Casino Royale (2006)

Just because you've done something, doesn't mean you've got to keep doing it.

--Vesper Lynd.

And that is Casino Royale (2006) in a nutshell.

Remember back, to the long and unsettling 4 year gap between Die Another Day and CR06. After all of the interminable haggling over pierce Brosnan's future, after all of the insane and incessant casting rumors, after all of the vituperation producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli and writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade were getting in the wake of the critical and fan disdain for some of the excesses of DAD...we really had no idea what to expect, did we?

Sure, Daniel Craig was a respectable choice (despite some dunderheaded loud early opposition...why can't Bond be blond?). Sure, Oscar winner Paul Haggis came on board to work in some unspecified capacity on the script. And sure, they were finally adapting Casino Royale, Ian Fleming's first--and many say best--Bond novel.

But Casino Royale had already been adapted twice before, with none too impressive results. And the "comedy" CR67 had so much high caliber talent involved that it couldn't fail...yeah, right. And the way the filmmakers had flushed away the potential they themselves had set up in the first half of DAD left us seriously in doubt whether they were capable of pulling off a proper hardcore Fleming story.

Silly us, and our short memories. We've been through this before, haven't we? After You Only Live Twice showed a drop at the box office and was less well received by critics, Eon responded with a back-to-basics, amazingly faithful adaptation of On Her Majesty's Secret Service. After Moonraker made a gazillion bucks but received a panning from many critics and fans, Eon followed up by giving us For Your Eyes Only, a hardcore gadget-free spy film weaved together from a couple of Fleming short stories.

So we shouldn't have been too surprised, given the backlash against DAD's CGI and ridiculously oversized sci-fi trappings, that Eon once again went straight back to a highly faithful Fleming adaptation, back to basics.

But there were 3 real surprises.

First of all, this time the public bought in. Historically, the gadgetless, straight spy Bonds haven't done well at the box office. Despite seeming to give people what they were asking for, OHMMS and FYEO had significantly lower grosses than their picked-upon predecessors. But CR06 actually surpassed DAD's box office. Not by a ton, but CR06 still passed it, which was an impressive first for a "retrenching" film.

Secondly, we got a reboot. If you read comic books, well, you're used to this sort of thing. And it's not as if there was any kind of particularly tight continuity between the Bond films to begin with. But for Eon to essentially say, "We're starting over," well, that was pretty damn shocking. Yes, Casino Royale was the first Bond novel, but we weren't expecting "Bond Year One."

And finally, the biggest surprise was how amazingly freaking good the movie turned out to be.

Let me hasten to emphasize, the film is still new to me...it's still the Bond film I've seen the least. Maybe after 5 more years to digest it, and catching portions of it every other week on cable, and comparing it to the movies that follow so we can properly understand what it spawned, perhaps then the newness and shock will have worn off, and my opinion might have mellowed. So maybe you should take my opinions with a grain of salt here, just as you would an adolescent in the bloom of first infatuation who can see no wrong in his new love.

But you know what? It wasn't just me. It scored a 94% on RottenTomatoes, the highest score of any movie for 2006. And the public agreed, going in droves. Who could have figured--a hardcore "straight" Bond film, with a relative unknown in the lead, in the longest Bond movie ever, became the highest grossing Bond ever. Wha happened??

Part of it, I think, was the "Bourne-ification" of the movie marketplace. Not that Bond was "copying" Bourne, as some opined--Bond was doing serious spy back before Jason Bourne was even a twinkle in Robert Ludlum's eye. But the Bourne movies, as well as the TV show 24, seem to have uncovered (or created) an appetite for the more serious action movie. And CR06 was in the right place at the right time to catch that wave.

Another factor is that, at some level, mainstream movie goers and critics were just as disgruntled at DAD as many of the fans were. Scan some of the reviews for CR06, and you'll see sighs of relief that the "silliness" is gone, that the "outlandish" is played down, that the reliance on gadgets and puns was over. (Of course, that just means we're due for the tire swing backlash, as reviews of QoS from the very same critics will no doubt decry the lack of gadgets and whimsy...but I digress)

And, of course, we can't forget 9/11. In a world where we're all frightened that scruffy terrorists with box cutters can destroy our cities, the escapism of evil billionaires with death satellites was exactly the wrong way to go. Maybe we wanted our heroes to make us feel safer by fighting the very threats we're scared of right now, rather than distracting us with fantasy threats. To that extent, perhaps DAD was caught in a bad place, and guessed incorrectly about which way to go.

But maybe I'm over thinking the wheel... maybe it's just that CR06 was such a freakin' great movie.

It starts with a very faithful adaptation of Fleming's novel. And how long has it been since we've been able to say that?!? Oh, they added a lot of things--CR was a fairly spare novel. But everything they added seemed very much in the Fleming spirit. And they modernized things a bit--LeChiffre was no longer a SMERSH paymaster, but a terrorist banker; they're playing Texas Hold 'Em, not baccarat. But the entirety of Fleming's novel is there, right down to Bond being smashed in the gonads by a carpet beater. Ouch.

The film begins with James Bond, before he's even a Double-O. And already they're playing against our expectations: we DON'T open with the gun barrel!! We're puzzled, we're bothered, what's happening?!? Black and white?!? Have they abandoned everything in this reboot?

Nope. It a pleasingly clever bit, we simultaneously get the "origin" of Bond's promotion to Double-O and the "origin" of the gun barrel!!! And not only does it work, it works fantastically...not only do we see the birth of Bond the sneaky assassin in the scene with Dryden, but we get to see Bond the hard-assed sonuvabitch in the bathroom fight with Dryden's contact. It's the most brutal fight in the series since the train car fight in From Russia With Love, and the inter cutting between the sedate conversation with Dryden and the bathroom fight is a cunning way to to introduce us to the "new" Bond.

As we go into the opening credits sequence, let's applaud Daniel Kleinman's originality. Aside from his sequence for Tomorrow Never Dies, which I thought was trite and uninspired, his work for the series has been exciting and original, avoiding repeating himself while making the credit sequence relevant to the film's themes (something Maurice Binder didn't always manage to do, especially towards the end). The playing card motif is based on the cover art to the British first edition of Fleming's novel, and follows the movie's mandate of being original.

As for Chris Cornell's song, "You Know My Name," well, I wanted to not like it. I've never been a big fan of his; I wasn't pleased with interviews wherein he practically boasted about not using the phrase "Casino Royale" in the song, joining Rita Coolidge's "All- Time High" on the chicken list; and his not allowing the song to appear on the soundtrack album is one of the biggest egotistical dick moves in the history of the world (Cornell's explanation: "It was a decision of mine not to have it on the film soundtrack. I wanted it to be mine.")

But damned if it isn't a good song for this movie, that grows on me more each time I hear it. Lyrically, it does a good job of setting up the movie's themes. Musically, it's hard-driving and exciting...and it's used very well throughout David Arnold's score (personally, I think it's his best yet...just listen to how he oh so subtly weaves in bars of Monty Norman's theme as the film goes along, until it's finally 'unveiled" at the end). Yes, it's different...but different is the name of the game for this movie. So, despite my misgivings, I really like the song. But, and let me re-emphasize here: not letting it on the soundtrack album=giant dickweed.

