Bond, Part 4

It's time I concluded my series of reviews of the James Bond movies, with a look at the four films starring Pierce Brosnan. (I already reviewed the lone Daniel Craig entry thus far, Casino Royale, when I saw it in the movie theater.)

Pierce Brosnan is a great James Bond. He's really able to pull together some of the best traits displayed by the other actors who played the role. He has Connery's strength and charm, Moore's wit and humor, and the hard edge that was supposed to have been Dalton's stamp on the part. Not that Daniel Craig made a bad Bond, but I'd have been thrilled to see Brosnan continue on to do a few more films before having his "licence to kill" revoked.

But how do the four films Brosnan did make stack up?

GoldenEye - Put simply, this is the best James Bond film of them all. Everything comes together well. It has a great cast of actors. Judi Dench is a brilliant choice to take over the role of M. Sean Bean makes a great match for Bond. And Famke Janssen takes an outrageous part and somehow makes it believable by tearing into it with such complete relish.

The movie has a coherent plot that actually makes sense, while having an appropriate scope and just the right amount of fantasy for a Bond adventure. The action sequences are all put together well, from the aerial tricks of the pre-credits adventure to the final battle atop a radio telescope. Even the credits themselves deserve a mention. The visuals depicting the two-faced nature of the film's main villain, and the fall of communism, are among the most striking seen in a Bond credits sequence. The song, composed by Bono and The Edge, is in my opinion the absolutely perfect tone for a James Bond theme, and Tina Turner the perfect performer for it. (Never mind that the lyrics actually make no sense whatsoever, when you stop to think that the "GoldenEye" of the film's title is actually an orbital laser.)

There are really only two small flaws in the movie, in my mind. First, the hacker character played by Alan Cumming seems too campy for the general tone of the rest of the movie (though I don't hold the actor responsible). Second, the musical score feels like a misfire. There are some neat ideas in the music, here and there -- such as treatments of the Bond theme on timpani drums rather than a traditional melodic instrument, and the including of a Russian-sounding choir. But this music, composed by Eric Serra (who worked extensively with director Luc Besson) is presented almost entirely on synthesizers -- and sounds like it. It feels like the progenitor of his score for The Fifth Element. In that science fiction movie, it worked. Here, it doesn't do it.

Still, the film is an A- in my mind, and as I mentioned, the very best of the James Bond films.

Tomorrow Never Dies - What follows is almost the very worst of the James Bond films, the boring On Her Majesty's Secret Service notwithstanding. Tomorrow Never Dies is such a preposterous movie, with a plot so ludicrous, it makes the "laser guns in space" battle at the end of Moonraker look like a documentary. There's simply not a single frame of this movie that can be taken seriously.

Teri Hatcher appears in a small role that's the most bland performance of her career. Jonathan Pryce chews the scenery more than any Bond villain ever has (and that's saying something, considering his company!). Michelle Yeoh is grossly mismatched with this film; her fight scenes are basically the only enjoyable thing in it, but they feel ripped from the cutting room floor of some other movie and edited in here.

In the course of the film, James Bond's escapades include: stealing a fighter plane from dozens of terrorists while being strangled by the man in the gunner's seat behind him; jumping over a helicopter on a motorcycle he's driving while handcuffed to another person; and taking part in a car chase while driving by remote control from the back seat. Said car is also the most ridiculous gadget Bond has ever had. More so than ever before, it's outfitted with otherwise utterly useless devices that are somehow precisely what is needed to get him out of his jams. (A pop up hood ornament that can cut through a metal cable strung at exactly three feet above the ground in front of the car? Give me a break.)

Even the opening credits sequence of this movie is awful. The visuals are flat and uninspired, and the song by Sheryl Crow sounds banshee-like and off key. The only virtue of this film is that at 1 hour and 57 minutes, it's the shortest James Bond film made since the 1960s. It's an unqualified F.

The World Is Not Enough - There are some good ideas at work in this film. The main henchman played by Robert Carlyle has the interesting characteristic of being unable to feel pain. The woman originally thought to be the "Bond girl" of the tale is revealed to be the big bad. The character of M is given a greater role in the story, when she is deceived and abducted by the villain. The theme, by Garbage, really fits the musical style of the best Bond themes.

But unfortunately, this movie doesn't quite know when enough is enough. Every major action sequence starts out interesting, but runs on too long. In the course of this movie, we see what feels like the longest boat chase ever put on film, the longest ski chase ever put on film, the longest stuck-on-a-runaway-hand-car-in-an-oil-pipeline chase ever put on film... well, you get the idea. More exacting editing could probably have put more tension into this film, but as is, it's the very example of "sound and fury, signifying nothing."

And then there's Denise Richards as Dr. Christmas Jones -- the most horribly miscast Bond girl. Ever. Asking the audience to accept her and her half-airhead, half-robotic delivery as a nuclear physicist? What on earth could the producers have been thinking? Well, other than, "let's get her in a tight tank top and put her in a leaky submarine."

In the end, the bad far outweighs the little good at work in this movie. I rate it a D.

Die Another Day - There's basically one good idea in this film, and it's a real shame it doesn't get realized fully. The opening sequence of the movie has James Bond getting captured by North Koreans. The titles themselves are actually used to advance the plot, showing him undergoing repeated torture throughout a 14 month incarceration. When the main action resumes, he is released, battered and defeated...

Which seems to have absolutely no lasting effects on him whatsoever. In a matter of minutes, Bond is back on his feet, kicking ass, enjoying life, and generally acting like nothing happened to him. Here was a chance to really show the character in a different place, and present a different kind of movie. Instead, he pairs up with Halle Berry in a lame attempt to start a spin-off movie franchise.

The movie feels like a desperate list of "things we haven't seen in a Bond movie yet," stitched together like Frankenstein's script. Bond surfs, he fences, he drives an invisible car... he visits a freaking palace carved out of ice.

The jokes are weak, and the action mixed. The editing is truly bizarre, with randomly inserted speed ramps and slow motion patches. CG is suddenly used to realize many of the stunts in the film, where such things were always actually done for real in earlier films. And it's very obvious and badly-rendered CG; not as well done as what you can see on television now, just a few years later. The Robocop-esque outfit worn by the villain in the final act of the film actually made me laugh out loud. And that opening theme by Madonna? A completely inappropriate techno cut that feels like it just wasn't good enough to make her Ray of Light album.

How to rate this film depends on whether you're inclined to give points for the "tortured Bond" idea, or take them away for completely wasting that idea. I'll settle on a little of both, and call this a D- movie.

So in all, though I may have thought Pierce Brosnan perhaps the best actor in the role of James Bond, his films are overall the worst of the worst. They average out to a D+, and that's even with the exceptional GoldenEye factored in, stretching out the average. I get the impression that the producers knew they'd made some bad movies too, which is why they took their cues from the Bourne movies in "re-booting" things with Casino Royale. Still, I think they unfairly made Brosnan a scapegoat for their bad production decisions, letting him go from the role as though he was the reason Bond films had become so deplorable.

In all, an unfortunate ending to what had otherwise been a mostly enjoyable marathon of 20 movies. (If indeed it could be called a "marathon," spread out as it was for me over the entire year.) I hope my journey might be of use to some of you thinking of watching an old James Bond movie sometime; perhaps you'll steer clear of the sinkholes I fell into along the way.