How sad. You can see the effect that movies like "XXX" and "The Matrix" have had on our beloved Bond series. Apparently the new formula is to abandon all sense of intrigue, make the action scenes even more over the top than in the not-very-good later Roger Moore movies (amazingly, it turns out this is actually possible), and throw in a Bond cliche every other scene.
It's one thing to give a little nod here and there to earlier Bond flicks. It's another to senselessly smash the audience over the head with every Bond cliche in the book. Even the name is an incredibly lame compilation of Bond cliches... "Let's see, you take something about life or death, something about time... put that into the Bond cliche generator..." Come on. We've already had "License to Kill", "The Living Daylights", "You Only Live Twice", "Tomorrow Never Dies", and "Live and Let Die". We get it already, it's a James Bond film.
But the sad thing is, it's not really. It's only a Bond film in name and cliche. Sure Pierce Brosnan fits the part well, and sure the girls swoon appropriately, the cars are fast, the music is Bondian and I'm sure the Martinis were shaken, not stirred. But James Bond is not Xander Cage, and I don't want to see him snowboarding his way through 94 minutes of action sequences. There used to be some plot and character building to Bond movies, sure it was tongue-in-cheek but it was there and it wasn't just plain stupid.
The only thing that comes close at all in this movie is the scenes where Bond spends what seems to be a couple of years in a North Korean prison, and who wants to see that? The Sean Connery Bond would have escaped from that prison in the first day, and if he couldn't pull that off he would have found a hot North Korean chick to let him go in exchange for some James Bond sex and an empty promise.
I think this may finally spell the beginning of the end for this venerable franchise. They have finally lost the actual Bond flavor and are stupidly attempting to replace it with "XXX"/"Matrix"-style action. To which I am sure audiences will eventually say "Who cares? I'm going to see XXX6 because my brain has been shrunk below the point required to understand something as simple as a James Bond movie."
It's one thing to give a little nod here and there to earlier Bond flicks. It's another to senselessly smash the audience over the head with every Bond cliche in the book. Even the name is an incredibly lame compilation of Bond cliches... "Let's see, you take something about life or death, something about time... put that into the Bond cliche generator..." Come on. We've already had "License to Kill", "The Living Daylights", "You Only Live Twice", "Tomorrow Never Dies", and "Live and Let Die". We get it already, it's a James Bond film.
But the sad thing is, it's not really. It's only a Bond film in name and cliche. Sure Pierce Brosnan fits the part well, and sure the girls swoon appropriately, the cars are fast, the music is Bondian and I'm sure the Martinis were shaken, not stirred. But James Bond is not Xander Cage, and I don't want to see him snowboarding his way through 94 minutes of action sequences. There used to be some plot and character building to Bond movies, sure it was tongue-in-cheek but it was there and it wasn't just plain stupid.
The only thing that comes close at all in this movie is the scenes where Bond spends what seems to be a couple of years in a North Korean prison, and who wants to see that? The Sean Connery Bond would have escaped from that prison in the first day, and if he couldn't pull that off he would have found a hot North Korean chick to let him go in exchange for some James Bond sex and an empty promise.
I think this may finally spell the beginning of the end for this venerable franchise. They have finally lost the actual Bond flavor and are stupidly attempting to replace it with "XXX"/"Matrix"-style action. To which I am sure audiences will eventually say "Who cares? I'm going to see XXX6 because my brain has been shrunk below the point required to understand something as simple as a James Bond movie."