The movie's pretty recent for all of us, so I won't give a detailed synopsis, but there are a few things I want to focus on. The first is the casual globe-trotting. In the past, especially later on, Bond movies made a big deal out of there locations, practically jumping up and down screaming "look where we are!" Refreshingly, CR06 plays it a lot more casually. In the first ten minutes, we're in Prague (and deleted footage from the teaser establishes that Bond's bathroom fight was in Pakistan), Uganda, and Madagascar, and the movie just tosses it off without broad establishing shots or enthusiastic shots of local tourist attractions. It takes the globe-trotting more for granted, which in a way makes it all the more realistic and believable for the audience. It gives Bond's world a more "lived-in" feeling, that it's not a big deal for him to be jetting to several different continents and casinos in the space of a few days. And it emphasizes that it's the action, not the sight-seeing, that's the most important part. It's a preferable approach, I think, to the past couple of Brosnan films, where they practically were doing cartwheels to advertise that they were in places uglier than a 1970's Doctor Who quarry.

The next thing to talk about is what they give us in the teaser and the first huge set piece: real live stunts. After all of the hullabaloo and outcry about the over-reliance on CGI and the lack of human stunts in DAD, the producers did an amazing thing: they listened. Gloriosky, how they listened! Start to finish, top to bottom, CR06 is crammed to the gills with stunt work. Not just everyday, humdrum stuntwork. No, they rose to the challenge and gave us some of the best, most-exciting, wonderfully-filmed stunts in the series history. They turned it up to 11, and it pays off tremendously. Just take a look at a few of these:



No computer para-glacier surfing, just good old fashioned real people doing ridiculously dangerous things on film to amuse and awe us. Thank you, Eon. All is forgiven.

Just as important is how they approach "Bond Year 1." It truly was a movie of watching James Bond mature into his role as 007. He's truly a terminator from the beginning...despite all Mollaka's parkour skills, Bond is able to keep up with him, albeit in a less graceful way. He's relentless in his pursuit of the Miami bomber. But he's not living up to his duties yet, is he? His assignment to bring in the Mollaka is botched (not his fault), but he overreacts by killing the man and causing an international incident. Blowing up Carlos with his own device was amusing, but he could have just easily thrown the bomb away and captured the man alive, gaining valuable intel. After he goes bust at the poker game, he's ready to kill LeChiffre until Leiter stops him. It turns out that M was right...he couldn't see the big picture.

Not that Bond was entirely just a blunt instrument. He showed a lot of wit in his ability to keep up with Mollaka. When the Skyfleet bombing is thwarted, LeChiffre declares that someone must have talked, when it fact it was entirely good old-fashioned detective work by Bond that led him there (Bond? Following leads and clues? When was the last time that happened?). He's innovative and quick, able to improvise on the fly--the salt shaker ipecac he improvised after being poisoned, shooting out the air balloons in the Venice building, figuring out what "ELLIPSIS" meant, tracking down M's home and breaking in...

But as smart and resourceful as he was, lethal violence was his usually his first reaction (although note the care he uses to not kill any of the guards in the Nambutu embassy). But by the end, instead of killing Mr. White, he merely captures him. And that's when we get the "Bond...James Bond" and the Monty Norman music. Because, up until that moment, he hadn't truly been 007, but a blunt instrument with a licence to kill.

We also see Bond learning how to be 007 in other ways, as well. As clever and as dangerous as he is, he doesn't know to dress himself for the high society he'll be moving in--Vesper has to teach him that. He doesn't know how he takes his martinis. He's the dangerous man, not from money, who has to mingle with the elite to do his job, but he's not comfortable doing so yet. The attitude that Sean Connery brought to Bond--that the tuxedo was just a costume he wore, but was still the predator underneath it--is where Craig's Bond will be in a few years...but he's not quite there yet.

All of which would be meaningless if Daniel Craig weren't up to the task. And he knocks the ball out of the park. Here's how I can best sum up my reaction to his performance: regular readers know I've always felt the OHMSS would be the perfect movie if we could go in and digitally replace George Lazenby with Sean Connery. Well, I now think it would be even better (for that movie, at least) if we used Craig instead of Connery. That's not a knock at Sir Sean...but he was never called upon to give the kind of emotional context to one his Bond performances as Craig was here. And so in my head I can see Craig, the hard-bitten love 'em and leave 'em spy whose heart was turned to stone by Vesper's betrayal, have that heart thawed by Tracy, only to lose her. (of course, had it been Craig, we can assume that the intro to Diamonds Are Forever would have been a lot more intense, and Tracy's murder not completely forgotten afterward...different times)

And although he's not burdened by the quips and puns of his predecessors, Craig also turns in a subtly humorous performance (with the help of the writers and director, obviously), a wry style of understatement and facial expression that conveys lots of quiet whimsy. Just watch the sly smile he gives when Carlos explodes--the smallest of facial expressions, yet it drew a huge laugh from the audience. And yet the broadest of the jokes--"Everyone's going to know you died scratching my balls" while in agonizing pain--is equally well done.

I know I shouldn't get overly enthusiastic--it's only one film, so far--but Craig completely erased everyone's doubts and owned the role from his first scene, digging deeply and not being afraid to give us a Bond who's not perfect yet, but is still struggling to come to grips with his new life. Plus, I'm told the ladies like the way he fills out a pair of swim trunks...

Much of the credit obviously goes to the script. I wasn't particularly complimentary to Purvis and Wade for their work on TWINE and DAD. But I don't want to fall into the trap of giving all of the credit to Paul Haggis, despite his credentials, as he's said publicly that his main contribution was rewriting the climax. Whoever is responsible, the dialogue sparkles and shines, especially between Vesper and James, without relying on terrible puns to push things along. And in contrast to the way that TWINE and DAD half-heartedly attempted to changes things up, but ultimately lacked the courage of their convictions and bailed out, CR06 never wavers in its commitment to give us a serious Bond Year One. The additions to the book are mostly character building moments for Bond and LeChiffre, and some thrilling action pieces, all well handled with none of the absurd tonal shifts of the previous two movies. A wonderfully solid writing job.

And let me go on the record right now: Martin Campbell can direct a Bond movie any goddamned time he wants to. With CR06 and Goldeneye to his credit, Campbell rivals Terrance Young as a Bond director in my book. Maybe he's only really good with an actor's first Bond movie, as he keeps declining offers to come back. But he's taken what on paper are two very different Bond movies and gotten right to the heart of them. But there are similarities: in GE he was given a movie about Bond at middle age, examining what the hell all the martinis and women meant to a man who should be jaded from having his life constantly on the line. In CR06, he gets a baby Bond, learning how to be a Double-O in the first place. In both cases, he has a firm vision of what he wants the movie to be, and guides us along confidently.

And the action scenes--oh, lordy, how wonderful. Despite the rapid action and quick cutting, you're never at a loss for what's going on, never confused as to how we got from point A to point B. Visceral, tough, thrilling--this movie quickens your pulse even when you know what's going to happen.

