Xander Markham

The Book Of Mormon review

2013-05-15T18:00:00.000+01:00

The Book Of Mormon, Trey Parker and Matt Stone's broadway behemoth, arrives in London under the stormcloud of controvery which follows the SouthPark creators wherever they go. The show's depiction of a poverty-striken Ugandan village being saved by two white missionaries has drawn the wrath of its left-leaning attendees, while conservative voices have risen in characteristic fury to denounce the mocking of white religious righteousness.

As ever, the reality falls somewhere in between the two extremes. Parker and Stone have long relished holding organised religion to account for its hypocrises, but shown a more subtle appreciation for the importance of faith as a concept, even if the material it is attached to is sometimes questionable. This humanist nuance is also what salvages Mormon's depiction of the native Ugandans from accusations of racism. Many of them speak in ridiculous voices, have unsanitary views on the appropriate course of action regarding female genitalia (even doing an uncanny facial imitation in the show's most inspired visual gag) and show a willingness to embrace ridiculous ideology in the vain hope of escaping the terror and famine of their everyday lives. What makes it work is how these stereotypical traits are used as a smokescreen for an underlying cynicism and self-awareness which the two white leads, who arrive on the scene with naïve assumptions about their moral and spiritual superiority, utterly lack in their total detachment from reality.

Jokes about an AIDS-afflicted villager having maggots in his scrotum undermine that subversive wit, and the songs, while amusing, are nowhere near as memorable or catchy as Parker and Stone's finest musical contributions to South Park, either the TV show or movie. The duo's affinity for calling upon deceased dictators for comedy value remains as one-note as ever, and the backdrops and staging often lack the ambition or vitality expected of such a production. For better or worse, it's the stage show you'd expect from the creators of SouthPark and, perhaps more pertinently, earlier movie musical Cannibal! Despite its stumbles, Book Of Mormon's ribald sense of humour and subtle notes of empathy carry it over the finishing line with winningly unfettered gusto.

Review: Sightseers

2012-11-30T22:00:00.000Z

FILM REVIEW

Review Scoring Chart - 10: Masterpiece; 9: Outstanding; 8: Very Good; 7: Good; 6: Above Average; 5: Average; 4: Below Average; 3: Bad; 2: Awful; 1: Reprehensible; 0: Non-Functional.

SIGHTSEERS

Dir: Ben Wheatley

Stars: Alice Lowe, Steve Oram, Eileen Davies, Richard Glover

Running Time: 88 mins

In a year where Great Britain has been celebrated by its Queen's jubilee, a successful Olympics and the fiftieth anniversary of its greatest cinematic icon, there's something gleefully appropriate about the year's final show of national identity tearing the pomposity and circumstance down into the mud. Brits often cite self-deprecation as a shared characteristic, and Sightseers is a movie which delights in pettiness rather than pagentry, a nation of grumblers as frustrated by manners, history and the countryside as they are in love with them.

In America, social rebellion has been given a glamourous veneer by such movies as Natural Born Killers or Bonnie And Clyde, perpetuating a myth of the heroic outlaw originating in the tales of the Old West. Britain has its romantic ideals too, but places as much value in subverting as championing them: in a year where Judi Dench's recital of Alfred Lord Tennyson's 'Ulysses' provided a moment of unashamedly thrilling patriotism, Ben Wheatley's use of Blake's 'Jersualem' over a man beating a fellow rambler to death following an argument about dog excrement becomes all the more perfect.

Truth is, Sightseers' humour feels so specific to British stereotypes and insecurities that it's difficult to imagine the movie travelling with much success. Attack The Block was occasionally met with confusion at the density of the characters' accents, but Ben Wheatley not only wheels out the regional voices, but concerns too: does any other nation share the love-hate relationship with its countryside as Britain does, or the people who inhabit (or visit) it? What will Americans make of the movie's amused respect for such inane eccentricities as a pencil museum, crumbling viaducts, or tour guides dedicated to the history of tramlines? Other countries may have their share of nutcases, but Britain seems the only one to consider them national treasures even while acknowledging their lunacy.

That dichotomy is where the movie mines its pitch-black comedy. The plot sends a reclusive middle-aged woman named Tina on a caravan holiday, as much to escape her manipulative mother as embark on the 'sexual odyssey' promised by her cheerful, if somewhat bitter new boyfriend, Chris. As they trawl the many ridiculous tourist 'attractions' littering rural England, it becomes clear that Chris' passive-aggressive streak is tied to a murderous self-righteousness. As his body count rises, Tina's fear gives way to a newfound sense of liberation, revealing a psychotic streak even wilder than that of her boyfriend.

The movie delights in finding increasingly gory ways to exterminate such stereotypes as the private school-educated over-achiever, the pernickity environmentalist, the debauched bride-to-be on her hen night celebrations. The irony, naturally, is that as much as Chris and Tina are infuriated by these people, so too do they share many of their traits. Chris' first kill revolves around avenging the inconsiderate littering of a public place, an annoyance expressed against Tina by his second victim. Tina, too, may have nothing but contempt for the loose morals of the woman wrapping her tongue around her boyfriend's tonsils, but is in the midst of a depraved sexual revolution of her own.

These vignettes give the movie an episodic feel which prevents the story from flowing completely smoothly, but the thematic thoroughfare is so strong and each grisly murder framed in such stunning countryside vistas (making it one of the year's most beautiful movies) that any complaints become incidental. The movie shares a number of traits with last year's barmstorming Kill List, not to mention Wheatley's cinematic debut Down Terrace, particularly a fascination with psychotically unstable relationships and a refusal to offer concrete answers to the topical ideas - the recession's creation of an angry, unemployed underclass is briefly but powerfully hinted at - it plays around with.

In addition to having written the screenplay, Alice Lowe and Steve Oram give powerful, layered performances which make Tina and Chris fascinating and entertainingly unhinged company, despite becoming increasingly unsympathetic as their week-long journey proceeds. Lowe, in particular, transitions her character from buttoned-up wallflower to lusty psychotic without a hint of contrivance, rooted in her need to break out of the mental shackles her loathsome mother (Eileen Davies) bound her in. Apart from nebbish innocent Martin - who gets a great sight gag with a runaway sleeping pod - the supporting cast is restricted to cameos, but are great fun as fodder for the central pair's murderous impulses.

The symbolism and ironic music choices may be laid on a little thick, and anyone expecting a laugh-a-minute comedy will come as unstuck as those who went into Kill List expecting a routine hitman thriller, but Wheatley's genre-blending revisionism and eye for dramatic visuals make Sightseers every bit as distinctive, exciting, and almost certainly divisive, as its predecessor. Great Britain may have spent the past year enrapturing the world in patriotic pagentry, but where Bond and his Queen (Elizabeth, not M) celebrated the country's historic romanticism, it's two complaining, cagoule-wearing caravaners slaughtering their way across the countryside who prove unexpectedly perfect embodiments of the shambolic, bleakly funny reality. [ 8 ]

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Call Of Duty: Black Ops II launch event report (via Hit-Reset)

2012-11-13T20:00:00.000Z

Last night, I attended the London launch party for Call Of Duty: Black Ops II. You can read my full report over at Hit-Reset, which includes impressions of the game's multiplayer modes in addition to INSIDER GOSSIP on why rapper Professor Green is a distinctly ungallant loser, the career change Olympic gymnast Louis Smith would consider if offered £50k a year by Chris Kamara, and what craziness adorned the loo walls. All that and more in this week's Hello Magazine!

Sorry, I meant at the link below. Easy mistake to make.

Read the full report here

Regular blog updates to end

2012-10-30T12:00:00.000Z

Out of the gate, thanks to everyone who read the blog during my Countdown To 007 feature. A new Bond movie is always a matter of enormous excitement for me and it's wonderful being able to share that passion with fellow fans. A particular shout out to Silent Hunter, who was commenting every step of the way!

Unfortunately it's a little bittersweet, as Skyfall's release was decided a short while back as the finishing line for my regularly updating the blog. (Hence the recent lack of television coverage). I've been writing here as often as possible for the past year and a half and have enjoyed some proud moments along the way - particularly the serialised publication of my full length action thriller, Dead Drop - but changing circumstances mean the time commitment required has become too great to continue for the foreseeable future. I'll still update every now and again with links to noteworthy work produced for other sites, but anything exclusive is going to be thin on the ground. Everything will stay where it is, meaning the blog will effectively become an archive for my work from here on out.

I'd like to offer my gratitude to all the blog's visitors since the first post in April 2011. It has been great fun to write and hopefully just as enjoyable to read. I'll miss being part of the conversation when Breaking Bad concludes next year (and Mad Men the year after), as getting reader feedback on my previous analyses was always a pleasure. Yes, even you, spam. Well, maybe not. My Twitter and Facebook accounts will stay open should anyone wish to get in touch or need a freelance entertainment writer for hire, but as far as the blog goes for now, it's so long, and thanks for all the fish. Follow the jump for a selection of my favourite articles and features.

