clivey6

Craig's Frankenstein Bond Reaches Its End

An early scene in his debut film, Casino Royale, saw Daniel Craig's Bond in a footchase with a younger, more lithe and athletic man suspected of being a bomb maker. Though Craig's Bond was older, shorter and not much of a runner, he nonetheless managed to close in, recalling how Frankenstein's Monster would somehow pursue his victims despite a lack of physical agility and pace. Heavyweight boxer Mohammad Ali used the Parkinson Show to cruelly mock his rival George Foreman, referencing, okay, not Frankenstein but The Mummy: 'You see that fella run and run, he does six miles in one shot - but in the next scene, there's the Mummy, he's still after him...'

Facial shots of a heavy-lidded Bond seeming to struggle with his identity in life, or the tender scene with Vesper, sitting down fully clothed in the shower, owed something to the Monster, along with the sense that Craig's Bond was an unwitting creation of factors outside his control. The Monster - a patched up assortment of various bodies - might also be a comment on the new Bond franchise - made up as new but soon heavily reliant on past components from previous films.

The 1930s film Frankenstein spawned a sequel - just one problem: the Monster died at the end of the first. To get round this, they had him re-emerge from the ruins of burnt out windmill. Something similar happened with the Jason Bourne films, to which the new Bonds owe a debt. This lapsed spy's memory regain depended on box office returns, and often each new film would undo the happy resolution of the last to ensure more business.

Similarly, Craig's Bond series, hitting a home run with his debut Casino Royale, based on the Ian Fleming novel, soon became a hostage to fortune. Its ill-fated follow-up, Quantum of Solace, being a sequel, while the fourth film, named after Spectre, the organisation that had belatedly landed in the producers laps, claimed that this Bond's past adventures and woes all stemmed from his traditional foes. But these two traditional Fleming ideas - newly available to EON - combined to box Craig's Bond films into a corner.

So this Bond character came with a lot of baggage that would have to be unpacked at the beginning of each film, not least because the main theme became Bond's inner life, rather than external foes. Craig's five film tenure would come with a story arc that would look rather rickety and ragged, not least because the writers and producers seemed to be making it up as they went along. So No Time To Die begins with Bond still mourning his lost love Vesper from over a decade ago despite the fact he seemed to know her at best for a fortnight only. It emerges this scene comes straight after the finale of Spectre, which perhaps explains why he and Madeleine Swann - the woman he went off into the sunset in his Aston Martin DB5 at the end of Spectre - don't seem to know, like or trust each other very much. That she is clearly so much younger than him is another issue that one could gloss over in the previous film.

It's clear that director Corey comes from the same school as Lee Tamahori or Marc Forster. A classy look and some muscular action doesn't distract from the dearth of 'funny bones' - there are some jokes here, but because of the largely humour free vibe, they don't really land. It's all quite heavy going. It allows one to doubt our hero: when he spits, 'How did they know I was here?' following an ambush, one could reply, 'Probably because you go around in a highly distinctive grey Aston Martin DB5 you tool!' We've been here before - the 'serious' Bond film that demands respect and attention - but then all you do is notice the plot holes and daft actions of the lead characters.

The admittedly tense and gripping ambush in the lengthy pre-credits later makes no sense in view of what we later learn about Madeleine Swann - but again it seems they writers had boxed themselves into a corner.

There's much to confirm that the writers had their work cut out rewriting large swathes of the film following the exit of director Danny Boyle, though how this could not have been foreseen I do not know. This sort of thing has happened before, with the exit of the late Roger Mitchell prior to Quantum of Solace. It's to be suspected both had foreseen just how badly things might go.

As script doctor, Phoebe Waller-Bridges brings none of the lightness of touch we saw in Killing Eve. The jokes don't land. As with Connery's rogue outing, there is the persistent sense of something just not right about the film. The tone of various scenes just do not match up. As with Brosnan's last film Die Another Day, I found myself sitting in my seat thinking, what am I watching here actually? It's not fun and I can't believe any of it - so what's the point?

