The prologue takes place on the Russian border, where 007 is infiltrating a terrorist bazaar and witnesses the exchange of an American GPS Encoder. Unfortunately, a sudden naval strike forces him to steal a jet carrying tactical nukes and get into a dogfight while flying with his feet. Anyway, he is soon assigned to thwart the plans of unscrupulous media baron Elliot Carver, played by a very hammy Jonathan Pryce, who seeks to engineer a war between the UK and China for the media coverage.
I guess after GoldenEye's exploration of Bond's relevance following the end of the Cold War, the powers that be decided the answer was "Yes" and opted to go back to basics. So, we have a somewhat generic and formulaic action flick that goes from Hamburg to Saigon, as Bond finds himself cooperating with Chinese agent and girl of the week Wai Lin, played by Michelle Yeoh. Also present is Teri Hatcher as Paris, Carver's trophy wife and an old flame of Bond's, but she gets about three scenes.
Carver is your typical megalomaniac Bond villain, who manufactures his news stories to get maximum coverage, but his methods are more than underhanded. He sinks a British destroyer in the South China Sea and has his brute Stamper gun down the survivors. Christ, there's phone hacking and then there's that.
But is that megalomania a bad thing? Not at all. It's what makes him so memorable. That, along with a few action scenes like an infiltration of his paper, a car chase through a multi-storey car park with a remote-controlled BMW, along with Bond and Wai Lin escaping on a motorcycle while handcuffed together.
All in all, it's a good film, with adrenaline-pumping action scenes and an easy story to comprehend, but it's not as great as the previous instalment. Then again, that was a hard act to follow.
No comments:
Post a Comment