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Non-Review Review: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

Posted on January 10, 2011 by Darren

This post is part of James Bond January, being organised by the wonderful Paragraph Films. I will have reviews of all twenty-two official Bond films going on-line over the next month, and a treat or two every once in a while.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is a relatively low-key Bond adventure. The action set pieces aren’t spectacular, it’s mostly confined to one geographical locale and it features a genuinely moving love story. Coupled with the fact that George Lazenby is replacing Sean Connery, you’d be forgiven for assuming that you’d accidentally been given the wrong video at the video store. It’s not that the changes are necessarily bad (though, to be frank, some of them are), just that it doesn’t exactly feel like the smoothest possible transition.

… And I thought Bond was only married to his job….

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Non-Review Review: Thunderball

Posted on January 6, 2011 by Darren

Thunderball perhaps gets a bit of a bad wrap because it’s perhaps not quite as good as From Russia With Love or Goldfinger. I’d argue that very few Bond films are. Thunderball perhaps represents the first moment that the series came to a rest – the first three installments had been built around establishing the character, his world and the tropes and clichés that viewers could expect from movie to movie. Sometimes concepts evolved gradually (for example, the novelty henchmen grew from the three blind assassins to Klebb and her knifey boots to Oddjob), while sometimes they were introduced suddenly (Bond’s Aston Martin), but by the time the fourth film came around, all these elements had been fairly firmly established. As such, the fourth film seemed to be more intent on consolidating the series than in breaking new ground. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that.

Bond isn't washed up... yet...

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Non-Review Review: Goldfinger

Posted on January 5, 2011 by Darren

Even though it was the third movie in an already iconic and hugely successful franchise, I think that Goldfinger is perhaps the film most responsibly for defining the shape of the archetypical Bond film we’ve been watching for fifty years now. Don’t get me wrong, I love Dr. No and From Russia With Love, but this film defined what an audience could expect from a Bond film. It’s big, it’s bold, it’s confident and it’s flamboyant. It’s also a wonderfully fun cinematic experience which manages to be consistently entertaining but never veering too far into the realm of the ridiculous.