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Villain Death Traps: The Best and the Worst
As a regular part of the Bond movies, the villains always have to place 007 in a death trap which he "cannot escape." Out of all of them, which do you think were great, and which were poor?
Here are a few I enjoy:
-The shark pool in Thunderball: I like this one because it wasn't something elaborate that looks like the villain took hours to prepare. It was simply spur of the moment, a split-second decision by Largo that would have worked out, had Q not equipped 007 with a handy re-breather device.
-The Centrifuge trainer in Moonraker: Again, it's just something that was spur of the moment. Chang saw that 007 was inside the trainer, so he found a convenient way to kill him, making it look like a malfunction.
-Kristatos' trap in For Your Eyes Only: Even though this one probably took a little longer to set up, it was a simple yet effective means of killing Bond and Melina. The brutal torture of having their backs torn open by the rocks, and then their blood attracting the sharks is just pure evil!
Some I didn't like:
-Helga Brandt's plane: What a ridiculous "trap"! Very poorly thought out. She had no idea if Bond carried anything to cut free of the wooden board, and if he did cut through, his 00 status would most definitely include pilot skills. No wonder Blofeld fed her to the piranhas!
-Whisper's traffic trap: He shot Bond's cab driver with the dart, but not Bond? Really? And as if Bond didn't have the knowledge to lean up over the backseat and take the wheel! Not very smart at all...
Here are a few I enjoy:
-The shark pool in Thunderball: I like this one because it wasn't something elaborate that looks like the villain took hours to prepare. It was simply spur of the moment, a split-second decision by Largo that would have worked out, had Q not equipped 007 with a handy re-breather device.
-The Centrifuge trainer in Moonraker: Again, it's just something that was spur of the moment. Chang saw that 007 was inside the trainer, so he found a convenient way to kill him, making it look like a malfunction.
-Kristatos' trap in For Your Eyes Only: Even though this one probably took a little longer to set up, it was a simple yet effective means of killing Bond and Melina. The brutal torture of having their backs torn open by the rocks, and then their blood attracting the sharks is just pure evil!
Some I didn't like:
-Helga Brandt's plane: What a ridiculous "trap"! Very poorly thought out. She had no idea if Bond carried anything to cut free of the wooden board, and if he did cut through, his 00 status would most definitely include pilot skills. No wonder Blofeld fed her to the piranhas!
-Whisper's traffic trap: He shot Bond's cab driver with the dart, but not Bond? Really? And as if Bond didn't have the knowledge to lean up over the backseat and take the wheel! Not very smart at all...
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Comments
- Goldfinger: Where Goldfinger has Bond strapped, layed-down on a table, with a powerful laser slowly closing-in between his legs, and there is no way 007 can get free, well except for 'talking', ofcourse.
Can't think of a bad trap yet
- Kristatos' trap in FYEO. I loved how it dragged on, and every time he turned around, Bond and Melina had just a few short seconds to cut the rope more and more.
- The alligator pit in LALD. Bond going from confident to captured, then given a brief history of the alligators, and then unwillingly being locked in there with them. Excellent escape, too. I love how that, because the watch didn't work, he devised a split-second plan to just book it across their backs.
- The train in GE. One of my favorites: Trevelyan's little quip about giving Bond the 'same six minutes you gave me', and having Bond recognize they only have three just makes the scene more intense. And as Bond is desperately trying to open the hatch and grab Natalya, the music builds up and she gets closer and closer to naming the location of their final destination. So dramatic.
One of the movie cliche - the villain always want to talk too much and waste their time with elaborate killing techniques.
He should had just tied them together real tight, bind their mouths, make a cut on Bond's arm and push them into the pool shark
or better yet, take a gun and shoot them point blank.
This is one of the elements that the Austin Powers films and Last Action Hero so successfully made fun of!!
The whole "talking to Bond and giving him an elaborate death rather than shooting him point blank" has always been associated with Bond - right back to Fleming's days.
sharks in TB
exploding helicopter in GE.
I'm not keen on the Goldfinger scene where the gangsters are killed - due to the awful acting primarily.
@Hank_Scorpio, those are my exact thoughts with the torture scene: Bond obviously wasn't giving in, so he would have let Le Chiffre cut away anything he wanted, resulting in him bleeding out and dying. It's really great what he says about torture - it's the simplest thing to make a man feel more pain than he could possibly imagine. It's why the CR torture scene is great - simplistic, yet you feel the pain. I wince every time I see it.
That scene is a masterclass in Painface.
I also enjoyed two of the concepts behind certain death-traps in DAD, but the execution was very poor. Firstly, I liked the idea of the laser fight, with Bond having to fight a villain in an environment that could kill him and was constantly changing. However, the presence of Mr. Kil and Jinx let the scene down, and the lasers defied logic (why would somebody have or need diamond-cutting lasers in a fake diamond mine?). Secondly, I liked the idea behind the dying plane, even if there was an excess of CGI, hammy dialogue, lapses in logic (a bird going through a jet engine would destroy said engine, yet a man in a Robocop suit causes it no damage) and bizarre jump-cuts (like when General Moon gets shot; the camera freezes for no particular reason). The dying plane put a time limit on Bond, and forced him to complete his mission and find a way to escape before killing him. It was a bit like the Cessna in GE (which wasn't really a death-trap): Bond had to catch it and take control of it before it crashed.