Skip to content

4 Comments

  1. Jack Falvey Andrew Libera
    November 3, 2015 @ 12:35 pm

    I will argue that OHMSS isn’t the only time we see Bond vulnerable. Take a look at 1989 License to Kill staring Timothy Dalton. Bond’s good friend Felix Leiter is getting married, right before the wedding we see Leiter get called in by his partners at the DEA for a drug lord he’s been after. He catches him with Bond’s assistance and parachuts to his wedding in a very cinema like take right into the intro video. It makes you happy. The movie takes a very dark turn when Leiter and his wife are captured right after the reception by the said drug dealer Sanchez played by Robert Davi. One of Sanchez’s henchmen rapes and kills Felix’s wife and then they feed Felix to a shark which is taken from the book Live and Let Die. Bond quits MI6 in pure rage and goes after Sanchez on a rouge mission against M’s wishes. Bond in that move is motivated by revenge and revenge only and makes a lot of mistakes where you see him being very human. LTK gets a bad rep because it did very poorly at the box office due to it coming out summer of 89 which had some tough competition (Batman, Lethal Weapon 2, ndiana Jones and the Last Crusade, etc) and add in the legal battle that came right after over the rights to the series which delayed Dalton’s 3rd film that never happened and gave the role to Brosnan for Goldeneye.
    Dalton was Bond in my eyes. I am a book purist and having read most of them I feel like Dalton captured the character perfectly in this film and in his other outing The Living Daylights.
    Craig does an excellent job in his own ways but to me there are small things that are missing with his films which are minor. I am looking forward to Spectre to see how they do the whole arc and hopefully stay true to the books without being a complete remake.
    For me Dalton, Craig, and Connery are my 3 favorites. While I respect Roger Moore and his role, towards the end of his run his movies just got too goofy and poorly made specially the very obvious stunt doubles.

    • Jack Falvey Episode IV
      November 3, 2015 @ 12:45 pm

      Bosses, hire this man!

  2. Jack Falvey John MacIntyre
    November 3, 2015 @ 1:41 pm

    From a pure entertainment standpoint, Roger Moore will always be my favorite Bond. It is usually Moore-era Bond movies that I will throw on if I’m bored. They have a comfort factor for me. That said his interpretation is quite off the mark from the Fleming source material; A fact that Sir Roger himself is likely to agree with.

    I like the serious take of Daniel Craig. However I’m bothered by how much of the fanbase ignores Timothy Dalton’s contributions. Dalton did a dark and gritty Bond about two decades before the world was ready for it. License to Kill is often derided as being an inferior entry. Yet out of all the films in the franchise, it may have the most satisfying emotional arch. And I realize that’s a bold claim when you set it against the Tracy or Vesper stories. But consider this: the death of Tracy gets an underwhelming pay off. Bond’s quest for revenge after the death of his wife is crammed into the pre-title sequence of Diamonds are Forever. Even when Blofeld comes back later in that very same film, Bond seems to be over the death of Tracy. This is largely due to the switch back to Connery and the producers’ basically ignoring what happened in OHMSS.

    The Vesper story suffers from the opposite problem. The pay off is extremely protracted, being a primary focus in the full run time of Quantum of Solace. Even with all that time, the final bit of “closure” is arguably very week.

    In License to Kill Bond gets his revenge within the film. It’s self-contained and therefore extremely satisfying. They set up Sanchez as a monster that needs to be slain and Bond kills the son of bitch.

    When comparing and contrasting Dalton and Craig’s Bond runs, I like to look at the “going rogue” trope. In License to Kill, Bond goes rogue for a very clear reason and it was a fresh concept at the time of the film’s release. Craig-era Bond on the hand seems to go rogue in virtually all his movies. When you have the trope of going rogue back-to-back-to-back it really loses it’s narrative punch and becomes goofy.

    • Jack Falvey Jack Falvey
      November 3, 2015 @ 2:03 pm

      Interesting take!

      I do disagree with the idea that the Craig films have a goofy edge. Quantum totally has that feel, but I think the circumstances of what happens in Royale and Skyfall are fairly organic. Also, we’ve got to factor in the writer’s strike and the reports that Craig himself actually helped finish pieces of the script, explaining the drop in quality by stating “I’m not a writer”. In Royale, he’s naive. In Skyfall, he abandons the spy life largely in response to what his enemy does. I’ve gotta revisit the Dalton flicks because I just don’t remember them much at all. Great points!