Which isn't to slight him in non-action scenes. Any scene with Vesper sparkles, and their shower scene is one of the most touching things in the entire series. In a movie with such highly-charged action scenes, there's a real danger that things will flag in between, but Campbell never lets our attention waver, making the poker scenes just as intense as the parkour, the conversations as riveting as the sinking buildings. Please, Martin Campbell--come back to us and give us Bond movies!!

Eva Green makes for a compelling Vesper Lynd. (Although I will say that her accent continues to bug me to this day--at times her English is so stiff, and accent so distractingly stilted, you almost wish that they had just found a way to make her character French...only at times, though). To make the part compelling, you have to believe that Vesper is intelligent, vulnerable beneath her haughty facade, and capable of both betraying Bond and killing herself because she loves him. Green pulls it off ably, creating a deep portrait of the woman Bond will come to love. Note that she doesn't even appear until one hour into the movie--yet the audience knows more about her, and feels a deeper connection to her, than any recent Bond woman. Green takes the strong script and executes her role amazingly well. Her repartee with Bond, the subtle signs of her guilt that only become apparent upon repeat viewings, and the depth of her feeling for James, come through beautifully. It's obvious why she's had such an impact on Bond's life, and why she is a top-tier Bond girl.

A special Felix Leiter shout out to Jeffrey Wright. Yes, it's once again a small role. But it's a refreshingly realistic Leiter--he's keenly aware of Bond's strength (cards) versus his own (money), and is willing to do the smart thing and stake Bond when the British government won't. For once, Leiter isn't there just as a sidekick or support staff for 007, but an agent with his own agenda that just happens to coincide with Bond's. Well played, "brother from Langley." Stay away from sharks, buddy.

Judi Dench's return as M can cause some consternation if you worry too much about whether or not this is a full reboot or just a Year One. After all, in Goldeneye we saw her introduction, and she replaced a previous M, and Bond had never worked for her before, so how could she have been Bond's first boss?? But just as with the "how come Bond and Blofeld don't recognize each other in OHMSS?" problem, I choose to ignore it. No solution makes good sense, so why not just relax and enjoy Dench's mastery of the role? She's on the top of her game here, balancing her anger at Bond with her trying to mold him into the agent she needs, giving him a long leash because she knows he's going to keep digging. Plus, we get our first shots of her home, her sleeping husband, and the first inklings of her real name (which apparently she's not terribly fond of...Mildred? Mulva?). I don't care what meta-fiction might have to be involved, but for heaven's sake keep Dench as M, no matter who is Bond or when the movie is set.

The movie is not 100% perfect...but many of those imperfections stem from following the structure of the book. Some have complained of the early death of LeChiffre and the "meandering" of the movie's last half hour. But that is exactly how the book does it! In the novel, Bond and Vesper cavort around Europe, but their relationship gradually breaks down over her guilt at having been the traitor (and her fear that SMERSH will catch up to her and kill James, too), and she kills herself with sleeping pills and leaves a tearful suicide note. Perhaps, in trying to mirror the novel so closely, they might have made a cinematic mistake. For those who weren't familiar with the novel, that 20 minutes of bumming around Europe being in love can feel anti-climactic and wandering, up until the phone call from M asking where the money is gives us a jolt of adrenaline. It's a segment that gives us a lot of appreciated character moments, yet feels very unlike a James Bond movie the way it unfolds, without the narrative drive the audience has come to expect, both from prior Bond movies and CR itself up to that point. I don't have any kind of answer here--I don't mind it, but I can understand why some people regard the longueur as a time to take a bathroom break. Could they have done it differently? Should they have? Were they too focused on being faithful to the novel?

This same fidelity to the novel also hurts Mads Mikkelson's presence as the villain. I'm not criticizing his performance at all--he's more than menacing enough, thinking his arrogant intelligence is enough to solve all his problems as things go to hell around him. Yet like in the book, LeChiffre doesn't actually have a lot to do. He doesn't really have any henchmen, and so other than his silent girlfriend, unless he's with Bond, he doesn't have anybody to bounce off of. The physical traits they give him--the asthma, the "weeping blood"--are just gimmicks glued onto the character to make him seem more Fleminesque, in lieu of spending time giving him more personality or background. We end up knowing far less about LeChiffre than we do Vesper. Take away the poker games and the torture scene, and there's really not much there. Throw in the fact that he dies 3/4 of the way through the film (and not even at Bonds' hands!), and we seem to have another situation where perhaps fidelity to the novel doesn't work as well as it might cinematically. Perhaps the writers should have deviated from the book a bit more in order to make LeChiffre a better character...

Those are minor quibbles, though. Eon completely stunned the world by, seemingly out of nowhere, producing one of the best James Bond movies ever. After a post-DAD break filled with controversy and unrest, after a nearly complete re-imagining of the series, Casino Royale (2006) has by sheer audaciousness and pluck muscled its way to near the top of the Bond pantheon. Did any of us expect that to happen?

Just because you've done something, doesn't mean you've got to keep doing it. Just because the first 20 Bond films followed a pattern, doesn't mean Eon had to keep following that pattern. That would have been the safe thing...but to the credit of everyone involved, they not only went back to Bond's roots, but they replowed and replanted the whole damned field. It's too early to know what the result will be--is this a one time aberration, or a new trend? A triumphant debut, or what we'll come to regard in 10 years as a false step? But for now (and at least for another week), I can confidently declare that Casino Royale (2006) is one hell of a movie. I guess the third time really was a charm.

I'm at the end of my journey through the Bonds. But we're not done yet. There will be posts aplenty over the next week, as I try to pass the time until midnight Thursday with lists, discussions of odd topics I hadn't gotten to yet, and more Cletus! And of course, QoS will undoubtedly give me a lot to write about, too. And then we can begin the countdown to The Hildebrandt Rarity (hey, don't laugh...who ever thought Eon would actually use Quantum of Solace as a title?!?).

SNELL'S RANDOM NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS:

**We'll have a long talk this weekend about the poker in CR06. There are several questionable things there...

**Interestingly enough, Eon finally got the rights to Casino Royale thanks to a studio trade--MGM gave Sony the rights to do Spider-Man movies, and Sony in return gave MGM the CR rights. Of course, by the time they got around to making CR, Sony had purchased MGM, so it was something of a moot point...

**One aspect of early Bond's spy abilities is that he is COMPLETELY TERRIBLE at surreptitiously following someone. In the deleted scene from the trailer, Dryden's contact sees Bond following him, which results in the bathroom fight. Bond gets made in Madagascar, but that's his partners fault...we'll give him a pass. But Dimitrios catches Bond tailing him in Miami; Carlos the bomber sees Bond trailing him at the airport; the Ugandans nail him at the hotel; and Gettler catches Bond spying on Vesper in Venice. All of these serve to make Bond's life much harder. Really, you'd think that before promoting him to Double-O, M would make sure that he had passed Surveillance 101 (or that the writers wouldn't keep using the same plot device over and over to advance the action...)

**Listen to Dryden talk all about Double-O's, and advice Bond that the second kill is easier. Does he know from experience? Was Dryden a former Double-O, now a corrupt station chief?

