Die Another Day

When Die Another Day came out I thought it kind of sucked, but then I watched it again just recently and thought it was OK to pretty good, so maybe our standards were just way higher back in the early 2000s, which is an incredibly depressing thought because that was the era of Dude, Where's My Car. No matter. The 20th James Bond flick in the Eon Productions series was a hit but its reputation, like that of the Moore films, has become exaggerated over time so that you'd think it was pure Adam West Batman camp, when really it's just thinly sliced post-Matrix cheese.

Coldsteel here literally swishes his trenchcoat in slow motion in this scene and it's the funniest thing.

In fact the comparison with the Moore era is apt because films like Live and Let Die, The Man with the Golden Gun, and Moonraker were all largely inspired by other trends that were popular at the time (blaxploitation, kung fu movies and Star Wars respectively) and so too Die Another Day attempts to adapt just a hint of the style that made the Matrix films a hit, most notably in the bald, trenchcoated henchman Zao, the glowing "sleep mask" thing, the VR training sim, the baddy's scifi robocop suit and the amazingly awful techno-whatever theme song by Madonna.

Coolly, the naked dancers aren't entirely silhouetted in this sequence.

This is one of three major missteps in the film. The second, and most infamous, is the invisible car. To be wantonly fair, the Bond films have always had an eye toward near-future technology. Goldfinger's industrial laser didn't actually exist at the time the film was made, but they were fairly confident such things would be produced soon. Nonetheless the invisible car seemed too farfetched for audiences at the time, and rightly so, and it's a shame because it adds so little to the film it would have been better not to include it, especially since the car is visible for most of the chase scene because nobody wants to watch the baddies chase literally nothing around for twenty minutes, except me because that would have been hilarious.

le funny walk man shows off the invisible car. way out indeed.

The final misstep is the overreliance on forced nostalgia gags that make this one feel like a clip show. There's another diamond-based orbital superweapon, more bright red lasers and another use of the ejector seat (creative and fun though), and callbacks to gags from From Russia With Love, Thunderball and others. I think the writers thought this would seem witty and endearing, but it didn't.

REMAMBER JETPACC?

Nonetheless there are still charms to be found in Die Another Day, such as Bond going briefly awol and the catfight between Halle Berry's Jinx and Gone Girl, which reminds me of the catfight between Diane Lane and the Azn chick from Twin Peaks in the underrated 90s Judge Dredd, in which Josie calls Diane a "bitch" and she replies "Judge Bitch" and headbutts her in the face, which is my favourite thing of all time.

wh*te g*rls btfo, dogs can rest easy again

It sucks that this is how things had to end, but in a way they never really did, because apart from minor details most of these films can be viewed in any order and have no real continuity beyond occasional callbacks. If Bond were one person throughout the Eon series he would have been like 70 by now so this was never even really a series in the continuous sense since, like, You Only Live Twice. In a way that is the charm of Bond. He just saves the world from some goofy baddy every week. No fuss. No gay "universe" shit. If you don't like this one, well, there are twenty more. Now everything sucks.

Final ranking

1. Goldfinger =
2. You Only Live Twice =
3. The Spy Who Loved Me
4. Tomorrow Never Dies
5. The Living Daylights
6. Live and Let Die
7. Doctor No
8. GoldenEye
9. From Russia with Love
10. Thunderball
11. The Man with the Golden Gun
12. The World is Not Enough
13. Never Say Never Again
14. For Your Eyes Only
15. A View to a Kill
16. License to Kill
17. Octopussy
18. Diamonds are Forever
19. Moonraker
20. Die Another Day
21. [strictly bullshit below this line]
22. SPECTRE
23. Sky Fall
24. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
25. Quantum of Sausage
26. Casino Royale
27. ???? whatever they come out with next in currentyear+5

let me know if you agree with my ranking, and i'll change it to spite u

The World Is Not Enough

Spoilers:

1999's The World Is Not Enough was pretty much the average among the average of Bond flicks, treading water well enough but without any standout sequences or moments. The Garbage theme song is nice but the cold open drags on way too long, there's another boring snow-based action scene and the villains suffer from being somewhat three-dimensional, which is always a fat minus in this type of movie.

