Movie Review—
GoldenEye (1995): Bond Film #17
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James Bond just does his job,
according to this interpretation, and says whatever makes sense to be
said in getting there.
The few scenes where GoldenEye
commits to giving us this rigid Bond interpretation don't work for me.
Invariably, you can pick them out simply by watching for Brosnan seeming
to force an under bite to his facial expression.
And the script itself falters where
its authors strain — needlessly! — to bring Bond into "the Twentieth
Century." The complaint by M that he is a relic of the Cold War, a
dinosaur. Natalya Simonova's shrill "boys with toys" recant.
We all know that James Bond is
relevant and will prove it in this film just like every other adventure
before it. He'll do just fine, thank you very much, even in the context
of today. At the same time, we can read newspapers as well as going to
see adventure movies such as this; we know that the cold war is
over, that the nature of "the enemy" and espionage have changed.
So this emphasis on the obvious
difference between the world in which From Russia with Love took place
and today was not only extraneous, but compromising.
Only slightly less awkward for me was
when Alec Trevelyan explains the way in which James Bond copes with the
brutality of his job, by drinking heavily and widely varied sexual
promiscuity. Crude scripting (no criticism whatsoever to Sean Bean as an
actor), but a nice, necessary summary, and from the right, credible
source.
I'd add Bond's use of "humor" to
Trevelyan's list as well. In past films, critics have complained that
Roger Moore took the franchise in a bad direction in this area. But I'd
refer them back to the very first big screen mission in Dr. No, where
Sean Connery as James Bond observes, after the hearse chasing him with
intent to kill, plummets off a cliff, exploding into flames: The
occupants were "on their way to a funeral."
Much to my relief, Mr. Brosnan, et
al., apparently refused to react against concerns that his Remington
Steele role portended a Brosnan Bond more like Moore than Connery.
This actor deftly delivers both.
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