David Vining's Blog, page 194

Goldeneye

There’s a seeming effortlessness to the action scenes here, lent from the fluid camera work and excellent choreography, that I don’t think I’ve seen from a Bond film. Yes, there have been great stunts for a long time, but the action filmmaking here feels just so much more graceful, in a way. At the same time, this is the first film that embraces a grungier aesthetic, using dirt and dust in great amount to create a great visual texture. There’s a great antagonist, and a new Bond in Pierce...

Licence to Kill

James Bond goes rogue, and they used just about the best actor to do it with. I’ve come up with pithy little ways to describe each actor who’s played Bond so far. Connery is the predator. Lazenby is the innocent. Moore is the lothario, but I’d had trouble coming up with one for Dalton. LIcence to Kill, though, made it obvious. He’s the vicious animal, and the vicious animal is the one to go rogue and take revenge without his government’s permission.

The big flaw at the beginning of the movie...

The Living Daylights

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I was with this movie until its final third went to Afghanistan. It’s largely a solid Bond adventure with a more grounded narrative focus and aesthetic feel, but the sudden introduction of a host of new characters and a late plot twist that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense and receives little explanation, drag it down slightly. There’s still fun stuff there, but everything around the fun stuff undermines the final stretch of an otherwise strong introduction to Timothy Dalton as 007.

The...

A View to a Kill

This feels like no one cared and everyone was bored except Christopher Walken who just made the best of it. Moore doesn’t want to be there. Tanya Roberts looks lost. The story barely exists and goes on meandering tangents for entire acts that don’t matter. We get characters introduced and dropped like a hat. This is probably the least enjoyable Bond film up to this point, and I watched Diamonds are Forever.

The confusion starts from the beginning. We get another ski chase. It’s derivative of...

Octopussy

I did not predict that I would like this the most of Roger Moore’s Bond films. It’s reputation is honestly not that good, but I was more caught up in the action and story of Octopussy than any Bond film since On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. It doesn’t go the same route as Lazenby’s picture, though. It’s more of a straight forward action mystery, but it does it with more style and clarity than any other Moore film.

This is what Diamonds are Forever wanted to be, except that this film...

For Your Eyes Only

There’s an obvious effort to bring Bond back to his roots in this film. His new fancy car gets blown up and everything. It’s a worthy goal (not that I had a real problem with the concept of gadget heavy Bond action, just the execution), but some of the problems of execution that have plagued Moore’s efforts repeat here, mainly in the first half of the film. The second half, though, comes together really well, shockingly so considering the muddled first half that preceded it, and it almost...

Moonraker

By my estimation, this is the second Bond movie built almost exclusively around a gimmick. The first was Thunderball and its underwater action sequences. Now, Moonraker comes along as the movie about Bond being in space. It’s the sort of ridiculous that should have worked really well with Moore as Bond, but everything up to the point of Bond going into space (about three-quarters of the film) isn’t in the spirit that the movie needs.

The first hour or so is a serviceable Bond adventure....

The Spy Who Loved Me

Finally, Roger Moore gets a good Bond picture. I have two largish problems with it, but everything else works with Moore’s interpretation of the character so well that I happily forgive the film the other issues. Moore finally feels like he belongs in this Bond picture, more than in his previous two outings.

In what feels like the undersea version of Blofeld’s plot in You Only Live Twice, two nuclear submarines, one from the UK and one from the Soviet Union, disappear, stolen by a tanker...

The Man with the Golden Gun

Roger Moore’s second James Bond adventure seems caught in between tones. On the one hand we have flying cars, cartoony stunts, a midget henchman, the inexplicable return of a Louisiana sheriff in Thailand, a laser gun, and a third nipple. On the other we have Bond with an edge again and an antagonist who feels like a real threat and a late soliloquy about how he and Bond are mirror images of each other. It’s all arranged in a rather overly complicated fashion designed to include some kung fu...

Live and Let Die

Here Bond sheds the last of his remnants of a character and becomes fully and purely an archetype. He no longer feels like a real character but simply a collection of thin traits wrapped in a posh British shell who goes on adventures. I’m not entirely opposed to this approach, but the movie needs to embrace its lack of depth more fully through better spectacle. What’s here isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s almost all rather bland which, when paired with the thinner storytelling, makes this...