**Should LeChiffre really be making his investment call in the open?? Where not only the Ugandans, but Mr. White might overhear? Geez, he's not even trying to conceal the phone call...

**Aah, fictional countries again. Nambutu...the question is, why did Mollaka flee to that embassy? Was he a Nambutuan? Or was he working with their government in some of his terrorist activities?

**How, exactly, does the press leap to the assumption that Bond was a British agent? He never says a word the entire time to anybody in the embassy, or does anything that might betray his identity...why not assume he's American, or Russian? Did the Madagascar authorities somehow manage to track this info down? Did somebody in MI-6 leak it?

**Speaking of which, whatever happened to Bond's oafish partner on this mission, Carter? He's never mentioned again after blowing things. Was he captured, and then dropped the dime on Bond?

**Well, at least we now know why Bond never fathered any bastards during all those liaisons over the years--crushed gonads!!

**I asked this same question in TWINE...why is Vesper making a physical withdrawal from the bank, as opposed to a wire transfer, such as the one that put the money into her account to begin with? Just to give us a briefcase MacGuffin, I guess...

**If that's someone from the Treasury asking M to call Bond about why the money hasn't been transferred yet, why aren't they also calling Vesper, since she actually worked for the Treasury?? Then again, maybe they did and she just never returned the calls...

**So Skyfleet is going to do the big public unveiling of their new jetliner in the middle of the night??

**Vesper may be at the treasury, but she seems a little iffy on certain mathematical concepts: "So you're telling me it's a matter of probability and odds...I was worried there was some chance involved." Uh, Vesper dear...that's sort of the definition of chance...

**Why all the muckity muck about planting the tracker/bug in LeChiffre's inhaler, when all it ever did was to show Bond what floor LeChiffre was staying on? Really, you need a gadget for that??

**I can't finish without mentioning Solange...mmmm, pretty lady.

**Did M know about Bond's deal to give LeChiffre to the Americans? Obviously, it never came about, but would she have approved of such freelancing? Would she have applauded it as a necessary improvisation under the circumstances?? Or would she have ripped into Bond for giving away an asset to the Americans??

**So, just for the record...we know MI-6 and the CIA had infiltrated the game. Who else was the? Japanese intelligence? The Mossad?

**Bond Score: 2. Solange and Vesper. Cumulative Bond Score...hmm, does this count anymore? If it's really a reboot, maybe not...but since so far they're not remaking any of the older movies, I say they still count for Bond Score purposes...so Cumulative Bond Score: 57.

And, as always

Tune in next week for "5 minutes later..." Damn it, the anticipation is killing me!!

My Favoritest Bond Parody Ever

From October, 1987...

Die Another Day

1:02:55.

It's not often that you can pinpoint the exact moment that a movie decides to go completely insane, to take a plunge off the deep end. But in Die Another Day, it's right there on the counter on my DVD player.

1:02:55.

Up until that point, I was with DAD. I thought it was actually rocking fairly hard. Oh, sure there were some trouble signs of what was on the horizon. And in retrospect, that first half wasn't quite as good as my mind was building it up to be. But they were taking Bond to places, physical and metaphorical, that he had never been before. And the movie's heart seemed in the right place.

Until 1:02:55.

That's when the movie takes an abrupt left turn, seemingly jettisoning everything that the first half of the movie had been about, to go off in a crazy super-hero sci-fi direction that makes Moonraker look like the Bourne Ultimatum. When the filmmakers seem to say, "Well, we gave you 3 1/2 Brosnan movies rooted in some level of realism, now it's time to go freaking nuts!"

Let me just say, as much as I had overestimated the first half of the movie in my memory, I had been too harsh on the second half. Whatever its flaws, Die Another Day is no A View To A Kill. The movie never fails to be watchable and entertaining, even if the back of your mind is screaming, "This is sooo not James Bond!!" The actors are giving their all, the action is pretty good (when real), the pace never flags, the sets are great...the problem is not coasting, or that the makers just didn't care. No, the main problem with the second half of DAD, and thus the whole film, is a series of (what I feel to be) wrong-headed decisions that blow up on them, and also help to expose the rest of the weaknesses of the film.

The movie begins with what is probably the weakest of the Brosnan teasers. The initial image, of Bond and comrades surfing onto a beach in North Korea, is terrifically unimpressive. None of the surfers does anything remotely exciting or different--at least VTAK tried to make us believe that Bond's snowboarding was something different and innovative and exciting. They don't even bother to give us as fake close-up to try and fool us into thinking that Pierce is actually doing the surfing. Matters aren't helped by the decision to slap a blue filter on the camera, pump in a lot of fog, and make things look as dank and dismal as possible.

And then the story--Bond posing as an illegal diamond merchant in order to assassinate some North Korean colonel who's selling weapons--isn't that interesting, as it really gives 007 nothing to do except stand around until he's betrayed. And the hovercraft chase is equally dismal. Given the identical looking craft manned by identically dressed troops and constant cutting and shifting of perspective, it's difficult to tell who is who and where from shot to shot....and let's face it: watching a hovercraft race isn't too thrilling, anyway. And with the reliance on flame throwers and grenades and heavy artillery, it felt as if we were just retreading the Tomorrow Never Dies teaser. (Alternate suggestion: I had hoped, upon seeing Moon's collection of bitchin' cars, that Bond would hop into one of them to chase the colonel, having to drive a Lotus through the minefields while chasing the hovercraft...now that would have been a teaser!!).

Ah, but the end of the teaser, that where things get interesting. Bond succeeds (we think) in his mission, but he's captured...and not just "hold a gun on him while we tell him our plan" captured, but for the first time ever, well and truly caught, no gadgets left, no way out. He's taken off to be tortured...and stunningly enough, that's where the opening credits start!!

And a pretty innovative set of credits they are, as they consist mainly as a montage directly reflecting the action of Bond being tortured, together with the motifs of fire and ice that will dominate the movie. As the audience is wowed by this unprecedented turn of events, they get to see the most unique credit sequence in franchise history, all accompanied by the great Madonna song.

OK, OK, I know that I'm apparently the only one in the western world who likes Madonna's theme song, and I'm definitely the only one who ranks it as highly as I do. So sue me. To those who say "But it doesn't sound anything like a Bond theme," well, neither did McCartney & Wings' Live and Let Die, at the time. I applaud the innovation, and it earns extra bonus points for having the best music video EVER to accompany a Bond theme (and a far better 20th Bond movie tribute than some of the ham-fisted homages we're given by the movie proper...oops, I'm getting ahead of myself).

And, just when the audience is still thinking, "Is this a trick? Is Bond really captured? How does he escape?" they hit us with the startling caption: FOURTEEN MONTHS LATER.

Whoa. Bond has never been held captive for more than 14 minutes before, let alone 14 months!! We see a beaten and unkempt Bond!! He doesn't escape, he's given back--in a prisoner exchange, for his enemy!! He's drugged, and kept prisoner by MI-6, because his own government no longer trusts him!! M declares that he should have killed himself!!!