I tried to redpill you on the manlet question but you didn't listen.

Renard, whom I shall call Bernard, suffers from an unusual affliction: he has a bullet in his head that means he can't feel pain. While this might seem like it would make him very threatening, it would most likely mean he would just die of some infected wound he failed to notice, but let's pretend. Bernard spends the movie angsting about the pain of feeling no pain, making him the series' first emo villain, so it is fortunate that we have a surprise second villain: Elektra, the woman he's ostensibly been stalking.

You need to screen for deformities in MI6 as everyone deformed in James Bond movies is a villain. We don't hash tag need a black James Bond; we hash tag need a hunchback James Bond.

The idea of a sort of Bonnie & Clyde villain couple seems to have potential (the closest we've had is Mr Wint & Mr Kidd from Diamonds Are Forever), but this angle is under-explored in favour of unwanted psychology: we're supposed to sympathise with Bernard as it's evident Elektra is just using him while cucking him with Bond. Boring! There's a simple, correct recipe for a Bond villain, and it's:

• More ham than Razorback

Plus-wise, Goldeneye's Zukovsky puts in a second appearance for some levity and the technological overreach of Die Another Day is foreshadowed with Bond's X-ray vision glasses.

A fun gag would have been to have Bond wander around perving on chicks for four or five straight minutes of screentime, but that might have been too avant-garde for the studio at that time.

World also manages to foreshadow K's comedy of errors from the Cr**g flicks, as for all her trash talk she manages to get herself captured by Elektra's goons. Wahmen: 0, gamers: 1.

Before and after assaulting the wait staff @ TGI Fridays

Finally we would be remiss not to bring up Doctor Christmas Jones, a perfect example of doing it right whose improbable name is nothing but an hour-length setup for a joke from which it was clearly reverse-engineered.

00: 55:59

01:59:05

Beckies h8 this character because how very dare they cast a hot Stacy with big fake tits as a nuclear scientist? I say they didn't go far enough. In the Berenstein reboot, everyone is a hot chick including Bond, M, Q, faceless goons #1 through #700, the director, the gaffer, and the audience. Stacies rise up!

Tomorrow Never Dies

The last favourite of mine to be released, Tomorrow Never Dies is the underacknowledged masterpiece of the Architect's oeuvre. In this prescient movie, James Bond must defeat the most evil and loathsome enemy of his long and storied career: a news network.

IDK if these graphics look dated in the States. In the UK news still looks like this crap.

Elliott Carver, who is the most fun villain since Christopher Walken if not Jaws, plans to start a war between China and the United Kingdom, to crown a career spent fabricating news stories like CNN on vitamins (not steroids, let's not get carried away here).

The look of an absolute lunatic who takes great pride in his work.

While the geopolitical balance might be way off, everything else about this scenario is dead on for today. Carver's dorkish megalomania is far more interesting than the fairly humourless villains of License and GoldenEye. It's easy to imagine him today tweeting pseudo-messianic banalities of the "orange man bad #resist" variety, inventing 8-year-old sons to provide him with profound soundbites on why antivax is worse than murder (but murderers are Good, Actually) and conspiring with the Zuccs and Jaccs of the world to save us peasants from our own stupidity and bigotry.

"So then I said to him, 'you know who else didn't like The Last Jedi? Mussolini.' And then everybody clapped."

Is trying to start war with China such a stretch? Well now it is, but just China specifically. Consider that the real-life mass media basically started a still ongoing race war off the back of such fabrications as "hands up don't shoot". This James Bond movie nailed the problem with the 21st Century better than any thinkpiece. Besides which, it was just entertaining as hell.

The prog rock acid trip visuals in the opening credits are strangely on point while being totally irrelevant to the movie.

