GoldenEye

GoldenEye is another favourite of mine that is so close to being top 5 Bond.

This actually starts out quite promisingly with a double-hander between Pierce Brosnan's "007" and his colleague "006/Alec" (Sean Bean) having a battle royal then a rogue general pinching the controls for a deadly satellites system - and that's pretty much all before Tina Turner gets her lungs around the theme song. Then, sadly it sinks into a really procedural action drama with some really mediocre writing and as B-level a cast as I've seen for ages. You could see the obvious twist in the plot from the satellite in orbit above, Joe Don Baker's cheeky chappie/American fixer “Wade" is almost as comical as Robbie Coltrane's Russian gangster "Zukovsky" who is in turn almost as bad as Alan Cumming's even more thickly accented geek "Grishenko". Dame Judi had the sense to say in London for most of this and so out of harm's way as the denouement lurched into view. There's a nod to the Ian Fleming humour, I suppose, with this one's "Bond" girl being "Xenia Onatopp" (the entirely unconvincing Famke Janssen) but I'm afraid I just lost interest. It's hard to keep reinventing the franchise and to be original - but if it's going to be this hard, then maybe just stop?

This 007 movie begins with Bond and a fellow agent performing heroics, and the other agent is killed. However, even when this movie was made, it is quite obvious that the other agent wasn't killed, and that he is actually the villain. That isn't even a spoiler. Bond deals with Russians mostly here. Not surprisingly, any good Russian becomes a dead Russian with the immortal godlike villain at work. One saving grace is a bit of dark humor with a computer nerd at the end. That's about it. Otherwise, it's just another depressing Hollywood formula movie, the usual "darkest before the Dawn" that just goes overboard and gets too self indulgent and too contrived every step of the way.