This was all heady stuff, and completely new ground for the franchise. It looked as if we were going to get a from-the-ground-up reexamination of what makes Bond Bond, a look at how 007 deals with defeat, a character study on how he can rebuild himself after 14 months of captivity and torture.

Nah. Not gonna happen. Sorry, but instead we're going to get a 21st-century version of Roger Moore era bombast. Fooled you!!

We'd already had a couple of trouble signs. Let me say first, I don't have too many problems with Brosnan's not too great looking beard and way-too-buff-to-have-been-tortured-and-starved-for-over-a-year physique. You've gotta suspend some disbelief, and I certainly didn't expect Pierce to drop 50 pounds and make himself emaciated for the sake of a couple of scenes (although, did they really need him to have his shirt off/open so much, essentially showing off the problem?).

No, the problem is in Bond's little escape. Bond escaping and going rogue is great...he's been rogue before, but it could be something worth doing again. But his escape? Seriously, did we need to invent a super power for Bond? I can buy some mind/body control techniques to make torture more bearable (although, aside from a line in the theme song, we never actually see Bond doing that in Korea...). But to lower your heartbeat enough to fake a cardiac event? And then the ability to instantly snap out of whatever deep trance that required, as your pulse goes from 14 to 70 in less than one second?!? (And notice that Bond's vitals weren't being monitored when M came to visit...the next scene, he's conveniently hooked up to monitors again!) The whole sequence was silly, especially when you consider that there were countless other ways Bond could have escaped without resorting to "Bond's super-ability of the film," which had never been seen before and would never be seen again. It's certainly not terrible, it doesn't really hurt the picture. But that's the first sign of where the film is going--over-the-top sci-fi instead of good old-fashioned spy craft, a gradual leaving behind of the realistic for the nuttiness of the Roger Moore era.

Next we go to Hong Kong, because apparently 14 months of poisoning, beating, and malnourishment leaves a Double-O strong enough to swim however far it was from the British ship to the docks and then walk however far it was to the hotel. But basically we're just marking time until Bond gets a lead (and an assist from Chinese intelligence) to find Zao. If you're a glass half full kind of guy, you can look at the fact that he doesn't immediately bed Peaceful Fountains of Desire as a sign that Bond hasn't fully recovered yet. If you're a glass half empty type of gal, you may be dismayed by the fact that, apparently, all Bond needed was a shave and a haircut to return to full functionality.

Off to Cuba (which means that fully 1/2 of Brosnan's films took place in Cuba, which one might think of as odd for a British agent...). The film is still in fine shape here, I think. Bond's meeting with the sleeper agent is very well handled, and his introduction to Jinx is exciting. I must say, it's pretty thrilling to see a female who's as enthusiastic for a roll in the hay as Bond is, who's just as good at the double entendres and lustful glances. Bond's first opportunity to wallow in pleasure after captivity is well handled.

The scenes at the clinic go pretty well, too. Jinx proves herself to be a capable agent (although you have to wonder, what exactly is her mission? The doctor was a pig, but if her mission was to find Zao, killing him seems a touch counter-productive, especially since the bomb she leaves goes off before she even could have made it to Zao's room). We get a good fight with Zao, and an exciting escape.

But, glass half empty time again. During the Zao fight, director Lee Tamahori begins to show off some of some of the more annoying qualities that will plague us later in the film, with so-cool-5-years-ago Matrix camera moves and speed ramping, gauzy close-ups, and unnecessary slow motion to show us Bond grabbing Zao's diamond "necklace"...what, you couldn't think of some other way to share that information with us?? The scene with Jinx diving off the fort is a particularly bad bit of CGI. And of course the whole conceit of the "genetic therapy" clinic that magically transforms people into completely different people is another example of the movie stepping too far into the realm of sci-fi as opposed to spy/action.

Bond returns to England, and has his "first" meeting with Gustav Graves, and quite a meeting it is, too. Taking the old set piece of Bond having a competition with the main villain to a new level, this is unquestionably the best scene in the movie. Filmed without any of the visual trickery Tamahori would depend later in DAD, the fight is both fun and brutal. Well choreographed, well directed, well acted, well stunted, and energizing. True, at this point we don't know that Graves is really Moon, so there's no real reason given for Graves' obvious antipathy towards Bond, which leeches the tiniest bit away from the fight scene. But it's still great, grand fun. Funniest thing in a Bond movie in quite awhile: the Blades employees in a parade, hauling away all of the items damaged in the duel.

(Query: Why do people get so upset about Madonna's little cameo? It's short, she only has a couple of lines that she delivers well enough, and then she's gone. Some commentators act as if her 1 1/2 minutes of screen time somehow ruin the whole movie. Trust me--she ain't that bad, and even if she were, she's still 10 or 20 spots down the list of things that hurt this movie.)

And then Bond gets his little key in the mail, and has his meeting with M. It's a good scene for the two of them, and fits well into the series' characterization of Dench's M as someone who'll drop her distaste for someone in a heartbeat if he's useful to her. It's a cagily written scene, which could be taken to be saying that M will be willing to use Bond, but keeping him "rogue" so he won't be fettered by the political intrigues (what, again? Why do British politics always seem to protect billionaire madmen?!) that keep her from going after Graves.

Oops, glass half empty intruding again. In a couple of minutes, despite wanting Bond "on the outside," he's back on official duty. And absolutely no reason--none whatsoever--is given for M to be investigating Graves. She had no knowledge of the conflict diamonds, she dismisses the satellite show as "another publicity stunt." Why would she bother with such a politically sensitive mission if there was no reason to undertake it? Or is she just routinely sending agents to infiltrate the staffs of billionaires?? The writers apparently didn't think that one through, a sign of slipshod construction that will continue throughout...

Which brings us to 1:02:55. While not perfectly executed, up to this point we've had a movie that poked at some of the darker corners of the Bond mythos, as our hero is expected to have killed himself, is tortured for over a year, is burned by MI-6, and has to go rogue. We've got North Korean officers and corrupt billionaires dealing with conflict diamonds, and all the history and misery that entails.

It would have been nice for the movie to deal with ANY of that. It's not as if I want to see Bond made dysfunctional with PTSD, but the second half of the movie pretends that nothing ever happened--he's 100% fit, healthier even than in TWINE, when at least he had a shoulder injury that flared up when convenient for the plot. All that's left is Bond's anger at his betrayal. And it's not as if I want to see DAD turned into Blood Diamonds, but they're the ones who bring up the issue of conflict diamonds, and then throw it away without any discussion whatsoever. It's as if the writers found a cool word to use without knowing what it actually meant...

At 1:02:55, the movie flushes all of that down the toilet, and dumps any pretensions it had of being a serious Bond movie.

Suddenly, we see Bond taking part in a bloody VR simulation. That's right, someone in MI-6 has betrayed him, he's been given a mission to go after Graves, and the very first thing the movie gives us is Bond playing a completely irrelevant video game. And aside from causing the audience to scratch it's collective head and go "WTF?" the sole purpose of this scene is to set up Moneypenny's obnoxious little scene at the end. Oh, dear.

Then we get Q, and aside from cramming as many old gadgets into his lab as possible, he's there to give Bond...the invisible car.

