Viewed: Somepoint towards the end of 2014
Finally posted: Sunday 26th April 2015
New Bond film with a shiny new Bond; Pierce Brosnan skydives
his way into the role and into a USSR base he’s trying to blow up with Sean
Bean. Obviously it’s not long before Sean Bean appears to snuff it and James is
left to save the day all on his own, which obviously he does or this wouldn’t
be much of a film.
Jump forward nine years and Bond is back at the Blackjack
table trying to chat women up by winning their money. Unsurprisingly Xenia is unimpressed but those
anger management classes must be paying off as she deals with the whole thing extremely
well – by strangling her Canadian lover and hiding him in the wardrobe.
There’s a shiny new Moneypenny and M to go along with a
shiny new Bond which we meet as James get shown to the most imaginatively named
‘situation room’. Q is back which
considering it’s been over thirty years since Connery first started bankrupting
casino’s everywhere is quite impressive and surely further proof that 007 and
all that happens to him occurs in some sort of time vortex controlled by one of
Q’s better gadgets?
Half way through and it’s time for the massive plot-twist,
Sean Bean aka Alec isn’t dead at all, it was all just a ruse for Bean to
demonstrate just how good he is a dying on-screen; que a heart-wrenching tale
of how Alec hid away his childhood memories’ of his parents to give himself a
way to eventually seek revenge against the corporation that destroyed them.
From here on in its Xenia and Alec vs James and Natalia, a
Russian programmer with useful connections Bond’s taken a fancy to. Xenia meets her end fairly quickly after
everyone goes to Cuba; but if you’re stupid enough to walk around Cuba in a
black jumpsuit then you can’t be surprised if you end up dead in a tree.
Following with tradition it all comes down to the last 20mins
of the film; Bond appears to have certainly lost, with Natalia gone walkies and
Alec’s underwater (obviously) base full of armed soldiers surely it’s all
over. The idea is simple, erase the
digital records of the UK, stealing the Bank of England’s money and the records
it ever existed along with everything else kept on government file. It’s so
simple, yet so easily flawed by one of Q’s exploding gadgets which buys James
and Alec time to have a quick fist fight and a heart to heart before Alec
manages to survive a ridiculous long fall onto the top of a building, only to
have the rest of the building fall on him.
This film must have been a pyrotechnic’s dream to make; as
the writer’s answer to everything was “make it go Kaboom” – there were at least
nine decent sized explosions in this, James Bond’s introduction to the 90s and
the latest in special effects.
One Brosnan film down and I don’t mind this new Bond, the
amount of sarcasm is ridiculous but he manages to pull it off without coming
across as overly cheesy, though with three more films to go before the gauntlet
is passed on that all has time to change.
