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<url>http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2012/sep/27/favourite-bond-diamonds-are-forever</url>;
"Here is a Bond film in which the old glamour has lost its sparkle and the resolute hero has lost his way. It's jaded, uncertain and disillusioned. It's vicious, mordant, at times blackly comic. It's oddly brilliant, the best of the bunch: the perfect bleary Bond film for an imperfect bleary western world."
I think that sums up the film nicely.
For a long time I hated this movie because of what it could have been. Recently I began to like it for what it is: a campy, fun and over-the-top Bond adventure. A little of Roger but with a light Connery. Nevertheless it has the worst Blofeld of them all, an anticlimatic ending and some of the most stupid scenes in the series (the gorilla transformation, for example).
Currently is 20th in my ranking but the strange thing is that I tend to see it more than the ranking could suggest... a guilty pleasure with no doubt.
Connery seems to be having such fun and this helps with what I see as a perfect transition from DAF to LALD, which I also rate as one of the more fun Bonds.
The fight with Franks in the lift and the subsequent line "oh my god youve just killed James Bond" "Is that who it was?" Is one of my all time favourite scenes.
And perhaps one of my favourite quotes. "Well, one of us smells like a tart's handkerchief. I'm afraid it's me. Sorry, old boy." I laugh everytime I hear it. Connery really puts on his most over the top Scottish accents for that line!
DAF has to be the movie that has grown on me the most out of all the Bonds. If you asked me where I would rate it 10 years ago it would have been near the bottom, Now tho it is in my top 8. what a difference a few years make.
Highlight of the climax though:
"Put it back Mr Bond...immediately"
I have always enjoyed the moon buggy chase for some reason. Find it kinda funny which I think fits with the overall fun theme of the movie.
The oil rig climax however is as you say...meh.
FRWL climax: Red Grant fight: amazing! Not much more of a finale after that, just chase scenes
GF: Pretty good: Odd Job fight, the countdown part though is similar to DAF, plus the sleeping soldier part is cheesy.
TB: Merely a fistfight on a boat, Largo is harpooned! Whoop-di-do. Underwate sequence prior is open to debate.
YOLT: The scale and scope is incredible, but Blofeld just sort of gets away rather unspectacularly
OHMSS: THE BEST FINALE OF THE SERIES - True, DAF can't hold a candle to it.
LALD: More of the usual henchmen in a laire with a ridiculous end to the villian
TMWTGG: I don't even need to tell you how lacklustre that is
TSWLM: the re-used ticking bomb finale, same old, same old
MR: A 'different' ending I'll give it that, but amounts to little more than faceless astronauts firing fake looking laser guns at each other and a giant falling in love with Ms. Pigtails
FYEO: Very underwhelming: Some fisticuffs with Kriegler, someone gets knifed, and some "let's play hot potato with the ATAC" shenanigans
OP: ...another ticking bomb finale
AVTAK: Villain murdering his crew in cold blood, followed by some ax wielding atop a blimp, decent, not too shabby actually.
I could go on here. But the point is DAF's ending compared to a lot of others in the series isn't all half bad.
The one failing of this movie is the absence of Lazenby in a decent sequel to OHMSS. But still Connery is great too.
Can't argue with that.
To be honest I don't really care for the endings in most Bonds, With the exception of OHMSS.
Its more about the dialogue and the interaction between the characters for me rather than the end battle.
The big problem I have with it however is that it is the start of what I call the 'lacklustre trilogy' which had quite a lot of lacklustre action sequences, they weren't all bad but many stand out as bad. Although worse was to come, it started in DAF with the moon buggy sequence which is IMO pretty dull, drawn-out and unexciting and the same goes for the finale. This trend of long, bland action sequences (which often suffered from a lack of a John Barry score) continued in to LALD and peaked with TMWTGG.
