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Ah possibly the Bond movie I saw the most often. Because the problem with that brand of bad movies is that they refuse to stick to memory, so it's always "hey that one I don't remember anything about, let's check it out", again and again, with always the same conclusion : aw, there was nothing to remember.
Except the music. First of all, I won't accept any (musical) dissing of Crow. This title tune is one of the best of the franchise, making this movies' quality all the more of a heartbreak (as opposed to, say, Die Another Day, which, in that regard, turned out what it deserved to be). And I find Crow's tone excellent. As an aside, I don't perceive her as a particularly upbeat singer, her voice can be quite dark, especially in the songs I like best. Anyway. Crow. But also Arnold. I'm a big listener of movie soundtracks (especially Bond ones), and no matter my opinion on these films, and despite my John 'ipcress' Barry fetishism, I always come back to their music tracks.
And now to the secondary aspects. Yes, casting Pryce as a Bond villain is brilliant and of course he makes one of the best. Like the composer, the singer and, hey, Brosnan himself, I wish this had all been used in an era of Goldeneye-level scripts. But oh boy.
The rest is cringey. The "old flame" coincidence prefigures blofeld-is-my-brother as a dumb plot device. The whole intro with the "stealth boat" (invisible ro radar, and, uh, sonars? And, uh, to the human eye? We see this humongous ship like three meters away from the vessel it's "sneaking up" to) and this torpedo drill (what? Why? How does it work? What propulses it in the boat? What's its point, you already have torpedoes that torpedo ships and they are named torpedoes), makes it the facepalmest Bond intro. And that Nokia commercial turned into an car chase, it could have almost worked if they didn't have Bond cheering like a six year old kid playing pokemon, defeating all sense of danger, and probably as an injunction to associate "fun" to that gaming smartphone model. But also we're entering the phase where scriptwriters go nuts with Bond innuendos and the dialogues become absolutely painful, like bad Benny Hill sketch quality. It's constant in the post-Goldeneye Brosnan, his lines become just straightforward hur hur sex jokes, presented as super smooth pick up. And gah, what's Brosnan's thing with biting the actresses? Also could he stop punctuating every sentence with a blow from his nose? Also everything. Even just things like toying with the car's remote (that he saw for the first time) to frighten Q irritated me. You were just given this thing and you can't have the feel of it, can you go experiment on other people? That's not being mischievous, that's being accidentally homicidal, you twat.
Blaaaah.
Yeah, no, whole film, 12 years old fan fiction. Give me back the more mature Moore films. Or skip to... skip to..... awww. It's over.