TELEVISION COVERAGE

MOVIES

Ran (Retrospective)
Skyfall
Countdown To 007 (Feature)
Dredd
The Dark Knight Rises
Prometheus
The Avengers
The Cabin In The Woods
Tideland (Retrospective)
Kill List
W.E. (congratulations to Madonna for the lowest score awarded on the blog!)
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Dougal & The Blue Cat (Retrospective)
The Skin I Live In
Attack The Block
How Communist China Is Keeping Hollywood At Bay (Essay)
Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows Pt II
Django (Retrospective)

GAMES

Retrospective: Ran (1985)

2012-10-29T14:00:00.000Z

[An earlier version of this article was originally published on Flixist]

Ahead of an announcement tomorrow on this blog's future, I thought now would be a good time to pay tribute to a masterpiece of world cinema, a movie both intensely personal to its director and grander in scope than any before or since. For me, as a teenager sitting down to watch it on a cheap television in a boarding school common room reeking of various substances I didn't want to think about, it opened my eyes and mind to the majestic heights cinema could achieve under the limitless artistry of an old man looking through his camera at a world so much darker than he remembered it from his youth.

That man was Akira Kurosawa. His movie, his magnum opus, is Ran.

Many people discover Kurosawa's work via the great Seven Samurai, a movie rightfully considered one of the most influential ever made and a prototype for the modern action blockbuster. It has been remade in countless forms in the ensuing decades, and its inspiration is evident in any ensemble blockbuster you care to mention, including the recent The Dark Knight Rises. Much of its appeal comes from its ballsy, freewheeling tone, idolising its samurai heroes and their bloody retribution against villainous bandits. It's a film by a young director at the height of his popularity, having a great time dreaming up the Japanese equivalent to a boy's own adventure.

Some thirty years later, Ran is the work of an old man shunned by the film industry back home, which saw him as out of touch with contemporary Japanese audiences and his work too costly for the box office risks it presented, and horrified by the nuclear weapons developed in the wake of Hiroshima. Where Seven Samurai is about growth, honour and violence as noble endeavour, Ran sees a world contaminated with death and moral decay, where the human race has set itself down a path of self-destruction without thinking to look back. This contamination affects every facet of existence, from the son inheriting the cruelty and treachery of his father; a wife manipulating her husband into war out of her lust for power and vengeance; a once feared King driven to madness by the realisation of the irreparable damage his reign was responsible for; the suffering of the good people caught in the midst of feuds between the powerful nobility; last of all, the Gods watching the destruction from the heavens and doing nothing.

In a running time five minutes shorter than the aforementioned Dark Knight Rises, Kurosawa manages to give every character a story of their own, individually examining the movie's central themes on a different social or spiritual level. As a piece of writing, it does not have a single unnecessary scene or character from beginning to end. Each storyline carries an equal share of the thematic and narrative work, with every action yielding a bigger picture consequence building towards humanity's inevitable downfall.

The story shares much in common with Shakespeare's most multi-faceted play, King Lear, in which an narcissistic monarch is humiliated and driven mad after handing his kingdom over to his two manipulative daughters and disinheriting the one who truly loved him. As his land is torn apart by war and political scavenging, Lear is forced to accept the depth of his folly. Ran's basic premise is similar, but where Lear's undoing is the result of arrogance and short-sightedness, the fate of Kurosawa's King Hidetora (played with raw, unhinged intensity from behind Noh makeup by Tatsuya Nakadai) is the result of his tyrannical past, values passed onto the sons, Taro and Jiro, to whom he bequeaths power. Where Shakespeare's play is self-contained, Ran's plot is backed up by characters with long and ignoble histories.

When I watched Ran, my knowledge of Kurosawa was rudimentary at best: I had seen a couple of his movies (Seven Samurai, Throne Of Blood and Ikiru), but was ignorant of his personal history. One of the many things which makes the film so astonishing is how, the more you learn about the director and Japanese culture, the greater depths are revealed. Unlike Vertigo, which I contend is enjoyable but needlessly weird for anyone academically unfamiliar with Hitchcock's personal neuroses and auteur stylings, Ran is magnificent no matter your entry level. Its pleasures merely grow in proportion to your knowledge.

In the movie's most iconic scene, King Hidetora takes refuge in an abandoned castle. Taro and Jiro's armies subsequently attack, slaughtering Hidetora's personal bodyguard. Horrified by his sons' actions and unable to commit seppuku due to a broken sword, Hidetora wanders out into the battlefield, his white robes and pale face contrasting with the blazing battlements behind him and scorched earth beneath his feet. Rather than murder him, the soldiers watch in silent awe as their former king wanders out into the wilderness. It's an incredible scene, wordlessly conveying so much about the impermanence of status and the illusion of power, yet years later, a professor interviewing me at Cambridge University (if that sounds like an explanabrag, know that I didn't get an offer afterwards) who shared a love of the film explained how, in Japanese mythology, it was believed a king's ghost could be seen leaving his castle after death. A small detail in no way vital to feeling the scene's impact, but adding so much to the psychology of how it plays out and the story's nihilistic religious underpinnings.

The scene's visual splendour is far from isolated: Ran has Kurosawa at his most artistically fearless, using colour and framing to inform his themes (setting in conflict the greens of nature, the whites of the spiritual and the divine, and the black and red of man's violent nature) with a control over his craft not yet acquired by the brash young director behind his earlier pictures. Anyone who has seen the movie will not be surprised to learn Kurosawa spent a decade planning each shot in painted storyboards, swapping out the tightly shot realism of his black and white work for the bold composition and heightened colour of an Impressionist painting in motion. If the movie's themes are bleak and harsh, the cinematography (accompanied by Tōru Takemitsu's strikingly otherworldly score) both cushions the blow and reinforces it as a reminder of the beauty being torn apart by human madness.

The movie is so rich and densely textured that essays could be written about the meaning of individual shots or characters: Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada, in a performance as terrifyingly unhinged as her eyebrows) and Lady Sué as emblematic of the ruination of femininity in a male-dominated world; how the human race uses the assumed existence of gods to justify acts of savagery, adding another layer to the motif of moral corruption bleeding down hierarchies... talking of plots and subplots feels almost redundant. There are stories to be found everywhere, each as meaningful in its own way as the ones taking place directly in front of the camera. That's why Ran, to me, is not only the greatest film ever made, but the greatest single work of art I have ever experienced. The power struggles shown on-screen represent barely an atom of the world and history Kurosawa creates, only to watch it go up in flames as per the Gods to the human race. The title translates into Japanese as 'chaos', and just as that describes the nature of the universe, so too does it describe the nature of Ran.

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Movies: Skyfall review

2012-10-26T18:00:00.000+01:00

FILM REVIEW

Review Scoring Chart - 10: Masterpiece; 9: Outstanding; 8: Very Good; 7: Good; 6: Above Average; 5: Average; 4: Below Average; 3: Bad; 2: Awful; 1: Reprehensible; 0: Non-Functional.

SKYFALL

Dir: Sam Mendes

Stars: Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Javier Bardem, Naomie Harris, Ben Whishaw

Running Time: 143 mins

This review will be spoiler-free, making it one of the hardest I've ever had to write. Not only because I'm a Bond nerd of unhealthy magnitude, no doubt demonstrated by the Countdown To 007 feature running on this blog for the past nine days, but because many of Skyfall's biggest joys come from its celebration and repositioning of a fifty year cinematic legacy. That's not to suggest there isn't plenty for non-devotees to enjoy as well: these days, Bond follows the trend of the times, and the movie's central set-piece offers a very British take on The Dark Knight's formula for sprawling urban epics, before moving to the remote highlands for a climactic showdown which blends the 'Englishman's home is his castle' ethos of Straw Dogs with a strong nods to Ian Fleming's Spy Who Loved Me novel.

Those calling Skyfall a 'classic' Bond are wide of the mark, however. It is unlike any other entry in the series, driven by theme rather than plot and with a distinct identity to its visuals, soundtrack and direction. The Bond series' deliberate visual uniformity has given it a reputation as a no man's land for technical artists, but Skyfall is very much the amalgamated product of Sam Mendes' character-driven theatrical background, Roger Deakins' stunning use of colour and composition, and Thomas Newman's subtly evocative score. For the first time since the early Connery era, the people behind the camera represent top tier talent operating at the height of their powers, and it shows in every gorgeous frame.

The movie strikes a perfect balance between its modern subject matter and a romantic devotion to an idealised past. The plot, as revealed in the trailer, kicks off with a hard drive going missing containing the identity of Nato agents undercover in terrorist cells across the globe, before branching out into fears about invisible enemies and the perils of national security being entrusted to technology when there are people on both sides capable of manipulating it to their own ends. The symbolism can be a little heavy-handed, but the topic is potent for a series which has often thrived following accusations of being outdated. Such concerns may be embedded in the here and now, but Bond remains one of the old guard and the movie is a paean to the idea (and importance) of people like him standing up for old-fashioned ideals and ready to engage with threats on a physical level.

After turning psycho in Quantum Of Solace, Bond's inherent decency is established in the movie's first few minutes, characterised as someone who won't flinch in making difficult decisions while performing his duty but places value in every life saved or lost. Given the beautifully framed shot of M standing behind a row of coffins draped in Union Jack flags, the movie could be read as a tribute to the real heroes in our Armed forces, risking their lives in far away lands so everyone at home can sleep more safely. In this light, Craig's rough and tumble Bond is very much a soldier in spirit, albeit in civilian clothes and fighting his battles against individuals rather than armies. It's a powerful and honourable take on the character, finally giving an identifying purpose to Craig's interpretation, which until now has seemed trapped between the original character and modern expectations, even in his strong Casino work. The snobbery and sexism are mostly gone, but Bond is first and foremost a champion for his country, and Skyfall proudly restores him to that role while adding the self-doubting inner monologue which was a vital humanising ingredient of Fleming's character. A poetic interjection at the mid-point sums up the movie's ethos in a way that movingly evokes the meld of high culture with blockbuster action which remains one of the series' defining characteristics.

