GoldenEye
After a six year separation between Bond films and a number of lawsuits over ownership of the rights, which resulted in Timothy Dalton announcing that he was opting out of the role, FINALLY we got Pierce Brosnan in the role that he had been groomed for since the mid-80s and his run on the show Remington Steele. Brosnan projects the right amount of suave style and panache that the role called for, and made arguably the smoothest transition into the series of any of the previous actors. This is helped by a pretty good premise for the story: that an ex-MI6 agent and old friend of Bond’s (006) was operating an international crime syndicate out of the former Soviet Union and has stolen a device to use to send an electro-magnetic pulse into London, destroying all technology and utterly decimating the economy of the British government that he felt had betrayed him. To this end, they cast Sean Bean (famous as Boromir from Lord Of The Rings) who plays easily one of the most solid, if not down to earth Bond villains ever, particularly in the wordplay references he uses to mock Bond by having so much knowledge of his personal life. Indeed, few Bond villains have seemingly known the man himself so well. Accompanying him is easily the best female Bond villain ever, Famke Janssen as Xenia Onatopp, a sexually kinky seductress with a penchant for crushing her victims during sex with her finely toned legs. As for the good Bond girl, we get Isabella Scorupco as the Russian computer programmer who survives the initial attack from the weapon but whose overall sex appeal pales in general to her evil counterpart, plus we get Judi Dench making her debut as the new M and Robbie Coltrane as a Russian gangster whom Bond enlists help from in tracking his foe. The film does suffer from a smattering of bad supporting performances including Gottfried John as a stiff Russian general helping with the villain’s plan, Joe Don Baker as the overly joyful and corny CIA contact (surprising since Baker had played the main villain two films previous), and worse of all Alan Cumming hamming it up as the geeky computer tech in on the plot with an unfunny repeated catchphrase (“I am invincible!”). There are also some plot holes, particularly in the opening sequence which sets up the story as well as the conclusion (how did this guy manage to install this operation and facility with its own satellite dish inside Castro’s Cuba??). But overall, things are carried rather nicely by Brosnan and his main nemesis, and it succeeded in reviving major interest in the Bond franchise in 1995, so this entry has a lot going for it here…
8/10