Good grief.

We've traveled so far into the nutter zone, it's as if we've jumped into a completely different movie all of a sudden. A generally straight spy adventure yarn has transformed into Spy Kids 3-D.

Let me tally the sins. First of all, the rule of Bond has always been "five minutes into the future." Technology for our hero that is advanced over what you can at Radio Shack, but nothing completely unbelievable (we'll leave technical feasibility discussions to others). But building upon small sins in the first half of the movie, look where DAD has led us: Ridiculously futuristic and non-existant medical scanning equipment on board the British warship; technobabble "gene therapy" that completely transforms everything about one's appearance, voice, height, voice, everything...not to mention turning them into insomniac supermen; a "virtual reality" simulator that appears to be just as good as Star Trek's holodecks; invisible cars, for gods sake; satellite-controlling, 100,000-volt dispensing exoskeletons that turn our villain into an Iron Man wannabe (I'll give them the killer satellite...that's a Bond staple). DAD not only crosses over the line, but erases it and keeps going, willing to do anything to be "entertaining" and "futuristic," regardless of how it fits in with Bond. It becomes a superhero movie, with a sense of unreality that actively fights against the audience's suspension of disbelief.

Secondly, there's always been an unspoken contract between the Bond films and the audience: the stunts are "real." Sure, it's not Roger Moore jumping off of Asgard...but somebody, a real human being, is actually performing the jump. Yes, we know that Timothy Dalton isn't really hanging off a plane's tail in mid-air--it's photographic trickery, but in a couple of shots he is actually there (albeit at ground level). It's the "realness" of the stunts that has always helped make Bond the best action franchise there has ever been.

But the way the computer graphics are used in DAD is a betrayal of that. It turns Bond into a cartoon, a computer-generated image of Brosnan riding a computer-generated parachute/surfboard in front of a computer-generated tidal wave from a glacier that never existed. No human contact or input necessary.

And the worst part is, it looked incredibly craptacular. We're not talking George Lucas level special effects here. We're talking "photo-shopped Pierce's head onto the body of someone surfing and uploaded it onto YouTube" quality. If you are going to turn to CGI stunts, why in the name of England would you do so in a way that actually makes your movie look worse?!? Take the scene of Jinx jumping off the fortress walls in Cuba. Instead of doing it the old fashioned way--showing Halle on the wall, cut to a cleverly camouflaged stunt-person actually doing the jump, cut to a shot of Halle in the water--we get a terrible, terrible "shot" of her body not even moving a muscle as she "jumps," no shot of anyone making an actual dive, or an actual splash. Picture, if you will, the bungee jump from Goldeneye having been done this way. Abominable.

Look, I'm not against CGI per se. And I'm not against it in Bond, if used reasonably and well. Properly utilized, it's no more offensive than, say, all of the "fake driving while in front of a rear screen projection" scenes for the good old days. But the way DAD uses it, it takes away one of the franchise's greatest strengths, and turns it into a weakness. It makes the movie look worse, it takes the audience out of the "reality" of the "stunts", and the quality of the CGI is just laughably, criminally bad. There's a reason why the duel at Blades was so much more compelling than anything done with CGI. I hope producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson were properly ashamed at abandoning one of the foundations of the franchise.

The shift in tone between the two halves of the movie is fairly remarkable. It's almost as if two different sets of hands worked on each half (and for all I know, maybe Neal Purvis and Robert Wade did each take a half!). Perhaps part of it was just me, reading things I wanted to see into the first half, and thus caused my own disappointment when they weren't followed through on. Is it just me? One half-assed theory: at the halfway point, M drops an oblique 9/11 reference. I can't tell you exactly when the script was written, but I can't escape the feeling that at one point either the writers or producers suddenly said, "Geez, we can't do a grim and gritty picture so soon after 9/11--we'd better lighten it up!!" Whatever the cause, this goes in the books as the most schizophrenic Bond movie ever.

Another problem in the movie is that the Colonel Moon/Gustav Graves conceit just doesn't work very well. I know that the premise is that it's supposed to be a completely unrecognizable transition. But it's just too unrecognizable for the audience to buy into...we never really accept that Graves is Moon. There's no commonality between the performances of Will Yun Lee and Toby Stephens--no phrase repeated, no Dr. Evil pinkie-to-the-mouth, no stance, nothing. From a story-telling perspective, I think in this circumstance you have to cheat a little bit, and give the audience something to latch onto that will let them buy that these two completely distinct men are one and the same. And this severe disconnect between Moon & Graves just encourages the writers to ignore previously revealed traits for silliness: in the teaser, Moon seems proficient with martial arts, while Graves relies on solar powered exoskeletons and barroom brawling to fight Bond!!

Finally, just as with The Living Daylights and Afghanistan, DAD is at best incoherent, and at worst ignorant, on geopolitical issues. I had wondered earlier why bother to make up fictional nations for Licence To Kill and The Living Daylights...this is why. Let's see if I've got this straight. We're told that the "hard-liners" didn't control North Korea until Bond's mission gave them the "proof" that they couldn't trust the West. General Moon, the "good" North Korean who doesn't approve of torture and opposes the hard-liners and whom Bond thought was powerful enough to stop a war just with his word, is deposed when the hard-liners "stage a coup" (and apparently give control of their country to any madman with a solar weapon). And through it all, not a mention of Kim Jong Il, the single-party state, or any actual facets of North Korea's government, let alone the fact that North Korea is hardly what anyone would describe as "moderate." If you're going to make all your background up, why even bother to make North Korea the villain in the first place, instead of a fictional country? It's not as if all of their attempts to avoid reality prevented the movie from offending Koreans from both sides. Just like with conflict diamonds, Purvis and Wade latched onto the concept of Korea without ever bothering to actually use it, or look anytrhing up.

And then there's the Demilitarized Zone, the DMZ. For a de-militarized zone, it sure seems awfully militarized, filled with military bases. Of course, there are no bases for either side in the DMZ..."Apart from Panmunjom, the Joint Security Area and two model villages, the DMZ is devoid of humans and their machinery, other than a large number of land mines." Maybe the captions were meant to be taken as "NEAR the De-Militarized Zone" or "Just outside the DMZ." Or maybe in the Bond universe "de-militarized" means "both sides have lots of stuff there but promise cross their hearts not to fight."

All of that being said, DAD doesn't completely fail, no matter how much it may disappoint. It does keeping moving briskly, albeit in a cartoon-like manner. For the most part the action is well-staged, albeit sometimes in a surreal CGI manner. And bless its heart, it never stops trying to impress us with how clever it thinks it is, how fun it is. And to an extent, it is fun. It is still the weakest of the Brosnan films...but it's not terrible, despite all the flaws I was whining about above.

Moon/Graves makes for a good villain, and is actually pretty fun. Will Yun Lee gets too little screen time for us to make much of an evaluation of him, although I do have to question why Moon is so corrupted and materialistic, yet still wants to have his non-corrupt and non-materialistic government destroy South Korea.

