiots to select her over Monica Bellucci. The result is the first and only film, IMO, not to manage a single appealing Bond girl.

 

TND wasn't worse than DAD, and it's certainly not the worst in the serious - how quaintly absurd an exclamation. With TMWTGG and Moonraker in the canon, you can't quite hit bottom yet...

 

I guess we'll get to it when we get to it, but I don't see the cause for all the outrage at Die Another Day. It was a big flashy action movie that also featured a guy pointlessly having sex and killing people while fighting a villain with goofy plans. As this thread has shown, that's not at all unique for this franchise. The best films in the series are occasionally something more, but that was much more the exception that the rule. Similarly, save the stupidity of the whole media-mogul-villain thing, I don't really see how this one was that especially bad either.