#SPADES ROYALE TV#

Elektra is after all presented as a rape victim and by the end of the film, she is unarmed and is shot by Bond. There’s an element of genuine surprise and uncertainty.

Michael Apted as a director had been chosen explicitly because of his record-making movies with strong female leads and Dana Stevens did a rewrite to punch up the women’s lines. The main innovation is giving Bond a femme fatale. There’s something more precious than poignant about it all. But Cleese represents more continuity rather than a proper break with the past. The introduction of John Cleese sees the final belated farewell to Desmond Llewelyn in the role of Q. This tension throughout the film between the old and new, the Moore and what will become the Craig Bond makes it a fascinating watch. But later he’ll also give Christmas ( Denise Richards) a throwaway line about his relationship with her which smacks more of Roger Moore. When Bond tells Elektra that he takes great pleasure in beauty as a way of surviving the horrors of his work, it feels like we’re actually getting some insight. Although the writers Purvis and Wade have fun reintroducing a lot of espionage elements to the story, there is still the tug of franchise branding that sees the film occasionally slip into the corny joke or the baffling twist. The set pieces are relatively subdued – a bot chase, a ski chase, and a few gun fights – and it’s refreshing not to end things with a low-key punch up.

Bond falls for her before he’s even met her, feeling guilt for her father’s murder and empathy for her ordeal at the hands of a terrorist Renard ( Robert Carlyle) who is once more active. Obviously, no one clocks that her name being Elektra ( Sophie Marceau) there might be problems along the line. The story is a refreshingly confusing one about oil pipelines, terrorists and a millionaire’s daughter who needs protecting following said millionaire’s murder. He looks great and he continues to inject his Bond with a certain tenderness, an added poignancy, which the job only allows him occasionally to express. From the first moment we glimpse Brosnan striding through Bilbao, his eyes flicking from side to side as he scopes out any danger, we are in the presence of an actor fully at home in the role. But it’s a relatively rare off-note and there’s much more to enjoy.

#SPADES ROYALE TV#

This involved the cast of a TV documentary that was briefly popular and the producers lobbed it into the film for a cheap laugh which no one else in the world would get and now everyone has forgotten.

I think the main reason I hated the film on first seeing it was because of the joke with the traffic wardens during the Thames boat chase. Likewise, The World is Not Enough was a film I’d written off as a boring dip in quality, but I’m happy to say I was wrong. I wasn’t ready to dislike Live and Let Die as much as I ended up doing, or totally reassessing the Timothy Dalton films. I assumed that my own judgement was already fairly fixed as I’d seen every film multiple times. Watching the films in sequence, you can see the developments and the repetitions, the lack of originality and the occasional innovation. Writing Bond Blog has given me some genuine revelations. Posted by John Bleasdale on in action, All, drama, Film, Headline, Reviews, thriller | 1 comment

Spades royale