Javier Bardem's villain Silva is another rooted in Fleming tradition - a larger than life grotesque - while finding a new direction for one of the series' stock figures. The shocking blonde hair is an obvious nod to Julian Assange, as is, perhaps, the unsavoury nature of the character's sexuality. (Bond's riposte to some heavy flirtation is one of Skyfall's biggest, riskiest laughs). It's no surprise Bardem was attracted to the role, because Silva could have been lifted straight out of Pedro Almodovar, bubbling over with mother issues and concealing internal instability behind a florid manner. True, the character's history is delivered in a single monologue and we have to take his previous talents on trust, but Bardem, always at his finest in a hideous wig, suggests horrifying depths and sadness in his non-verbal cues, rendering the concrete facts of his sinister speeches compelling, but effectively redundant.

Turning a villain into a mirror for Bond is a familiar device, but has rarely been used so effectively and aimed so specifically. M has long been more expository figure than actual character, even with the role expanded in recent outings, but Judi Dench is this time at the heart of the conflict, an ageing symbol for an institution under fire for covertly risking lives in a time where transparency and sensitivity are the order of the day. Skyfall is satisfyingly concerned with consequences as much as action, and never have Bond's orders and his relationship with the people who deliver them been subject to such scrutiny. It is as much a character study as an action movie, proven by the relative dearth of huge set-pieces outside the impressively manic pre-credits sequence and intense finale.

While not huge in number, each grows out of the drama organically with considerable individuality in their scope and staging. The choreography is captured with a flawless sense of geography, mercifully making Dan Bradley's motion-sickness inducing Quantum Of Solace camerawork a one-off aberration. That level of artistry is enhanced by Roger Deakins' cinematography, which turns Shanghai into a Blade Runner-esque sci-fi cityscape illuminated by flashing neon billboards, Macau a searing cesspit of reds and oranges, and relishes the stoic Victorian beauty of London's subterranean foundations. If Deakins gives the movie its visual flair, Thomas Newman makes it sing with the series' most daring soundtrack to date, mixing familiar Bond cues - perfectly deployed at key moments - with more unusual asymmetric rises and longueurs. Adele's theme song is restricted to the gorgeous if slightly muddled credits sequence, but is note-perfect as a contemporary spin on Shirley Bassey's immortal contributions.

A handful of small frustrations hold the movie back from the genre-defining greatness of series highlights like From Russia With Love or Goldfinger. While the many nods to the series' legacy are entirely welcome and executed with joyous glee - not to give anything away, but the Aston Martin twice steals the show - the components of the plot can feel a little overfamiliar. Yes, after twenty-three movies, some recycling is forgiveable, but it takes a solid hour before the movie starts producing anything which could be considered remotely new. Silva's scheme is also built on very wobbly logic, particularly the always troublesome that idea he'd been setting up his master plan years ahead of time, requiring Tiresian levels of foresight. A few revelations at the end feel hamfisted in a similar way to The Dark Knight Rises' wrap-up, and though having the gunbarrel sequence as a closer is far more giddily enjoyable than its misplacement in Quantum, still takes away the unparalleled frisson of having it announce the start of a brand new Bond. Considering how the movie ends, surely there's now no possible excuse for not putting back in its rightful place for Craig's fourth outing.

Even more than Casino Royale, the movie feels like it is putting the pieces in place to return the Bond universe to a more traditional set-up, right down to the return of a very familiar looking set. Hopefully that will not mean abandoning the revisionist streak which makes Skyfall both unique in the canon and very much a part of it, but the series has always had a keen sense of what to evolve and what to safeguard, and there's no reason to fear that may not be the case going forward. If not quite top of the pile, this remains one of the most energised and artistically rich entries in Bond's long history, played out by a wonderful cast - Naomie Harris is charm personified and has a sweetly affable manner in her interplay with Craig, while Bérénice Marlohe, Ralph Fiennes and Albert Finney all vividly define their characters in a very short space of time - and an inspired choice of director in Sam Mendes, who gently signs the film without ever threatening to overpower it. If any Bond is to have a legitimate claim at Academy recognition, this is the one. After fifty years, Skyfall proves Bond is still on top of his game. [ 8 ]

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Countdown To 007: Casino Royale, Quantum Of Solace

2012-10-25T14:00:00.000+01:00

This Countdown comes to an end with Daniel Craig's two Bond movies under the microscope ahead of his third outing, Skyfall, released tomorrow in the UK and on November 9th in the US. The actor's powerhouse performance in Casino Royale was undermined by a big stumble in the under-developed, poorly shot Quantum Of Solace, and it will certainly be interesting to see whether the right lessons have been learnt. For all the untidness of the movie as a whole, there's real potential in some of Quantum's individual ideas and while Skyfall won't be taking them up, fingers crossed that future Bonds make the most of them.

My review of Bond's twenty-third outing will be going up tomorrow. Don't miss it.

CASINO ROYALE

Casino Royale is a great example of Bond being trapped between a rock and a hard place, but coming out victorious anyway. Many fans were dismayed by the series' dive into tired self-parody in Die Another Day and eager for a change, yet appalled when that change involved the loss of Pierce Brosnan, with his split from the series supposedly less than amicable. Wounded comments from the actor in the press shortly afterwards would certainly support this claim, although while the nature of his departure has never been officially disclosed (understandably), he seems to have made peace with it in the following years. His spirited appearance in the excellent documentary Everything Or Nothing shows a man not necessarily pleased, but accepting, of the producers' need to take drastic action to save the creatively ailing series.

Either way, neither the press nor fans were anticipating the role to go to Daniel Craig, a man until then best known for a slightly-Bondish lead role in Layer Cake and a handful of serious dramas. He didn't look like the typical Bond, or anything close to Ian Fleming's description from the books, and his blonde hair and muddled appearance at his first press conference were taken as omens of impending doom. The revelation that the series would finally adapt Fleming's first novel - Casino Royale - after finally acquiring the rights was greeted with great enthusiasm, but the prospect of a full series reboot, making Craig the first man to play a brand new Bond (got that, Tamahori?), was treated with suspicion by many - yours truly included - who remembered stories of Cubby Broccoli rejecting a Bond origin story out of hand on several occasions.

In other words, there was greater pressure than ever on the series to pull something spectacular out of the hat. With Die Another Day writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade still on scripting duty, doubters were out in droves as to whether they could succeed. A few months ahead of the movie's release, the script was leaked to a disheartening reception. I tracked it down at the time and was met by questionable dialogue, a slightly uncomfortable structural framework seemingly blending two plots into one, and several key scenes from the novel either weakened by unnecessary humour or completely rewritten for the sake of another action set-piece. It was unquestionably an improvement over Die Another Day, because a colonoscopy is a step up in enjoyment over Die Another Day, but didn't seem to do justice by Fleming's book or justify the casting of such an unusual Bond as Craig.

All the flaws described are present in the final movie. The dialogue is, at times, face-palmingly awful ('If the only thing left of you was your smile and your little finger...') and the torture scene's forced humour has the movie relent at the time it really could have gone seriously nasty, turning Bond into a bit of a caricature, even if director Martin Campbell kept the tone darker than it appeared on the page. The climactic set-piece in an abandoned Venice building also makes little logical sense and is too overblown to have the same gut-punch impact as Vesper's suicide in the novel. Fleming's powerhouse of a closing line ('Yes damnit, I said 'was'. The bitch is dead now.') is also completely thrown away, even if the alternative offers its own thrill in a decidedly showier way. For all the claims of the movie being grittier and tougher, it always backs down when Fleming was at his most sadistic. Given the mainstream reception to Licence To Kill, a movie which never pulled a single punch, that might have been a wise decision. From a fan perspective, it's a tad disappointing.

Nevertheless, the shortcomings of Casino's script are squashed into near insignificance by the inspired creative team of director Martin Campbell, who had revived Bond once before with Goldeneye, and star Daniel Craig, whose force of nature performance immediately established a more forceful, psychologically fractured Bond than had been presented on screen before. While Craig rightly attracted all the plaudits, Campbell's role in the movie's success should not be overlooked: the film is visually sumptuous, at once filled with bold colour but never losing a grounding earthy quality. From the black and white introduction to the limited, slightly saturated lighting in the torture scene, every section of the movie has a distinct visual identity formed around the mental state of Daniel Craig's Bond. When he's doing what he does best, firing guns and kicking arse, the movie beams around him. When he's in emotional or physical pain, Campbell pares back to a limited palette, unpredictable cutting and a harsher image quality. Editor Stuart Baird, who had plenty to atone for after helming Star Trek Nemesis (which did to that series precisely what Die Another Day did to Bond), cuts the movie together with stunning assurance, keeping the big action scenes moving at a frantic pace while showing no fear in taking the time to build tension around an elongated game of poker.