Michelle Yeoh is Wai Lin, the Bond Girl, who is a Chinese agent. Sadly he doesn't sass off to her about Tiananmen Square (Moore's Bond zinged Major Triple X about the Gulag) but they have a fun dynamic anyway and spend a chunk of the film riding a motorcycle while handcuffed, which calls to mind the logistics of The Chase's sex scene in a moving car. The Chase was good as hell.

Everything better on moving vehicles.

GoldenEye

Rights issues foiled a third Dalton outing and Bond went on hiatus until 1995, when it became every millennial's favourite childhood FPS. Do u remember the giant head mode?

The zen-like look of chill on her giant face reminds of better times.

GoldenEye also had a tie-in movie, which introduced popular architect Pierce Brosnan and Dame Judy Dench as the series' first Karen M.

Bond: *saves the world from nuclear annihilation, terrorism, drug cartels, space lasers, Voodoo gangsters, fake news, giants, midgets, sharks*
M: u r sexist

K, as we'll call her (xir?), is set up as another cringe stronk bad-ass womxn character but spends the next six films being either ineffectual or actually dangerously incompetent, and I'm not sure if it was on purpose at all. Never mind though, as the rest of the movie is basically good, with highlights being the tank chase, the intense finale, and enjoyably characterful bit parts like Zukovsky and Boris, and lowlights being Tina Turner and the 2kool techno remix of the Bond theme music, which dates the movie more than anything else ever could.

It dates it to the 90s though so that's OK.

The Architect is a good Bond who acts like somewhat of a synthesis of previous Bonds. He has a little of the Dalton vulnerability, the Moore detachment, and the Connery charisma, and a lot of actors wouldn't be able to mesh those elements at all. In the same way, GoldenEye works principally by checking the right boxes, keeping a tight pace, and its reputation as the best Brosnan probably owes more to its fidelity in sticking to a formula that works than anything specific. Also I'm sure it has nothing to do with the chick that cums a little when she kills people.

That face she makes when she finds out you're a big Warhammer fan.

License To Kill

Taking a further step into the gratuitously edgy, Dalton's second and unfortunately final outing as 007 features Bond's best friend Felix Leiter (a character so wallpaper I can't remember a single thing he's done in any of the other films he's been in) having his wife raped and murdered and an arm and a leg chewed off by a shark. The villain also beats his mistress with a whip and at one point a Klansman dropkicks a puppy into a gas chamber (OK I made that one up). Despite this, it's still a pretty good movie, if you look at it as Bond Vs Scarface in much the same way that Moonraker was Bond Meets Star Wars.

We need to bring back this aesthetic too.

The Bond Girl this time is Pam Bouvier, who is pretty much the ideal modern (2019) heroine, except that she's good looking and likeable. But she can kick ass(tm) and don't need no man(tm), except for Bond of course because this is still sort of a Bond film (they weren't totally not Bond films until Cr**g). She even backsasses Bond constantly like a Twitter thot, and yet there's a charm to it, very much unlike a Twitter thot, perhaps because it was the 1980s and dystopia still seemed very far away.

This scene where she demonstrates "shaken not stirred" is a perennial favourite.

The best stunt involves a car on fire shooting off a cliff and narrowly missing a plane, but Bond also does a wheelie in the cab of an oil tanker and waterskies without skis, and the baddy has an iguana, so personality abounds in general. The atmosphere is very much 80s/90s actioner though, with a bar brawl, credibly sleazy goons and big orange fireball explosions. There's even a cult leader/televangelist who works as a front for the cartel out of a cool temple, which borders on heavy-handed social commentary but is fine because he's actually pretty funny.

Spilling over that border like a caravan of human traffickers, however, is the gleefully reactionary vigilante plotline, as Bond is explicitly out for personal revenge and is in theory wanted by the British government, but by the final scene all is forgotten, possibly because they realise they'll need Bond to stop a nuclear war or something next week. If I'm being fair I would give a Cr**g joint shit for this, but it's different because in the pre-Cr**g days Bond actually did save the world on the reg so he can pretty much get away with the odd unsanctioned murder spree.

nothin personnel...ese...