But Toby Stephens shines as Graves. Graves was based very much on the Moonraker novel's Hugo Drax...the enemy of England who has plastic surgery to adopt a British identity, become wealthy, and build a "good" space vehicle that is secretly a plan to destroy his most hated foe. Granted, the script lets him down at several points, as his motivations and plans are blurry at times, and the writers make him rely on a Transformer suit at the end. But he is thoroughly unlikeable, as his haughty arrogance gives us a good villain to hate. He has a good physicality, going toe to toe with Bond in the duel at Blades and holding his own. He has fun playing up the eccentric billionaire playboy cover--although the fact that he's such an asshole seems a bit at odds with his philanthropic give-away-half-my-fortune-and-build-a-satellite-to-save-the-world portion of the story. Stephens creates a better megalomaniac than the film's script deserves.

Rosamund Pike makes Miranda Frost a nasty, sexy bitch (and I mean that in a good way). Again, I think the script is a bit lax on her motivations--really, Moon helps her win a Gold medal instead of Silver, and she's ready to betray her country and murder millions? Really?!?--but Pike muscles her way through it, portraying Miranda as a women who is playing Bond for a fool very well. It doesn't hurt that's she one gorgeous woman...and that outfit at the end...grrrr.....!!

Zao could have been great. They play him as an evil Bond--he's got a better car than Bond, he can outdrive and outfight Bond--but the problem is, we've already had an evil Bond during the Brosnan era, and Zao is no Alec Trevelyan. Zao is given no personality at all, and buried beneath ridiculous make-up for most of the movie, Rick Yune isn't able to give us anything to make Zao as memorable as he should be. Again, the script isn't doing him any favors, but unlike Stephens and Pike, Yune doesn't seem able to rise above it. And is it just me, or do half his lines sound dubbed??

Lee Tamahori has some annoying quirks. He's not good at chase scenes--the ice chase between Bond and Zao is almost as confusingly filmed as the hovercraft chase from the teaser--and he waaaaayyy overuses the Matrix stop-n-goes. Most annoyingly, he does this pretty inconsistently: sometimes he uses it to introduce a scene, sometimes to exit one, and sometime just when Zao walks across a room. There's no rhyme or reason to the technique, he just keeps doing it because he thinks it's cool.

Otherwise, though, it's a fairly solid directorial outing. The duel at Blades, the duel between Jinx and Frost, the final fight between Bond and Graves--all well directed and pretty exciting, occasional slow-motion indulgences aside. Tamahori definitely makes a better flowing film than Michael Apted did, and seems to have a stronger vision of what a Bond film should be than Roger Spottiswoode.

Sadly, M and MI-6 comes off as chowderheads again. Seriously, how easy is it to penetrate this organization?? In Goldeneye Bond mentioned pysch tests--well, how in the world did Miranda Frost pass one of those? Willingness to cheat and murder your way to a gold medal wouldn't show up? Your willingness to betray field agents wouldn't turn up?? Furthermore, M says she was in the cryptography department for the past 3 years...how did she get access to Bond's files?? Can any old clerk at MI-6 just pull up and transmit classified data to her Korean boyfriend?!?

Oh, it gets worse...M castigates the American Damian Falco (great name, jerkwad character) for not telling MI-6 that Miranda was on the fencing team with Moon at Harvard...what, MI-6 can't run their own freakin' background checks?!? You don't even check who her classmates and boyfriends were? Oy. And after Bond is released by the Koreans, and M knows that there's a mole, does she do ANYTHING to investigate it? Can't M look up to see if anyone's been accessing Bond's files? Maybe double-check and see if her agent who is closest to Graves is clean? M say that Frost volunteered for the assignment--what, there was a flier up in the cafeteria? "Wanted--cryptographer to pose as publicist for billionaire??" And the fact that she volunteered wasn't a call for further background checks?!?! Oh, poor M...the past 2 movies have made you look so stupid...

We've discussed how every few movies they make the Bond Girl somehow "competent", and suddenly we’re deluged with articles declaring that the new Bond Girl is “007’s equal” and that this is somehow new for the series, and what it means for feminism, yadda yadda. Well, it's this decade's turn. Jinx Johnson joins Anya and Wai Lin as someone the media declared as a "new type of Bond girl." Snore.

But Jinx actually is pretty competent. True, Bond does have to rescue her--TWICE--in Iceland. But she acquits herself well in Cuba, and kicks Frost's ass pretty well. And I love the fact that, as mentioned above, they do make her more of an equal to Bond in terms of being a seeker of sensual delights. I can't say that I'm 100% sold on Halle Berry's performance. She doesn't seem able to consistently give off the toughness she wants to project without coming off as stilted and shrill on some of her line readings. But her scenes alone with Bond? Pretty damn good.

There was, of course, all of the talk about Jinx being given her own movie series. I'm not sure how much of that was merely hype, especially as we were hearing that before the movie even debuted. For whatever reason, the plans fell apart, and I can't say that I'm too disappointed. I never saw a lot of evidence onscreen that Halle/Jinx would be able to carry her own series as anything other than a female version of Bond, and that would merely dilute Eon's resources between two franchises. Plus, the dropping of the project meant we were spared seeing Michael "Please, Quentin, cast me in something again" Madsen ambling across the movie screen every two years, lazily barking arrogant orders as Damian Falco.

This was, of course, Brosnan's last outing as 007. It's too bad, because I certainly think that he had at least one more Bond film in him. He has no emotional through line to follow in this film--the script bails on the beat-up rogue story at the halfway point--but Pierce manages to carry some of that hurt and anger through into the rest of the movie with his performance. Even though the second half of the film provides almost no character moments for him (and the CGI robs him of some chances to actually perform), Brosnan never gives into coasting, pushing Bond past what the script gives him.

I think that perhaps the most impressive thing about the Brosnan era was his ability to keep up the intensity of his Bond despite scripts that weren't always conducive to that. Whatever complaints you here about the movies during his tenure, there rarely seems to be any criticism aimed at his portrayal of 007--which is a revelation in and of itself, because there were certainly plenty of critics of Dalton and Moore. While you regularly heard debates as to whether Lazenby or Moore or Dalton "was" Bond, you never heard that said about Brosnan. He will never receive the respect or acclaim of Sean Connery...but the fact that he never received the disapprobation occasionally directed at the others is very telling, I think. I don't like to rank the Bond actors--there's too much difference in tenure length, movie quality, and other things that were beyond their control, making such a ranking too much apples and oranges. But I will say that I think that Pierce Brosnan is due a lot more respect than we give him sometimes...

A lot of people forget that the general public and the media were quite disdainful about the prospects for the Bond franchise before Pierce came aboard, ready to dismiss it as dated and irrelevant. But from his very first scene, Brosnan won (almost) everyone over, giving us a Bond for the 90's, one whose character went places that the other 007 were never asked to. Sadly, his movies follow a continuous downward line in quality, and that obscures, I think, the impact his era had. The worst Brosnan film, DAD is still better than most of the Roger Moore era...yet the quality of Goldeneye (and to some extent TND) left us spoiled and hyper-critical. Sometimes we're missing the forest for the trees, ignoring the fact that the Brosnan run is the reason we're getting a new Bond film in 2 weeks. In it's own way and time, Goldeneye was every bit as vital to the future success and health of the franchise as The Spy Who Loved Me was in its day. As the box office numbers climbed for every Brosnan film, we were guaranteed that James Bond would indeed return.

