As I may have mentioned here a few times, my wife and I are fans of the James Bond movie series and, with the final Daniel Craig film in the series, No Time to Die, coming out this weekend we felt it might be time for a warm up back into the series. It has, after all, been five freaking years since we’ve had a proper Bond film in the theaters. Not the longest gap in the series, which was between Dalton and Brosnan, but still a long time.
Having seen the cast interviewed on Graham Norton where it was mentioned that the new film carries on straight from Spectre, we thought we had best watch that again. Then my wife suggested before I could even utter the words myself, that we should watch all the Daniel Craig Bond films. So that was what we did, and here is the summary from our viewing.
Of course, this was easier said than done. Much to my disappointment, none of the streaming channels to which we currently subscribe… which total more than half a dozen at the moment due to following various series, including HBO, Showtime, and Starz… had the films available.
So it was time to get out the disks and crank up the PlayStation 3, which is still out source for watching DVDs and Blu-Ray. Fortunately we have all the Bond film on disk. I had to put new batteries in the remote and go through yet another patch update for the PS3 and then figure out again how exactly it was hooked up to our sound bar, but once settled things went well enough. We have the first film, Casino Royale, on DVD only. That was fine and it looked good on our TV. For Quantum of Solace we bough the DVD+Blu-Ray combo, because we didn’t have the PS3 yet. The other two are on Blu-Ray only.
It had been long enough since we watched a store bought Blu-Ray film that I had forgotten how the studios liked to cram trailers for other films to run before you get to the main menu. You can skip through them, but I tend to watch them for as long as it takes me to guess the film and get it confirmed. It was a reminder of past times.
- Casino Royale – 2006
Not my favorite Bond film, but I have softened on it since I put it on my “least favorite” list back in 2012. I’ll trade it out for Die Another Day. I think I’ve seen Casino Royale three times since then, including the past week’s viewing, and it has grown on me a bit. I still have my gripes. I am not saying they should have dumped Judi Dench, but when they made a big deal about cleaning house for a fresh Bond look and then kept the same “M” as the Brosnan series still strikes me as odd.
It also has to bear the weight of being an actual Bond story, one that has been done twice, once on TV and once in parody form. It breaks the Bond mold in that it starts off with him not yet being a double-0 agent, so we have to establish that first, then we break into the intro credits before getting onto the traditional set piece action sequence which, true to the series, isn’t all that relevant but is a lot of fun. Best parkour ever. But we keep having to establish the Bond tropes because it is a reboot of the franchise.
But the real failing point of this outing for me is that the stakes really aren’t that high; win a card game. What happened to plots to destroy the world? Yes, there is a lot around that card game, but it still comes down to cards… and not even baccarat which, while unfathomable to me, still has all the classic dealer lines. Instead it was Texas Holdem, which was a fad at the moment. But Bond films are always of their time.
The opening credits are an excellent animation and the theme song is perhaps the most on-point since Goldfinger; a line like “But you yourself are nothing so divine, just next in line” calls to the reboot very nicely. It might be one of the more underrated songs from the series… and it made an excellent WoW parody.
Overall decent, though it gets out of hand for the last 30 minutes or so, most of which could/should have just been appended to the opening of the next film. Also, Daniel Craig looks so lean and crisp in the face. I guess we were all a lot younger in 2006.
- Quantum of Solace – 2008
My trajectory with QoS has been rather a flip when compared to CR. I liked QoS a lot when it came out, but less so with each viewing. It feels a bit like an appendage to the first film, carrying on immediately from the final scene, lurching forward with promise, then losing its way.
It doesn’t start out bad. It opens with a car chase, a quick interlude, then a foot chase, then a quick trip, followed by even more action including a boat chase. Very Bond. And it carries on hitting all the usual Bond points with more action and a woman with whom he slept being murdered.
But the opening is about a shadowy organization that has infiltrated everywhere and is potentially a world menace, and ends up with Bond solving a water utility problem in Bolivia. You might not notice the sudden reduction in scope on the first pass, but after a few viewings I’m left with sort of a “Hey, what the hell?” kind of reaction, and it is something that doesn’t even get revisited until Spectre. We start with one goal, straight off the end of CR and end up in the Bolivian desert with no real answers. Cool plane chase though.
Certainly not the worst Bond film, but doesn’t really stand out either. Even the theme song, which was again on point, fails to stick.
- Skyfall – 2012
After all of that secret society stuff that ended up nowhere, the franchise headed off in a more traditional “crazy bad guy with a Rube Goldberg level scheme that is timed down the second” event that would fall apart the second you applied any thought to it. But it looks so good and runs along at such a brisk pace, giving you little time for reflection, that it works in almost a “a whole that is greater that the sum of its parts” sort of way.
Skyfall does not have the best stunts, the best chases, the best action, the best shootouts, the best locations, the best gadgets, the best villains, or even the best theme song of the series. The story isn’t even that compelling. But everything is good, or at least good enough, the villains especially after the tedious Le Chiffre and dull Mister Greene of the previous two outings.
This is my favorite in the Daniel Craig batch so far. It also nicely brings in some of Bond’s past and does the leadership transition at MI6. Sam Mendes did a good job. A solid outing.
We even got Adelle for the opening theme, which is a bit nonsensical in the vein of the Thunderball theme, but at least sounds nice. I don’t remember any of the lyrics, just that it is easy on the ears and goes with well with the credits.
- Spectre – 2015
After writing past Bond stuff I meant to write a review of Spectre when it came out, but I wasn’t moved to do it because it felt kind of empty.
Part of it was, of course, the fact that Skyfall came together as such a solid outing. Having Sam Mendes come back to direct after that seemed like a promise of more quality work.
And the film seemed to have so much going for it out of the box. The title is literally the secret organization we have wanted to know about as recently as half way through Quantum of Solace, Andrew Scott shows up as a menacing “C,” Christoph freaking Waltz as the main bad guy, there are locations to die for, and it kicks off with arguably the best opening action scene of any Bond film ever. This was going to be great.
Okay, the opening theme was completely forgettable… I’ve seen Spectre three times now, including just minutes before I started writing the section and I can’t remember anything about it… but you can’t have everything. It just has to live in the shadow of the Mexico City opening.
And it is ambitious. It tries to tie together the previous three films… ret-conning Skyfall and its main villain into the mix… as all part of the grand plot of an international cabal that drives everything behind the scenes. Bond goes from Mexico to London to Rome to the Alps to Algeria, and is fairly exciting the whole way. And then we end up at their HQ in the desert and things start to come unglued as we find out what is going on.
There is the big reveal, the raison d’etre for Spectre… and I won’t spoil it, but it was akin to when I found out that Lex Luthor is evil because young Superman caused a lab accident that made all his hair fall out and, rather than using his considerable intellect to work on a baldness cure, Lex spends all his time trying to kill Superman with kryptonite. It was a serious “Are you shitting me?” moment. I mean, sure, they’re still a sinister and powerful international crime syndicate, but their leader is hung up on something that happened ages ago and all his wealth and power somehow hasn’t assuaged it.
It was hard for me to take the movie seriously after that. It felt like a lot of build-up expended pointlessly. There is still the whole final climax yet to play out at that point, but you know Bond is going to win, it is just a matter of filling in the details. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
- No Time to Die – 2021
So we’ve had the build up, seen Daniel Craig age as we all have over the last fifteen years, now it is time to see the final act in his Bond arc. The movie apparently picks up right where Spectre left off, which is a bit of a theme for these five movies. I’ll probably write something up for next weekend about how it played for us.
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