The Living Daylights

Concluding the brief but fondly remembered (by me) 80s pop-rock era of Bondkino, The Living Daylights is also the first outing of Timothy Dalton in the role. Universally forgotten and ignored by pop culture bloggers and general audiences, Dalton was notable for being Craig before Craig, except better in literally every way. His Bond is terse, serious, brooding, edgy and grimdark. Crucially however no one else is, including old friends like Q, amiable villain Brad (this is, in fact, his name), and undisputed series Best Girl Kara the cellist, who is a qt3.14 and uniquely marriage material among Bond thots.

PROTECT

The plot involves a defecting Russian general, because it is the Cold War once more, except this time with an appropriately nervy sense of suspicion and mistrust, like it's actually the Cold War and not the friendly sport it's mostly been portrayed as heretofore. There's even an hilariously cringily poorly aged subplot in which Bond teams up with the Mujaheddin to fight the bad old Russkies, which either makes him Rambo 3 or a contemporary Democrat.

Well boys, we found it: the most horrifically badly aged joke of all time.

The action in the Dalton outings is extremely good and real-feeling, but still makes use of fun gadgets such as a car that slices other cars in half with lasers. You know, something fun, instead of having a nerd in glasses lecture us about how gadgets are silly and not grimdark enough, like in the Cr**g joints. There's also tits for, I believe, the first time ever in a Bondkino, which seems odd somehow but that's how it is.

Hilariously, Bond ripped off her robe to create a Bugs Bunny tier distraction for the guy he's knocking out in the corner.

Though overshadowed by 1996's Goldeneye and, sadly, 2005's Casino Royale, The Living Daylights was a nice, refreshing change of pace in its day, and in the Berenstein timeline where 9/11 never happened and there is no Jihad, it's probably fondly remembered and viewed in flying cars on autopilot to this day.

A View to a Kill

Notable for Duran Duran, A View to a Kill is also the second instalment in Bond villains doing absolutely nothing wrong, as nominal baddy Christopher Walken's plan is to destroy Silicon Valley, thus ensuring no Zuckerberg, no Jack and no McInternet as we know and loathe it today.

Because no actual person is as based.

His defeat is therefore the second most unwittingly tragic ending to a Bond film after Moonraker, in which Drax planned to wipe out the dysgenic hordes and replace them with models, saving the environment and bringing up the average human from a 5 to like a 7. I mean honestly his perfect specimens weren't actually that great, but whatever, it's the thought that counts.

The man's aesthetic sensibilities were unimpeachable regarding set design, but he had yet to discover thicc girls.

Walken should also have survived for the simple reason he has a blimp. Blimps are cool and all villains should have blimps, and I should have a blimp.

The movie ends in a climactic hand-to-hand fight on the Golden Gate Bridge, which is a cool location and fun setpiece, but throughout the movie you're more worried Bond is going to die of old age because based Moore was like 200 years old at this point.

MY SPIIINE

The Moore era in general is overly maligned for its campiness. In reality the camp tone set in with George Lay-Z-Boy's cringe Carry On-esque antics in On Her Majesty's Secret Service and went into overdrive in Diamonds are Forever, so Moore really just inherited a well-established tone and rolled with it. Nevertheless he sold tense and dramatic moments such as the nuke-disarming in The Spy Who Loved Me excellently, and his Bond is a great character unto himself even if his actual films were all over the place in terms of quality. And this is what Bond should be: a consistent character who can find himself fighting Voodoo gangsters one week and metal-toothed giants the next, and retain much the same attitude of bemused detachment. Only one man has imbued a Bond with edge, grit, vulnerability and realism and not sucked utter balls, and his name is Timothy Dalton (up next).