So this is going to be spoilers all the way, but since I am only going as far as the opening credits and much of that is in the trailer, I am not going to feel guilty about it. Also if you still choose to go and see the film after the slating I am going to give the first 4 minutes then it is your own fault.
So we start with a crowd scene in Mexico at a celebration of the dead that looks very much like a rip off of the New Orleans segments from Live and Let Die. Obvious bad guy in a white suit gets a tracking shot and as he passes in front of Bond, literally inches in front but more about that later, we switch directions and track with Bond. He and a hot brunette make their way through a dense crowd up a lift to her hotel room. A bit of smooching then he takes off his jacket to reveal a folded up rifle, steps out of her window and we follow him along a couple of balconies so he can spy on a room full of men, where our bad guy in the white suit appears.
OK, so far, so normal. Bond then sights on the guys in the room with a blue laser. Stupid, the reason red lasers are used is so that you can see where you are pointing them. We hear a bit of conversation from inside the room, without any explanation of how, I wonder if we are meant to figure out that the blue light is doing harmonic detection on the window? So one of the bad guys blows some cigar smoke, spots the laser light, and the shooting starts.
Still, with it. OK, so he shoots the first two bad guys cleanly. Then misses the guy in the white suit. Instead hitting a bomb in the middle of the room. The bomb takes out half that building, but the guy in the suit, who was still in the same room, walks away unmarked. That building then falls onto the building Bond is on and takes out a huge chunk of it. So he has to drop his rifle and jump. He then does a quick bit of Parcour to get down a couple of floors before falling onto a sofa which has conveniently survived intact exactly where he needs it, despite having had a building dropped on it.
Now that little bit I could write off as a silly joke. Things is that he has just dropped two buildings on a crowd, and not only are we meant to ignore the civilian casualties but when he starts chasing the guy in the suit again they are immediately back into 'normal' crowd, in less than a block. No-one seems to have even noticed the demolition work going on 30 yards away!
If your suspension of disbelief is still going then we have Bond chase the guy through the parade, while a helicopter is landed in the middle of a crowd and they both get in and continued fighting hand-to-hand. Punch the helicopter pilot a couple of times and he manages two barrel rolls (actually one barrel roll but they obviously had two good shots of that sequence and wanted to get value for money so they stick it in twice), then while Bond tries to choke him he loops the helicopter over the crowd before falling out of a locked door, allowing Bond to climb in the front and safely take control, inches before hitting the crowd. Although I have to wonder how many crowd members died under the two bodies he dropped on them.
So I had already given up by this point. Everything from here just got worse.
The gadgets were stupid super-tech, exactly right for situations that could never possibly be predicted. He had everything short of a Star Trek transporter, just when he needed it. I thought that post-Brosnan Bond was beyond this stupidity.
The bad guys are so stereo-typical that they are actually lifted straight from other films. The original Oddjob and Whisper were great but bringing back Dave Bautista as a straight copy of them, right down to the mutism is silly. And somehow they take Christoph Waltz (double supporting Oscar winner for playing bad guys!) and Andrew Scott (the brilliant Moriarty from Sherlock if you don't recognise the name) and somehow turn them into cheap B-movie villains is beyond me.
The story was written by someone with a dog. The only way that they can have approved that script is that they read it, green lit the project and then his dog ate all of the bits of that made sense in between the explosions.
I didn't hate the song. A lot of other people don't seem to like it. I don't mind it.
The torture scene with the drill/needle gadget? Which somehow releases all the clamps for no conceivable reason? I almost got up and walked out at that point.
I didn't hate the stunts and the fight scenes. I just don't think the links between them make any sense. And a few of them were just too Brosnan for words.
They seem to have decided that the supporting characters need to be moving forward with the franchise. I can't really see why after they haven't moved for the last 53 years, and neither has Bond for that matter. Anyway that resulted in chunks of wasted time while we follow all their arcs. Maybe the sensible bits of the story were cut to fit these in?
I tweeted before I even left the cinema that this was the Worst. Bond. Ever! I stand by that.
I have given it 4 out of 10. I still feel generous about that.
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