The foot chase across and over a construction site is where these talents come together in the most striking way. It's the rare action scene driven entirely by character, where Bond's ability to adapt to his surroundings on the fly is set against bomb-maker Mollaka's super-human levels of freerunning agility. (The character makes such an impact that star Sébastian Foucan, one of the founders of parkour, gets his own credit distinct from the rest of the cast). Where Mollaka dives gracefully through a narrow gap above a cardboard placeholder for a door, Bond smashes right through it. Where Mollaka escapes the building's upper floors by leaping from one lift to another, Bond smashes the controls of a nearby hydraulic platform to drop him to ground. As M notes, he's a one man path of destruction, albeit with a better understanding of the big picture than she gives him credit for. Is he Fleming's Bond? Yes and no. His lack of professionalism and self-control certainly push towards the latter, but his introspective streak offers a surprisingly effective representation of the literary Bond's sometimes self-doubting inner monologue.

Craig immediately owns the role, balancing brute force with a fragile psychology which finds a match in Eva Green's wonderfully fatale Vesper Lynd. There isn't a weak link among the cast, and the movie's biggest sign of confidence is in giving villain Le Chiffre (portrayed by the viper-like Mads Mikkelsen) an identifying physical defect which is sinister rather than silly. The welcome hints of a SPECTRE-like criminal organisation behind the scenes give the impression of a world of nastier, more cunning villains waiting to be torn apart in future movies, even if such tantalising promises now look destined to go unfulfilled. Is Casino Royale the best Bond ever? Nope. But it offers yet further proof of the Bond series' unmatched ability to successfully adapt to the demands of new times and new audiences, achieving success off the back of difficult and often controversial creative choices. Anyone who compares a movie this brave and immediately iconic to the one-note Bourne movies (which themselves stole plenty from Dalton-era Bond, albeit with a fraction of the substance) is a buffoon. At the time when the doubters were louder than ever, Casino Royale and Daniel Craig comprehensively proved that nobody plays the action game better than Bond.

QUANTUM OF SOLACE

There's a worthy sequel to Casino Royale somewhere in Quantum Of Solace, but it takes a lot of digging to find amid the clutter. One of the excuses given for its lack of focus was the Writers' Guild strike, which reared its head in the middle of script development. The movie subsequently went into production with what Daniel Craig later described as a 'barebones' script, requiring he and director Marc Forster to rewrite key scenes on the fly. That explains the ramshackle plot - completely unrelated to the Fleming short story, an curio from the For Your Eyes Only short story collection inspired by Somerset Maugham's tales of adultery and failing relationships - but doesn't excuse the shoddy editing or shaky-cam rendering the action sequences virtually incomprehensible. Guess who was on second unit direction duty? None other than Bourne's Dan Bradley, aka the man who murdered the art of action directing. Quantum's script may be a mess, but doesn't deserve to be the sole scapegoat for the movie's failings when the technical problems are far more serious. For a movie so dependent on its action, Quantum does a terrible job with them.

Once the movie settles down in its second half, it improves immeasurable. While I'm certainly not going to call it a classic, or even particularly good - it's about on a par with The World Is Not Enough for me - there are things to be enjoyed. First of all, once the plot finds a focus of sorts, Quantum's scheme to monopolise Bolivia's water supply may not send pulses racing in the manner expected from a Bond movie, but does present the organisation's devious nature in a realistic context. The exploitation of natural resources remains a serious debate in environmental discussion and Quantum going after the water supply of a third world country is consistent with their modus operandi of operating beneath the radar and taking power through the incremental acquisition of international influence. The movie wastes its opportunity to satirise the hypocrisies of the green movement, but is at least fuelled by some interesting, timely ideas.

Quantum's project in Casino isn't any grander in scope, concerning nothing more than the offering of financial services to an African militia. As that movie proves, a relatively low-stakes plot is far from a death knell if the story is told clearly enough and it is made sufficiently important for the characters to succeed. Bond's revenge mission should be the movie's main focus, but because Dominic Greene (the deliciously slimy Mathieu Amalric) is shown to be but another of the organisation's middle-men, there's no single figure for him to chase down for Vesper's death. Mr. White could have filled the role and is the movie's most fascinating villain - I like how he's the only one clever enough not to fall for Bond's trick at the opera - but is kept mostly on the sidelines. In the end, there's no link between Bond tracking down Vesper's Algerian 'boyfriend' (who was blackmailing her on Quantum's behalf) and the plot he's just foiled, rendering it essentially irrelevant to his character arc. Greene's plan isn't weak for concerning a South American water supply, but for having next to nothing to do with Bond's stated goal.

The gradual revelation of the depth of Quantum's influence is another of the movie's strong suits, setting in motion all kinds of potentially enormous threats - we learn one of their moles is an advisor to the British Prime Minister - which could fuel countless Bond plots to come. Such a pity, then, that the producers appear to have flaked out on the prospect at the first sign of trouble, asserting that the 'story is told' and the series is likely to forget about the organisation hereafter. I hope that's not the case, because Quantum poses more questions than it answers and we're still yet to see a figure who could be described as Quantum's leader. True, it could be understandably argued that the meeting at the opera is effectively a board meeting and by identifying each of the members, Bond has gathered enough information for them to be taken down. A single man at the top is perhaps unrealistic, but isn't the prospect of a new Blofeld figure - not neccessarily the man himself, although I still think there's a very strong argument for the character's return - too irresistible to pass up? Besides, the idea that Bond took down a global criminal network with a fairly obvious ploy and a camera phone would be an anticlimax to end all anticlimaxes. I'm pretty sure Silva's scheme in Skyfall could have been linked back to Quantum somehow, and would certainly fit the organisation's fondness for collaborators with colourful names. I'm seeing the movie tomorrow, but given the fervent denials, am not holding out much hope for this to be a late twist, exciting though it would be.

One of Quantum Of Solace's biggest disappointments is Daniel Craig's Bond, who was ferocious but vulnerable in Casino but reduced to a one-dimensional mass murderer for much of Quantum. Licence To Kill showed Bond on a revenge mission but still maintaining a basic level of professionalism and morality, whereas the character more or less wantonly slaughters everyone he comes across here. The human side which levelled out his destructive streak in Casino is almost entirely absent, save one of two heavy-handed reminders of Vesper's death, and most tellingly, where Bond was visibly shown suffering and taking damage in the previous movie, here he barrels through proceedings with barely a scratch. Even Craig's performance is more a surface imitation of what worked last time than an extension, keeping a somber facial expression throughout and delivering all his lines in the same monotone. Olga Kurylenko's near-feral Camille is consequently much more interesting and sympathetic, with a clear target in her quest to avenge her parents' deaths (General Medrano) and her ferocious exterior hiding deep-set fears and self-doubt. Were it just her trapped in the burning hotel at the end of the movie, crippled by the arsonphobia embedded in her psyche as a child and ready to commit suicide, the moment would have real power. With the quasi-invincible Bond at her side, its bleakness is undeserved and meaningless.

The movie's use of its characters is a mixed bag throughout. Mathis' return offers nothing and requires the contrivance of his having been posted in Bolivia earlier in his career for whatever reason, while his death is horribly handled. (His involvement also shows up how pointless it was to have Bond send him off to be tortured at the end of Casino). On the other hand, Felix Leiter gets more screentime - if not enough with Bond - and while I'm not a supporter of 'colour blind' casting, there's no question that Jeffrey Wright's droll cynicism makes his every appearance one to look forward to. Gemma Arterton is marvellously prim and Strawberry Fields is a fun name for a Bond girl, despite the character only existing to be killed off in a Goldfinger homage that serves no purpose other than for its own sake. She's still not as irrelevant as Greene's ally Elvis though, who may be the most disposable character in any movie in the Bond series. Is he really only there for the sake of a toupée joke, which barely even registers?

That messiness drags Quantum down every step of the way. While the writers' strike undoubtedly had a serious impact on the uneven story structure and unfocused narrative, it doesn't excuse the incoherent action scenes comprising almost the entire first half of the movie. The elements are there for something special - well, ignoring Alicia Keys and Jack White's tuneless title track - but in too much of a jumble and surrounded with too much dead wood to create a satisfying experience. It will be a shame if the Quantum organisation never gets a proper payoff to their two movie build-up and the only thing carried from this movie to the next is the senseless displacement of the gunbarrel sequence. Still, if there's one thing looking back over the twenty two movies of this Countdown has established, it's never to bet against 007. Check back tomorrow to find out if Bond's fiftieth year will be marked with yet another miraculous resurrection.

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Countdown To 007: The World Is Not Enough, Die Another Day

2012-10-24T14:00:00.000+01:00

The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day represent Bond as endurance rather than entertainment: the former has some merits but is undermined by messy pacing and tiresome action sequences, while the latter drags the series to its lowest point to date. A shame, because despite the underwhelming quality of both movies, Pierce Brosnan does some of his best work.

These write-ups have been republished from Flixist's ongoing Across The Bond feature, where fellow Bond nerd Matthew Razak and I go through the series one by one. The feature ends tomorrow with a look at Daniel Craig's two movies, before finding out on Friday whether his third time will be a charm for him as it was for Sean Connery and Roger Moore.

THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH

Like For Your Eyes Only, I respect The World Is Not Enough more than I like it. It tries to tell a story with greater focus on character, but is let down by clunky pacing and arbitrary action sequences. When first released out in 1999, I really liked it, but each subsequent viewing has dampened my enthusiasm. The ingredients are there for something special: the plot twist, itself almost uncharted territory for Bond, enacts out a sly reversal of expectations, making a villain out of one of the Bond girls. Sophie Marceau plays Elektra with a reserve which initially seems down to a natural resilience after being kidnapped as a girl, but is later revealed as the tactic of a devious manipulator out for revenge against the people who left her for dead. The whole situation with her mutilated ear is just weird, though - what, Renard sent Sir Robert King his daughter's... earlobe?

It's not the most shocking twist, with the name alone pointing towards the fractured parental relationships - although technically she should have hated her mother, not her father - but Marceau finds the right balance between fragility and cunning to make both sides of the character work. It fascinates me how few people recognise her as the movie's main villain, perhaps forgetting Bond's realisation that she turned Renard's allegiances whilst in captivity, rather than the other way around. Perhaps it's a further credit to Marceau's performance that so many viewers choose to see her as a victim or manipulated accomplice, just as Elektra would have wanted. Her personal relationship with M rings a little untrue as one writerly convenience too many, but getting Judi Dench more involved with the plot was a welcome step towards her increasing prominence in later movies. The addition of John Cleese as 'R' is altogether less successful, with his cameo recalling the most tediously exaggerated gags from the Roger Moore era.

The movie's schizophrenic nature is demonstrated by that scene being immediately followed by one of the series' most moving: the departure of the great Desmond Llewellyn's Q. While previous scenes between he and Bond found comedy in the antagonism between Q's curmudgeonliness and Bond's reckless playfulness, his farewell speech emphasizes the two men's shared affection. The sight of him being lowered into the depths of his laboratory (perfect last line: 'Always have an escape plan') is both eerie in the knowledge that Llewellyn died shortly after the movie's release - on my birthday, to make it personally that bit worse - and sweet for the delicacy of the humour. (It also deepens the connection between Bond and The Avengers [tv series] by echoing Emma Peel's equally devastating retirement advice for partner John Steed: 'Always keep your bowler on in times of stress, and watch out for diabolical masterminds'). Sad though it is, I'm glad the actor got to officially bow out on-screen and doubly so that it was alongside Pierce Brosnan, the Bond with whom he shared the most natural chemistry since Connery. It's just a shame the movie couldn't have been retroactively dedicated to him, so this article is instead. In memoriam, Desmond Llewellyn, 1914-1999.

Also terrific is Robert Carlyle as Renard, technically the movie's henchman. As with Marceau, the twist's credibility relies upon the audience being able to believe there's another side to Renard than the cruel exterior, and Carlyle's cavernous eyes and wounded expression give a hint of sadness to a man who knows he is dying and is using his last days to do right by the only love he has perhaps ever known. The revelation of his impotence should seem trite, but is used as a clever shorthand to establish how Elektra manipulates him. It's the only significant scene Marceau and Carlyle share together, and the nuances of their respective performances imbue it with greater resonance than the blunt writing deserves.

While Elektra's backstory and motivations provide the movie's real dramatic meat, the main plot feels excessively convoluted and struggles to establish any kind of storytelling rhythm. The movie's structure deploys a big action sequence for each element of Elektra's plan as Bond discovers it. To alleviate suspicions of guilt, she twice has Renard's men attack her pipeline: the first time, this causes a ski chase - just don't ask how she knew Bond would be there - and the second has Bond diffusing a bomb inside an oil pipeline. Renard collecting the bomb from Kazhakstan is another action sequence, as is Elektra's helicopters trying to eliminate Zukovsky to stop Bond discovering the pair's business agreement.

This approach segments the movie and makes it seem as though story elements have been reverse engineered to justify the action sequences, leading to over-saturation. That they're shot with such a lack of flair only makes their perfunctory nature all the more acute. The only set-pieces which work are in the excellent pre-titles sequence, where Bond first escapes a Spanish bank - one of my favourite scenes in any Brosnan movie - and later chases an assassin down the river Thames in the slick, gadget-heavy Q boat. These feature the movie's best stuntwork and some striking visuals - Bond jumping out of a top floor window at the bank, then his boat tearing through London and emerging in the shadow of the then-Millennium Dome - and set a far higher standard for action than the rest of the movie is able to meet. The climactic fight with Renard aboard the sinking submarine feels particularly uninspired in comparison.

Bond's only real purpose is to catch up with Elektra's intentions and then stop her at the last minute. Once again, the writers try to force some emotional resonance by having him get emotionally involved and betrayed by her - much as how such feelings were supposedly reignited with Paris Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies, only for her to be killed because of his investigations - and while it's too obvious to work much better this time around, at least Elektra's established powers of sexual manipulation give it greater credibility and Brosnan does some of his best work in their final scene as he tries to get Elekra to abort her plan, even though it would have made more dramatic sense for M to take his place. He certainly does better work than in the j'accuse scene where he pins her father's murder on her, with his line delivery seemingly oddly over-emphasized. In general, he gives a stronger performance than in Tomorrow Never Dies (including a well-handled allusion to Tracy), but remains a little too slick for his own good. He's given more to work with, and hints of vulnerability peek through at the right times, though still comes across as if acting Bond rather than becoming him.

Such minor shortcomings are nothing once Denise Richards appears on the scene playing a nuclear physicist. The idea is faintly amusing at first in the audacity of its ridiculousness, but as with Tanya Roberts' Stacey Sutton in A View To A Kill, gets old pretty quickly once she refuses to go away. Like Zukovsky, returning from GoldenEye with the sole purpose of making annoying in-jokes and moaning about insurance, she's a product of part of the plot which feels like it should have been covered quickly and without fuss (is it really so vital we see how Renard got the bomb, and Elektra the submarine?) rather than lingered upon for the sake of cramming in a bit more action. To be fair to Richards, she does the best she can, but it's hard to imagine anyone excelling in such a one-note role and she's not much of an actress at the best of times. On the plus side, her ridiculous name was blatantly only contrived for the sake of the movie's hilariously inappropriate final line, which is so stupid it circles around to being fun again.

While somehow working that one time, the movie's baser impulses undermine its commendable efforts creating a pair of psychologically complex villains in Elektra and Renard, who seem to exist in a different, more intelligent movie than the one where Bond, Zukovsky and Christmas Jones spend most of their time dodging bullets and explosions for the sake of minor plot revelations. Unfortunately, when choosing the direction of the next movie, the producers expanded upon this movie's spectacle rather than story, a miscalculation so grave it would lead to the series' entire continuity being abandoned for a fresh start.

DIE ANOTHER DAY

Lee Tamahori is the worst human being to ever be involved with the Bond series. Kevin McClory may pip him, since his persistent legal action was the last nail in Ian Fleming's coffin, but he got a producer credit on Thunderball without actually working on the movie, so I'm not counting him. Tamahori, though, was involved with every terrible decision that went into the Die Another Day debacle.

What he must have done to convince the Broccolis to hire him beggars belief, and not just because he was arrested four years later for offering oral sex to an undercover policeman while dressed in drag. The man clearly had zero knowledge of the series or respect for what made it work. For one thing, the intensely idiotic 'codename theory', postulating that every Bond until that point had been playing a different character under an assumed 'Bond' name, originates from him. Never mind that it was debunked by the interviewer in THE SAME CONVERSATION as Tamahori proposed it, the idea has lingered like a bad smell around the series ever since, tediously repeated over and over by people who might have seen one or two Bonds and want to feel clever and controversial. No. Bond continuity is messy, but it's patently obvious that everyone until Daniel Craig's reboot was playing the same man, often made clear through references to previous adventures or, most commonly, the loss of Tracy Bond in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Even the most cursory observer can only arrive at the conclusion that Tamahori's theory is guff. Even this movie's recall of gadgets from the classic movies and Brosnan's immediate familiarity with them, suggests it doesn't even make sense within the director's own work.

Tamahori's love of CGI and push for its inclusion in a series acclaimed for the authenticity of its stunts further demonstrates his tragic misunderstanding of what has made Bond tick over the preceding forty years. In promotional interviews, the director boasted about a CG-created scene so realistic no-one would be able to tell it apart from the live action. This boast was similar to one made by the Wachowski brothers (as they were then) a year later for The Matrix Reloaded, and even with a much bigger budget and more advanced technology, they couldn't pull it off. Needless to say, the scene Tamahori was referring to has gone down in Bond lore as one of the series worst - and yes, that includes the double-taking pigeon inMoonraker - not only for the sub-video game standard of the CGI work in question, but the staggering idiocy of expecting audiences to buy into Bondkite kite-surfing a tsunami. In the outstanding recent documentary Everything Or Nothing, even Pierce Brosnan cracks up at the stupidity of what he was asked to do. The addition of a bullet to the gunbarrel sequence isn't quite as bad - better than not having one at all, EH SKYFALL - but is a needless, meaningless addition which doesn't make the slightest bit of sense in any context.

It's not entirely fair to put all the blame on Tamahori, despite his being culpable for most of the worst crimes - urgh, all that slow-motion! Writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, inexplicably still on EON staff, deserve to take a significant chunk of the blame for a screenplay overflowing with painful dialogue, loathsome characters, 'virtual reality' (oh, Moneypenny...), and a superweapon imported wholesale from Diamonds Are Forever. What's worse is that the story can be loosely interpreted as a bastardisation of Fleming's Moonraker novel, in which a foreign villain poses as a British national hero and intends to use a space-based weapon to redraw the political landscape.