Another gripe is that inevitably Craig's new film occupies a different universe to that of his debut. So it was with Dr No and Connery's fifth, You Only Live Twice. This could be overlooked when each movie is pretty much a standalone - less so when a plot line is meant to thread throughout. Some of the plot is astonishingly prescient given the pandemic. But in a packed cinema, with many not wearing face masks, there's an added and unwanted dimension of fear, plus the suspicion the makers are trolling their audience.

So it is with allegations of 'wokeness' - here the uneasy sense that the producers don't actually like James Bond. Like a vegan running your local fish and chip shop, there's a sense of being a cross purposes.

Past Bonds suggested a businessman on his travels, putting everything on his account, footloose and fancy free. This one suggests a long-married man with debt collectors on his tail on a family day out whose wife would prefer it if he just signed the divorce papers, agreed the alimony and disappeared. Bond seems hemmed in by one virtual family or another - Madeleine, the CIA, MI6, his foster brother, each one more miserable than the last. Virtually no action scene, no matter how impressive, seems to have him end 'the winner'.

Indeed, it's made clear in the script that had James Bond never been born, much of the troubles he's fought in all the films simply would not have happened, because he wouldn't have landed up as the cuckoo in the family of would be arch nemesis Blofeld. It's like It's a Wonderful Life in reverse.

As reverse escapism, I suppose, it can't be beat. You think your life is bad - he's got it worse!

Having squirmed at again seeing Roger Moore's Bond take Soitaire's virginity in Live And Let Die two days before, I can vouchsafe that there is much about the Bond character to disdain. But I don't want that rubbed in my face when watching a Bond movie. For those who see Bond as a guilty pleasure, this film is all guilt and no pleasure. With Barbara Broccoli having taken the reins since GoldenEye, and now with Phoebe Waller-Bridge on board, it does rather seem as if women have done for the character what Blofeld himself never managed to do.

Returning to Frankenstein's Monster, there are hints here that our man is a cooked-up product of an environment that he can never truly understand or be part of, though suspicions that MI6 are some kind of Masonic source of world strife are never really followed through. As with Jason Bourne - another agent the new films owe something to - there is a sense that none of it will end well, and that the character is not destined to enjoy his cottage with the rose garden and picket fence. Post-pandemic (up to a point; deaths continue) this is far from the cinematic pick-me-up some of us would have liked.

By some reckoning the worst film I have seen in a long, long time. Some plus points for the photography, though it's overemphasised to obscure the small budget, from which you'd get change from a box of popcorn and carton of cola from the Odeon kiosk. When Monty addresses his men before sailing for Normandy, they seem to number only 15. Chartwell (Churchill's home) seems to consist of two box rooms, albeit nicely shot.

This is the sort of film that makes one wish the Germans had won the war, it's that bad. Historically I can't say it's accurate that Churchill didn't want to open a second front against the Germans, and so to base an entire film around that seems like madness. On top of this, he is portrayed as a senile, out-of-touch buffoon who is only fit for a nursing home, who turns up three days before D-day with an alternative invasion plan for Eisenhower. Who laments the imminent loss of life - this would be the same Churchill who led (failed) allied attempts in Norway, Crete, Dieppe, yet you'd imagine from this that the Normandy landings was the first military initiative.

Characterisation is broad, dialogue is asinine.

I don't carry a torch for Churchill, like many great men he had flaws, but this is at such variance with the truth it's basically pornography, except unlike pornography I can't imagine how it could appeal to anyone.

A thoroughly decent movie that respects the audience. Some great locations, mostly in Athens. It's a three-hander, and in retrospect the chemistry between the three of them could have got under the skin a bit more, rather like in Knife in the Water. As with Patricia Highsmith's other works, a key theme is male one-upmanship but it doesn't play out here quite the way it ought to, especially with the final pay-off, which is nonetheless quite satisfying.

Nothing wrong with any of the performances, and the twists and turns of the plot work well, but if you can't really sympathise too much with the characters, the director ought to have a more mischievous style perhaps, rather like Hitchcock of course. So this is a film that won't wind you up much, but won't ruffle your feathers either.