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Comments
I like the bit after that when he walks from the car park to the hotel
THAT is James Bond :D
You are clearly mad. However, it is definitely the best of Brosnan's outings. If there'd been a better actor in the lead role it might actually have been quite good.
I agree, coolness personified. Also the way he leaves the hotel room after executing Kauffman, the swagger he has while he moves down the stairs is very good. Quintessential Pierce Brosnan Bond. Not quite to the level of Connery, but still pretty damn cool!
Good: It had a good idea, media mogul manipulating the world politics to sell more newspapers (sounds unusually plausible nowadays), an old-flame , I just love Kaufmann and the scene in the parking lot, I quite enjoy Jonathan Pryce as Carver. Last but not least Surrender was a great song (should have been the title song)!
Bad: total waste of the old-flame, the fact that sometimes if feels more like a generic action film and inconsistencies such as Bond mourning Paris' death and 2 min later laughing and having a good fun in the nonetheless great aforementioned parking lot sequence!
Conclusion: although it's a "Bond by numbers" I woudn't call it bad!
But then i'm not an artsy type, I like a good action film, and TND is exacly that.
Very well stated, though GE is perfection to me, haha. That's what I liked about Yeoh: people might complain about her kung-fu'ing her way through the film, but that has to be why she picked her: she can. I've never really researched her biography, but almost every other film she's done that I can think of involves her beating serious ass. Then again, so does Jet Li, and he always says he could hold himself in a fight, but nothing like we see in the films he does.
Got to say, I don't see where you're coming from there at all, Smythey - GE looks far more stylish and luscious and is generally easier on the eye than TND thanks to Phil Meheux's superior cinematography. One of the big reasons why CR looks so good (in different ways at different times) is because Campbell wisely used him as DOP again...
Agreed. Meheux's crowning glory for me will always be that swooping shot as Bond and Vesper's yacht moves in towards Venice. Breathtaking stuff.
There's much better characters and better executed sub-text too. It helped that GE wasn't being re-written as they filmed it, unlike TND. I suspect that's why the latter's so much a film-of-two-halves with, if you will, the latter an Under Siege in the Far East to the first half's OHMSS in northern Germany...
I mean that GE looks like a rough looking film, compared to TND that looks slicker than an eel convention. Whether that's down to GE being the first Bond post hibernation, I don't know. But TND does look more like a film that's had every penny spent on it. TND has also aged better too, and there's only two years between them.
It's been some time since I last watched GE, so maybe my memory is a bit rusty on it, but i'll be coming up to it soon in my Bondathon. Both FYEO & OHMSS have climbed my list, so there's a chance GE could too.
And please don't liken TND to Under Siege. You can liken TND to a Van Damme film, but please not a Seagal film. ;)
GE looks rough? Again, can't see where you're coming from on that one. I can only reiterate it looks more pleasing on the eye than TND - and I suspect many a Bond fan would agree with that, frankly. It's a 'cheaper' film on-screen perhaps, simply because TND had a substantially larger budget, didn't it? And rightly had every penny put on-screen, as is the admirable Eon way.
That's pretty subjective, I guess, but I think they've both aged relatively similarly really - both have done fine on that score.
Come on, they're all the same - they just rotated the two actors... :p
GE looks rough? Again, can't see where you're coming from on that one. I can only reiterate it looks more pleasing on the eye than TND - and I suspect many a Bond fan would agree with that, frankly. It's a 'cheaper' film on-screen perhaps, simply because TND had a substantially larger budget, didn't it? And rightly had every penny put on-screen, as is the admirable Eon way.
Hmm I suppose GE does look a bit "darker" compared to TND which has a more colourful, "techno" feel to it. That said the GE stuff in Monte Carlo and parts of Cuba are fairly lush.
However I think the "greyness" in GE suits the post-soviet story - as does the soundtrack.
Yeah, and Van Damme got all the good ones. \m/ Now you've done it, SG. You've forced me to engage Action Junkie mode. Maybe i'm biased, but Van Damme had a much better 1990's run than Seagal.
Seagal: Under Seige. That's it.
Van Damme: Nowhere To Run, Hard Target, Sudden Death, Universal Soldier, Maximum Risk & Timecop. To name just 6.
Action Junie Mode: Disengaged.
I think @Bain might've hit the nail on the head. Maybe it is the soviet setting that gives the film a cold grey feel.
Ah, I see now, yes. Well, complimented nicely by the luscious way Puerto Rico (Cuba) and Monte Carlo are captured, I'd say that adds more fuel to the fire that is Meheux's quality cinematography... ;)
While I found GE to be timeless and classy, TND is very much a late-90s film. The poor techno soundtrack really dates it, and the four uses (!) of the James Bond theme in the first half hour was overkill. It sounded what what a 12 year old would do if he was scoring a Bond film because, you know, WE'RE WATCHING JAMES BOND DO STUFF!
It also seemed a bit like a generic action film more than a Bond film - classic elements were there but they seemed to exist as "put a check mark in that box" kind of way. Pryce's villain was an interesting idea but there was no menace to the character and that kind of lessened him. Brosnan showed the first bits of becoming more smug and confident in the film and while that was good in its own way I actually liked how he underplayed the role in GE (Campbell also made him far more believable in the fights in GE than he was in TND). The less said about Paris and Stamper the better (maybe better actors could have brought more personality to the roles).
However, I did still enjoy it. There were quite a few great scenes - everyone remembers Bond drinking alone in his hotel room, the Dr. Kaufman scene and the parking lot chase but I also really liked the HALO jump and the dive to the sunken ship. Yeoh was credible as an agent but I found that her and Brosnan didn't have much chemistry. Dench was great as usual and I liked the touch of the briefing in the motorcade - it gave a sense of urgency to the scene.
I found the film quite zippy and enjoyable. Having rewatched Brosnan's first three films I put TND in the middle - not a classic like GE but better than the mawkish, poorly directed and acted TWINE (which, at the time, I liked more than TND!).
Also loved the scene where Bomd infiltrated the Carver HQ and how he left. Pure Bond imo.
Really? I don't have much of a problem with the Bond box-checking mentality, in fact, it works better for me because at that point I know exactly what I came to watch- 007 in his best form, with all the usual refinements attached.