Despite the title, the novel is one of Fleming's most grounded, at times verging on a work of detective fiction as Bond and undercover Special Branch agent Gala Brand (the original name for Miranda Frost, until the producers, probably correctly, thought it sounded too much like a luxury sausage) gradually discover the truth behind a project secretly intended to destroy London in an act of retaliation by a vindictive enemy hiding in plain sight. In contrast, Die Another Day is an almost non-stop assault by misguided flights of wild fantasy, featuring invisible cars, a Robocop-esque control suit for the villain, an assistant with a Transylvanian accent named Igor and Jinx, a contender for worst ever Bond girl thanks to a series of pathetic wisecracks ('Yo mama!') and Halle Berry's inability to even hold a gun convincingly. Yes, she looks great in a bikini, but so did Britt Eckland.

In fairness, there are a handful of positives, although the fact they're so badly wasted becomes a further reason to dislike the movie. The idea of Bond being captured and tortured for over a year by enemy forces is a potent one, and the pre-titles sequence is sort of okay but for the shoddy backscreen work and laborious 'saved by the bell' pun, though it all goes to pot the moment Madonna's dreadful theme tune kicks in. Until Alicia Keys and Jack White came along with their incoherent ramblings for the Quantum Of Solace track, Madonna's was the first Bond song I genuinely disliked - yes, I'll even listen to Lulu - and only sounds increasingly dated over the passing years. That she was even allowed to cameo in the movie, a grievous little scene where the dialogue solely consists of double-entendres (or maybe single-entendres, they're so bad), shows the depths of the movie's creative failure. But anyway, further pluses include Rosamund Pike as Miranda Frost, who somehow manages to be a fairly enjoyable presence despite struggling with some of the movie's most aggressively awful lines ('That's pretty good tailoring...'), and Toby Stevens piling on the hammy smarm as Gustav Graves.

Pierce Brosnan is also comfortable enough in the role to throw in some nice little character grace notes - swiping a villain's sunglasses, showing a fondness for grapes recalling Thunderball and some uber-swagger walking through a posh hotel lobby sporting soggy pyjamas and a bushy beard - despite playing a character both considerably stupider than usual (yeah, you see how far you get hiding behind that invisible car, James) and too often Commando Bond than Commander Bond. He does some of his best work in the scenes evoking Bond's emotional damage, making it even more of a travesty it's trapped in far and away his worst movie.

Unfortunately, any hint of enjoyment is quickly submerged beneath a CGI tidal wave of awfulness. Countless further paragraphs could be written on the movie's other crimes, but we all have lives to lead and, frankly, I suspect most of us would rather leave this mess behind. Needless to say, it edges out Diamonds Are Forever for me as the lowest of the Bond low - although at least doesn't feature a villain wearing drag - and was so dreadful it inspired a full reboot of the series. In one way of looking at it, Die Another Day killed off the James Bond who had gone strong for forty years previous. While Daniel Craig brought the character back to his roots with a vengeance in the following movie, hopefully it will serve as a warning next time anyone at EON so much as dreams about another space laser.

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Countdown To 007: Licence To Kill, Goldeneye, Tomorrow Never Dies

2012-10-23T14:00:00.000+01:00

My Countdown To 007 introduces another new Bond today after Timothy Dalton departs in one of the series' most contentious entries. Licence To Kill is a personal favourite of mine, drawing more inspiration from Fleming than many detractors give it credit for and featuring an outstanding performance from the lead man. When Pierce Brosnan took over six years later, his run in the role was a mixed bag but his opening movie, Goldeneye, was a perfect reintroduction to the character after the series was put on hiatus by legal troubles at parent studio MGM.

These write-ups have been republished from Flixist's ongoing Across The Bond feature, where fellow Bond nerd Matthew Razak (defiantly anti-Dalton) and I go through the series one by one. The feature will look at Brosnan's two remaining movies tomorrow, then Craig's two on Thursday before the Skyfall review on Friday.

LICENCE TO KILL

Licence To Kill is my fourth favourite Bond movie, propping up such esteemed company as Goldfinger, From Russia and On Her Majesty's Secret Service. It's also the most divisive entry in the series, going darker than any before or since. For those raised by the flippancy of a Moore or Brosnan, it's undoubtedly a culture shock and was the first Bond to be given a '15' certificate in the UK rather than the customary 'PG'. By today's standards it's ridiculously tame for that rating, even in the uncut version available on more recent DVD / Blu-Ray releases. That said, it's still a Bond movie where the main villain whips his lover, Bond's oldest friend is dismembered by a shark, a sleazy businessman's head explodes in a decompression chamber, and a henchman falls ankles-first into a rock crusher. Most of it is implied rather than explicit, but still a long way from Octopussy.

I understand those who yearn for more family-friendly fare from their Bonds, but as Timothy Dalton points out in the excellent documentary Everything Or Nothing, the character was never created for a young audience. Licence goes further than Ian Fleming did in its violence, but not by much. Leiter's mutilation is a straight lift from the Live And Let Die novel, right down to the sadistic joke left with him as a warning ('He disagreed with something that ate him'). Fleming was happy detailing the nastier side of Bond's job, proven by how tame the torture scene in Daniel Craig's Casino Royale is compared to its prolonged equivalent in the novel, where there's no hint of such mitigating humour as the 'scratching my balls' line.

In any case, Licence's violence is hardly needless: it establishes the stakes of a deeply personal revenge mission for Bond, and gives Sanchez credibility as a Latin American drug lord rather than pandering to the censors by paring him down, which would have made inappropriate light of a serious criminal problem. Is the underworld an appropriate fit for Bond to begin with? Well, Fleming featured the mob several times in his novels, with Bond getting a good beating from them in Diamonds Are Forever, and the Dalton movies are nothing if not timely. It sits perfectly well with me, but it's hardly surprising that more casual fans find it excessive compared to what they're used to from the series.

The most ridiculous argument is that the movie isn't 'Bondian' enough. Disregarding the Fleming influences already mentioned - and the Milton Krest character is named after a similarly brash American entrepreneur from short story The Hildebrand Rarity, who whips his wife in the same manner Sanchez does his mistress Lupe here - the movie features some of the series' most ambitiously staged set-pieces, all hitting the heights of badassery which Dalton made his trademark. The pre-credits sequence sees he and Felix capture Sanchez by 'going fishing' for his plane before it enters Cuban airspace, then skydiving to the chapel where Leiter is due to be married: a ridiculously cool way to enter a wedding, not to mention pre-empting The Dark Knight Rises by almost a quarter of a century. Later, Bond escapes an underwater death by harpooning a departing seaplane, waterskiing behind until catching up, then ditching the pilot and flying to safety. The climactic battle, meanwhile, takes place atop and inside a number of Kenworth tankers, which Bond systematically destroys in a series of elaborately staged stunts, including pulling a wheelie and avoiding a missile by tilting onto one side of wheels.

The best thing about these sequences is how difficult it is to imagine Bond getting out of them, even though the pieces of his escape have been carefully laid out beforehand. Dalton's Bond takes more damage, physical and emotional, than his predecessors, but is good at his job because of his quick, rational thinking. Unlike Quantum Of Solace, which turned Bond into an uncharacteristic psychopath for half the movie, Dalton reacts to his friend's murder with a show of devastating, calculated professionalism. (Dalton's Bond would own Liam Neeson's Mr. Taken every day of the week). He's guided by a desire to see justice done, not just targeting the few men responsible but systematically playing out a plan to take down the whole organisation responsible for his friend's dismemberment. He's burning with righteous anger, but never lets it impair his judgment: one by one, he brings Sanchez' lieutenants down, playing on the main villain's paranoia as his trap closes.

Despite his talent for the job at hand, this Bond is unmistakeably human. Dalton is the best actor to ever play the part and has some lovely scenes leading up to Leiter's fate. Tracy gets a beautifully understated nod early on, foreshadowing Leiter's soon to be curtailed marriage and justifying Bond's anger at what happened to him also happening to his best friend. In the scene where he discovers Leiter's unconscious, dismembered body, Dalton takes a short breath to steel himself against having his worst fears confirmed inside the bodybag lying on the sofa, perhaps the finest moment of acting in the series. Dalton's Bond is often compared to Craig's, but Dalton is more fully rounded and always guided by an inherent morality where Craig can too often seem more preoccupied by his own issues than the job at hand. Don't get me wrong, Craig did stunning work in Casino, but while he brings back many aspects of Fleming's character, he's too often out of control - from M and himself - to be as close a match as Dalton. In the You Only Live Twice novel, where Bond is heavily grieving for his dead wife and handed an opportunity to avenge her, he rallies himself to channel his anger into getting the job done. That's Dalton all over.

He's helped by a strong supporting cast. Davi's Sanchez has a fascinating code of honor deepening him beyond the one-dimension drug lord sterotype, always putting loyalty ahead of money. Benicio Del Toro (yes, that one) is terrifying as his enfant terrible sidekick Dario, who is unusually competent for a henchman and uses the actor's mad-eyed stare to great effect. Pam Bouvier is a standard all-action tough girl, but Carey Lowell plays her with enough sly humour to make her mark, even if her jealous streak is one of the movie's few bum notes - the other is Bond's constant attempts to send his allies home, which gets tiresome after the second argument.