But still, very entertaining, great performances, great score and a strong Connery performance, still a classic, albeit a lesser classic :)
This film is a funny 70s romp that borders on the bizarro, and I guess this was deliberate after the (kind of) seriousness of the film that is inmediately above this one in my list: OHMMS (now, that's a film that grows on you. Since watching it from the first time, it passed from the bottom of my list to the top-5 in two additional viewings). Its comedic value is priceless. Connery looks sure and funny here, a departure from that machine-like performance on YOLT. Jill St. John starts good and screws it in the end; Charles Gray (I prefer to think he's not Blofeld) is one of the funniest villains of the series; Glover and Smith are AWESOME as Wint and Kidd.
Another highlight is John Barry's score, my favorite one by him: jazzy, bouncy and at times as over the top as the film itself. Man, "Q's Trick" is awesome!
The main problem here are the action scenes. The fights are quite good, but the chases and the oil rig attack are dull, and as Calvin Dyson put it in his review, the latter makes one think of strangling that salt mine owner who denied shooting the REAL climax in his property. Not to mention the god-awful *so-called* FX. I've seen better ones on silent cinema, for Méliès's sake!
I don't buy that Connery's salary drained the budget: that satellite scene, the explosions in the missile bases... I can't call it "budget restraints", I call it "lazyness"!
But these flaws do not spoil the film for me. On the contrary, they add to its geeky charm. If I have to got personal, this would be my second Connery favorite after GF.
The whole film is quite seedy and unpleasant. Many of the locations are about as unglamarous as you can get - Dover, Holland, petrol station forecourts, Vegas gaming floors, a funeral parlour and an oil rig. It all reeks of decline and Connery's gone-to-seed devil may care attitude, while not exactly appealing, does seem to actually suit the film quite well. The girls all look like hookers (and probably are) and any sense of the excitement and glamour has gone. This is a sordid Bond, doing sordid work in one of the most sordid places on earth - Vegas.
It's very far from vintage Bond, but despite all this, I don't think it's a 'bad' film. It has a strange period appeal and all in all actually works quite well. Connery's Bond seems like a man out of time here - a relic, nearing the end of the road.
Not 'enjoyable' exactly, but interesting in a good way.
It's just that I've suddently seen it in a new light. This whole end of the 60s, start of the 70s come-down thing. And it's all so rancid and far removed from those early movies, where everything's so cool. It is actually quite brilliant in the way it responds to and reflects Connery's altered state. It's not trying to recapture the golden days of the early films. It's just unashamedly sordid and sort of repugnant.
I have to say, seen in this new light, I have new found appreciation for it.
And it really does feel like the transition movie between Sean and Rog as well. You could have seen Rog in it as well, but Sean's overweight and aged appearance just suits it so well.
Of course, I'd have loved to have seen a Lazneby revenge movie after OHMSS, and it could well have been a better film. All I'm saying is that DAF as made has qualities that I had not fully appreciated before.
I also think it sort of explodes that idea that Mendes peddles, about SF being the first film to address the passing of time and the characters ageing. I do actually think DAF does this - may be not a directly as SF (no need for clunking pointers from Turner or Tennyson) but in a more subtle and nuanced way.
If that's the case, I sincerely doubt it was an intended move from the filmmakers. On the contrary DAF seems like a very obvious attempt to replicate Goldfinger's cool, extravagant smart fun, what the nostalgic fans wanted... and a complete failure at that... Although sordid by todays standards, Vegas was considered glamorous in the early 70s. The laser satelite was an attempt at an epic plot devise, the underwhelming oil rig being a product of lazyness if anything. Ken Adam does his best to to provide elegant sets, Barry provides a "classic" score and so on... The film feels tired and sordid because it was made on tired and sordid premises, not as an effort of thematical symbolism. "Nuanced" is definitely not the word to describe it...
...but since this is an appreciation thread... I might add that I enjoy some of the humour in the film. Those jokes and lines that are tasteful and clever that is, not the embarrasing farce. I can't find more positives than that though... Oh well, the elevator fight is decent I guess...
Yeah that's pretty bad, but I do like Grey's response when Bond Connery ejects the tape:
"Put it back Mr Bond...immediately"
Would have been better with Telly
Something for Tarantino to explore.
I rank it around the middle, which, if you know me, means I think quite a lot of it. Interested to see where it ends up after this Bondathon. Probably around 13 or so.