And so, except for Judi Dench's M, we bid farewell to everybody (onscreen, at least), as the reboot of Casino Royale was coming. I really do wish that Pierce had been given at least one more shot--he'd earned it, and there's nothing inherent in the Casino Royale story that requires it to be the "first" Bond story. But time marches on, change is constant, and big things were in store for us. Get ready, folks, as next week we get re-introduced to a fellow named Ian Fleming...

SNELL'S RANDOM NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS:

**Let's start out, surprisingly, with my defending the movie against one of the sillier criticisms leveled against it. When Bond is escaping in the car from Icarus' beam, it's said to be stupid because "he's outracing a light beam, and that's impossible."

Not true. Let's try a thought experiment. Hold onto a flashlight or a laser pointer. When there's an annoying housefly buzzing around the room, try to keep the beam centered on the fly. You can't, and probably can't ever catch up the the insect. Does that mean the fly can "outrun a beam of light?" Of course not...but it does mean that it can move faster than the thing controlling the light beam. Just as the fly can move faster than the hand holding the laser pointer can react, Grave's car can move faster than the targeting mechanism on Icarus which controls the beam can keep up with.

It's still a crappy bit of CGI, and a pretty silly scene (where, exactly, was Bond planning to go when he hopped into the speed mobile??). But in this one aspect, they don't deserve the sneers.

**That being said, Icarus' beam can completely destroy a military missile and explode the living hell out of everything it touches...but a jumbo jet can fly right through it and keep on going for another 10 minutes or so??

**And, not to call the U.S. idiots or anything...but you fire ONE missile at Icarus? One?? OK, so it's shot down. How about shooting more missiles--that would at least distract it from blowing up the DMZ, right? Or how about firing missiles from different directions--could Icarus take them all out?? How about trying anything more than just one lousy missile and giving up?!? I smell a Cletus coming on...

**So...Graves is sucked into the the jet engine, the Icarus control mechanism is destroyed...isn't it just as likely that it would now stay locked in the "on" position as it would be just turned off by this??

**Samantha Bond...on behalf of everybody in the entire world, I have to apologize for THAT scene being your final scene. You and your character deserved far, far better than a ridiculous masturbation joke. Shame on you, Purvis and Wade...

**As this was the 20th Eon Bond movie, and the 40th anniversary of the franchise, and the 50th anniversary of Bond's first publication, much ado was made over all of the "references" to other Bond films placed throughout DAD. Forgive me for being underwhelmed. First of all, I don't like to have my movies being "Find-A-Word" puzzles, where I'm busy hunting and pecking for "tributes" instead of focusing on the picture itself.

Secondly, some of those "references" I've seen listed are so spurious as to be figments of people's imaginations, I think ("The exterior of Graves' command center is a tropical forest, also akin to Moonraker." Really??? "The laser causes row upon row of explosions across a vegetated area, in this case detonating thousands of land mines, and is reminiscent of the extermination of Kananga's poppy fields." You're kidding, right?). These are after the fact associations that aren't weren't really purposeful tributes. The "game" of finding the references has caused people to over-focus the commonalities that naturally come up in any 20-movie series about a secret agent ("hey, this one has a scene set in snow, so...")

Finally, if the creative team did spend so much time on these "references," well, shame on them. Sure, Halle coming out of the water was fine, the ornithology book was cute, Q's lab was quick and painless. But did they really decide to directly copy Diamonds Are Forever's plot as a "tribute" to that movie? Did they really have Graves chop off part of a glacier to reference OHMMS? A few hat-tips to the past are cute...but if you start borrowing plot points instead of coming up with good, original ideas, that's not "homage", that's just lazy at best, and plagiaristic at worst.

**That said, I should mention one that nobody ever seems to bring up--the scene where M talks to a captive Bond from behind a plexiglas shield is very reminiscent of a scene from the novel TMWTGG, when a brainwashed Bond tries to kill M, who is protected by an "invisible" glass shield...

**Look at this:

How can you hide by crouching behind an invisible car?? Remember, Q explains that cameras on one side project the image onto the other side...so everybody on the other side would see Bond crouching there...sheesh...they're not even paying attention to their own premise again...

**Speaking of which, that camouflage unit is pretty wussy, isn't it? A few hits from Zao's guns, and it's out? And it takes forever to reboot. Plus, Zao's car already has countermeasures to detect it, despite its being "the ultimate in British engineering"!! So, all in all, not one of Q's best inventions.

**So let's talk about Graves. It's been 14 months since Moon was "killed." You'd think that the whole process of "genetic therapy" and whatnot would have to take at least a couple of months...so let's say he's had about a year to establish himself by the time Bond is released. He's already a billionaire? Was one colonel based in the Korean DMZ really trading so many weapons that he had that huge a stash of diamonds? Especially since he supposedly gave half of his fortune to charity...was he using just the diamonds Bond gave him? How many other arms deals were there? Did Moon really sell billions worth of weapons?!?

**A year also seems a ridiculously short time for him to become so prominent. Granted, he might have had some of these plans in place before his "death." But it does seem difficult to believe that he could construct such an impenetrable back-story and become such an amazingly high-profile figure in merely a year.

**And forgive me, any British readers, but will the Queen knight just anybody?!? Seriously, I don't know the politics of the process, but someone who has come out of nowhere, only been in the public eye for a year, and isn't even English?? And he's getting a knighthood?!? I guess Her Majesty's background checks are just as thorough as MI-6's...

**OK, so Graves supposedly found a huge diamond strike in Iceland, gajillions of dollars, and hasn't been shy about spreading his wealth. But we are to believe that not one single person in the entire world EXCEPT an aging sleeper agent in Cuba has ever bothered to actually look at even one of these diamonds, and recognize it as coming from Sierra Leone. Nobody. DAD may gloss over the concept of conflict diamonds, but given all of the scrutiny diamonds receive these days, that is completely unbelievable, isn't it.

**It's wrong of me, but every time I read about this story, I have to think that Graves was involved...maybe this is how he actually amassed his fortune...and it would explain Britain slapping a "terrorist" label on Iceland...

**Olympic fencers use steroids? I guess it's possible...but wouldn't it be odd for a fencer to overdose on steroids after she'd already won the gold? Again, possible, I suppose...but the story smells odd enough that you'd have expected some red flags to have been raised before she was hired by MI-6. Nope...

**So Frost supposedly empties Bond's gun right? But look after she hands it to him...

They do a real quick edit here, but Bond is clearly about to check his clip! Did Pierce just do it out of habit, requiring a quick edit to save the conceit? Or did they just come up with the "empty gun" bit later, and go back and cover their tracks?

**Bond Score: 2. Jinx and Frost (sounds like a cartoon...). Cumulative Bond Score: 55.

And as always

Join as next week as we conclude our long, long trek, and see James Bond try to defeat LeChiffre at baccarat...what?!? Poker?!? Texas Hold 'Em?!?!?!