Q gets some welcome time in the field, giving series legend Desmond Llewellyn his biggest role to date and leading to a hilarious sight gag where he discards a gadget with the same insouciance he so often criticised 007 for. Lupe Lamora's tortured moll shows a rebellious streak in the face of terrible consequences which makes her sympathetic rather than simpering, while crooked televangelist Professor Joe Butcher, played with joyful sliminess by Vegas legend Wayne Newton, is up there with the most Flemingian characters never actually created by the original author. Let's also not forget the Isthmus City presidente, who is played by Pedro Armendariz Jr., aka the son of the actor who played Kerim Bey in From Russia. Such touches are what make the movie such a delight for long-time fans.

Licence To Kill was the last movie to pitch Bond to his original adult audience, and despite producing one of the top five movies in an esteemed series, its mistake was perhaps not recognising how the movie character had expanded beyond the reach of his literary equivalent. You'll never hear anything but praise from me for the bravery of that attempt, though. Its supposed financial 'failure' also deserves to be put in context for those using it as a stick to beat the movie with: it grossed $156m on a $32m production budget, which puts it more or less in line with A View To A Kill. Secondly, MGM was undergoing some financial and executive instability at the time, leading to the movie opening into a summer minefield of Batman, Back To The Future Part III, Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade and Lethal Weapon 2, all far bigger draws at the time than Bond. Problems behind the scenes with the advertising led to then-MGM president discarding a whole planned promotional campaign. There was even a last minute title change from Licence Revoked due to the term being associated by American audiences with the loss of a driver's licence.

Even with its more restrictive age rating, Licence To Kill had the misfortune of opening at a time when almost all the elements were against it. That it still went on to make such a notable profit deserves to be seen as an achievement in itself. Nevertheless, such circumstances compounded to delay the next Bond movie by a full six years, during which time Timothy Dalton departed for pastures new and the collapse of Communism and the Berlin Wall led speculators to suggest Bond might never return. If Dalton hadn't been there in the first place to take the character back to basics, perhaps they might have right. Fortunately, producer Cubby Broccoli disagreed, as did a man who had been waiting eight years for his turn with the PPK: Pierce Brosnan.

GOLDENEYE

First, some alternate history: had Bond not been sent into a six-year hiatus following Licence To Kill and Timothy Dalton stayed on in the part, his third movie would reportedly have sent him to Japan and Hong Kong in order to track down the people responsible for blowing up a top secret research lab in Scotland. His Bond girl would have been American industrial thief Connie Webb, and his enemies would include a Yakuza assassin, a shady pair of identical twin Japanese business owners and, erm, a robotic female assassin. (Or gynoid, but I think I'm the last person on the planet to use that term). Frankly, from the fascinating rundown offered by Bond site MI6-HQ, the script sounds like it would have edged the series back towards the more fantastic tone of the Moore era, so I'm pleased in a way that Dalton's era ended with two fantastic movies and his legacy intact, as much as I'd like to have seen more of him in the role.

Back in the real world, Pierce Brosnan had missed out on playing Bond in The Living Daylights by a matter of hours when his Remington Steele contract was unexpectedly renewed - before the series was cancelled again shortly afterwards, just to give the poor chap a second kick in the teeth. With the political wrangling over MGM stabilising in the mid-90s, Brosnan was given a second chance as Cubby Broccoli sought to revive the series. Though I don't think Brosnan would have been the right man to immediately follow Roger Moore, as the series needed Dalton to earn it some serious dramatic credit back, there couldn't have been a better choice to remind audiences of what they had been missing since Bond had vanished from their screens in 1989.

One of my biggest criticisms of him, that he plays to the Bond stereotype rather than creating a character of his own, is a strength in GoldenEye, where a radical reinterpretation would almost certainly have led to audience confusion and the series being shut down for good. Despite being a bit too pretty-boy for my taste, Brosnan has buckets of charm and an easy manner at tossing out one-liners. In that respect, if Dalton was the heir apparent to (early) Connery's more serious Bond, Brosnan takes after Roger Moore, albeit with some much needed restraint. For now.

The movie itself, named after Ian Fleming's estate in Jamaica (itself named after a WW2 operation Fleming masterminded whilst working at Naval Intelligence), manages its more outlandish elements with a straight enough face to allow its plot to still be taken seriously. Xenia Onatopp, for one, is an absolute joy and the series' most striking villainess. I mentioned last week that televangelist Joe Butcher was a great example of a Fleming-type character never actually created by the author, and Onatopp is unquestionably top of that list, right down to the weird sexuality which defined so many of Fleming's villains, for better or worse. Famke Janssen is bombastically hot in the role, and there are few straight men who wouldn't be delighted to accept death by Janssen thigh-crushing. She play the character's uber-vamp sex appeal to the hilt and steals every scene she's in, right up until an absolutely perfect death and kiss-off line from Brosnan. ('She always did enjoy a good squeeze.') The plot, about a disgruntled former MI6 agent seeking revenge against Britain by detonating an EMP over London - after stealing all the moneys from its banks - is pretty silly, but has enough post-Cold War resonance to keep it on the straight and narrow, despite Alan Cumming's gratingly awful satellite programmer, Boris. Sean Bean, himself often mooted for the Bond part, is a great choice for the role of Alec, Bond's friend-turned-foe.

The Cold War elements are a sly riposte to everyone who said Bond couldn't survive in the modern era, and demonstrates how intelligently the series has evolved with changing times. Alec Trevelyan, a descendant of the Lienz Cossacks, embodies the type of villain born from the collapse of Communism, tying together disparate elements from the Soviet era still bearing a grudge over the fall of their previous regime. Gottfried John doesn't get much to do as General Ourumov, but represent an aged, old-school Russian bitterly yearning for wars long since lost. Daniel Kleinman's gorgeous title sequence make this post-Cold War theme explicit, and Tina Turner's theme song harkens back to Shirley Bassey without seeming old fashioned. Eric Serra's score is often the topic of debate, although I like its mix of (then) modern synth tracks with more sparse, Russian-sounding cues. (I'm no music analyst so those terms are probably all wrong, but hopefully my point is clear when you actually listen to the soundtrack). His choice of 'The Experience Of Love' for the closing song is awful, but his gunbarrel sequence arrangement is fantastic, almost as thrilling as the militaristic, bass-heavy version which was such a perfect fit for Timothy Dalton's swansong.

GoldenEye is by no means perfect, particularly Isabella Scorupco's nondescript (and drearily dressed) Bond girl Natalya and Bond being given a gadget-laden car whose tricks he never uses (bad enough that it's a BMW), but once again, it was the right Bond for the right time. Brosnan's performance was instrumental in taking the character right back into the upper echelons of pop culture, the villains are terrific, Judi Dench is an inspired hoot as M, there are some great one-liners ('You don't need the gun, Commander' 'That depends on your definition of safe sex') and the post-Cold War themes answer every question about Bond's viability for a new age with aplomb. Though the Brosnan era would quickly sink into bland mediocrity and then outright catastrophe, this is a triumphant, vibrant debut for an actor who perhaps always deserved better material than he was given. Plus, it brought in a whole new generation of Bond fans courtesy of the greatest video game ever made, even if it likely resulted in just as many educations failed due to Slappers Only in the Complex.

TOMORROW NEVER DIES

I think Elliot Carver is a fantastic Bond villain. I'm throwing that out there because it's probably the most contentious, and therefore interesting, thing I have to say about Tomorrow Never Dies, which for the most part is a middle of the road actioner as far as any movie goes, let alone a series with such a strong identity as the Bond movies. It's not bad, but generally feels inert and lacking purpose. There's little particularly Bondian about it, other than a couple of diverting gadgets and the obligatory scene where our hero strolls around in black tie before getting in a fight. The best Bonds exaggerate reality to make the villains that little bit more grotesque, the girls that little bit more beautiful, the situations that little bit more unusual. Where the Moore era too often took that notion to ludicrous extremes, Tomorrow is the opposite, making even its big action set-pieces fall flat.

Jonathan Pryce's evil media mogul, though, is a clever spin on the megalomaniac figure who has populated so many Bond movies to date. As he himself notes, the modern world is no longer controlled by governments and armies, but communication. On its own terms, his devising a scheme to start a global conflict just to get broadcasting rights in China sounds excessive, but makes a kind of sense when seen through Carver's eyes: one last territory to conquer before his influence spans the entire world. If GoldenEye looked at how the world had changed for its heroes, Tomorrow tips its hat towards how rapidly evolving technology requires a new breed of supervillain. With all the revelations about the Murdoch empire over the past year, the movie ironically feels more timely now that it did when first released. You can just imagine Carver sitting before an inquiry and saying it is the humblest moment of his life, before returning to his office and ordering his international news bureaus to start shovelling dirt on everyone who dared cross him. Critics often moan that Carver isn't a larger-than-life figure in the Goldfinger vein, but that's the point: he doesn't need to be physically domineering because his network does the intimidation work for him. He's a slimy little control freak, and while the big villains are fun, it's nice to have expectations mixed up a little.

The movie's other strong point is Michelle Yeoh, who may be wasted in a role giving her only one martial arts scene, but still pulls off the tough girl role with more charm than any other actress in the series to date. Despite her physical prowess, Wai Lin mostly ends up just following Bond around, but Yeoh is a constantly engaging screen presence despite her romantic chemistry with Brosnan being almost nil. That might be because Brosnan's Bond feels like he could be replaced with just about anyone, compounded in the climactic scene aboard the stealth boat, where he's running around firing dual machine guns like a Terminator. Brosnan does his best and has a few enjoyable moments (he and Desmond Llewellyn are always a great pair, and Bond's boyish delight at his car's self-inflating tyres is wonderful), but is asked to play a void of a character. He throws out a few half-hearted quips, but this is a Bond reflecting the sanitised sensibilities of his time. His 'filthy habit' line about a cigarette-smoking henchman would make Fleming turn in his grave. There's no edge, no vices, nothing to stir excitement other than an exceedingly fancy dress sense.

An attempt to make his assignment more personal by bringing in an old flame in the shape of Teri Hatcher's Paris Carver doesn't ring true for a moment, since Hatcher is so stiff in the role and, like Bond, lacking any discernable personality. Their big emotional reunion in Bond's hotel room, though accompanied by a lovely visual homage to Dr. No as he waits for her in much the same way Connery awaited Professor Dent, is meaningless because no context provided for why they seemingly share such a strong connection (most of the 'facts' we're given about their history come from the apparent lies Paris tells her husband), but neither are remotely interesting as people. The scene where Bond later discovers her body only manages to be interesting thanks to Vincent Schiavelli's eccentric Dr. Kaufman, one of the movie's few actual personalities. Naturally, he cops it after only a few minutes' screentime, leaving us back with Stamper (whose actor, Gotz Otto, won the part after describing himself as 'big, blond and German', thus entirely summing the depth of his character) as lead henchman for the remainder of the movie.

Of the gadgets, the remote controlled car is a wonderful idea, but its abilities are taken to a ridiculous extreme in the parking lot chase scene, with every enemy traps designed explicitly to show off one of the car's tricks, including a buzz saw at just the right height to cut through a taut cable. Why Bond would then consider it acceptable to drive said car over the side of the rooftop and down towards a street packed with civilians (certainly injuring everyone inside the office it crashes into) beggars belief. The much-publicised decision to swap Bond's PPK for a more modern P99 is further proof of the movie's misguided sensibilities: the PPK may be weak and old fashioned, but its shape is intimately associated with the Bondcharacter. The P99, on the other hand, looks like any other handgun, costing the movie yet more character in favour of tedious realism. I suspect commercial interests were probably also at play, although have no idea whether Walther actually sponsored the movie.

Tomorrow Never Dies isn't terrible by any stretch, but makes no attempt to break out of first gear and confuses modernising for whitewashing every trace of identity from Bond's character. There's some good stuff in there - the baddie is pretty interesting (to my mind at least), Michelle Yeoh does a terrific job with a nothing character, the remote-controlled BMW is cool (again, despite being a BMW), Judi Dench has a wonderful snapping turtle quality as M and nails the movie's best line (in reference to an accusation of her not having the balls for her job: 'Perhaps, but it means I don't have to think with them all the time.') and the pre-credits sequence has an amusing use of a fighter jet ejector seat - but while it's the kind of movie I'll happily leave on in the background whenever it's on TV, it's pretty rote as an actioner and especially anodyne as a Bond.

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Movies: Everything Or Nothing - The Untold Story of 007 review

2012-10-22T16:00:00.000+01:00

FILM REVIEW

Review Scoring Chart - 10: Masterpiece; 9: Outstanding; 8: Very Good; 7: Good; 6: Above Average; 5: Average; 4: Below Average; 3: Bad; 2: Awful; 1: Reprehensible; 0: Non-Functional.

EVERYTHING OR NOTHING: THE UNTOLD STORY OF 007

Dir: Stevan Riley

Stars: Daniel Craig, Barbara Broccoli, Pierce Brosnan, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton

Running Time: 98 mins

Running at a touch over an hour and a half, some might suspect Everything Or Nothing to be a glorified DVD extra given undue prominence and a limited UK release due to 2012 being the character's 50th anniversary year. The unconvincing 'recreation' with which the movie starts, featuring a faceless Bond figure getting dressed in black tie and loading a PPK, doesn't do much to convince otherwise, even with Daniel Craig's voiceover reminding us how the series has proven to its doubters a nasty habit of surviving against the odds. Then it cuts to a gunbarrel sequence where all six Bonds turn to fire at once in what will surely be the nerdgasm moment of the year, and its cinematic validity is proven beyond a doubt.

If anything, it's a surprise the documentary hasn't had greater exposure, given the producer credits for Simon Chinn and John Battsek, two of the most acclaimed figures working in the genre. Whilst largely a collection of talking heads, Everything Or Nothing may not quite be an 'untold story' for most serious fans, but extracts candid confessionals from its stars and for more casual Bond viewers will be a fascinating insight into the turbulent development of the longest running movie series in history.

Since the name of the production company which produces the Bond movies is also the documentary's title (EON = Everything or Nothing, the mantra upon which producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman built the series), don't go in expecting much impartiality. To call the movie a hagiography would be a gross exaggeration, as there's no shying away from the moments when the series took a wrong turn or stars went off the rails, but it is very much a celebration of Bond's fiftieth year on the big screen. There are clear 'enemies' in the story, a select few whose actions put the series at risk, who are given little chance to offer their side of the story.

One of these is Kevin McClory, the man who plagued the Bond producers for longer than any other after securing limited rights to the character based on a screenplay he and Ian Fleming developed for Thunderball prior to Dr. No. Unquestionably the Blofeld of the piece, his legal action against Fleming is cited as a cause in the author's death - although the dependence on industrial quantities of booze and cigarettes are acknowledged as not helping - and not only did he wrangle himself a sole producer's credit on the official Thunderball movie, but went on to remake it as Never Say Never Again in box-office competition with Octopussy in 1983. His futile efforts to wrestle control of the Bond series, which lasted until the end of his life, are well known to Bond fans, who have long seen him as the boogeyman of their worst nightmares: try to imagine, if you dare, the series lasting more than a single film with another effort as singularly abysmal as Never Say Never Again. Despite his prominent role in the documentary, the closest thing offered to his side of the story comes from a close friend, who seems mostly sad that he wasted so much of his life in the courts.

The second major villain, surprisingly, is Sean Connery, who quickly becomes something of a Frankenstein's monster as the movies become major successes. Connery is the only Bond not to give new interviews, and the selected archive footage is particularly damning. Despite having built his career on the support of the Bond producers, he's often showing being dismissive of them and their importance to the series. In one amusingly pointed barb during a Diamonds Are Forever press junket, he offhandedly suggests himself as the main reason for the series' success. Contributors do little to argue against this perspective of him, and the documentary's greatest shortcoming is that the man most keenly identified with the character is not around either to give his perspective on where the relationship soured - although Cubby Broccoli made peace with him before his death - or whether he has any regrets over acting the way he did.

Someone who does express serious regret is George Lazenby, who proves the most compelling and sympathetic interviewee for his candour at how his determination to win the part succeeded despite his being a male model with no prior acting experience, and then how his surrender to the vices offered by newfound success led to him falling out with almost everyone on the cast and crew and abandoning the role, on the advice of an agent with his own agenda, after a single movie. It's one of the many astonishing, small stories adding personal texture to what could have been a very formal history of the movies' production, and the focus on people allows the documentary to be as moving as it is informative.

It helps that all the Bonds are such compelling interview subjects, even if Lazenby is the only one who has a long, tragic story of his own to tell. Roger Moore hasn't lost a drop of his charm and gets the movie's biggest laugh in reference to one particularly naughty scene from The Man With The Golden Gun being performed by the man who is now a UNICEF goodwill ambassador. Pierce Brosnan, in some ways Moore's natural successor in the role, is similarly funny and expressive, particularly when it comes to showing his delight upon finally securing the gig after heartbreakingly missing out on it in 1987. His bout of hysterics at the awfulness of the notorious kite surfing scene in Die Another Day is a joy for any serious Bond fans scarred by that particularly egregious instalment, and is a fine example of the honesty and humour with which even the movies' lowest ebbs are discussed. The passion for the series demonstrated by its leading men is infectious, and Timothy Dalton is wonderfully vehement in defending his back-to-basics, darker interpretation of the character, particularly the grossly underrated Licence To Kill.

Funnily enough, Daniel Craig proves the least memorable of the Bonds, extolling the movies' history and virtues without showing the same love as his predecessors. Barbara Broccoli's battle to cast him does show how well the people behind the scenes know the character and have adapted for the times, though, even if poor Pierce was hung out to dry. The controversy that surrounded Craig's appointment is made clear by Skyfall director Sam Mendes, who admits to going on record as believing it a poor choice. As ever, though, Bond cast off his doubters to come back stronger than ever, and Everything Or Nothing is a wonderful record of one of the most beloved, culturally vital institutions in film history. The six-Bond gunbarrel is worth the price of admission alone, perhaps partially compensating for the disgraceful decision to not have Skyfall open with the iconic introduction, but the interviews which follow - featuring a handful of surprise, big-name guests I won't spoil - more than live up to that early thrill. It's the documentary a series as important as Bond deserves, and you won't get a bigger compliment out of me than that. [ 8 ]

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