GoldenEye: Several Bonds smashed together.

= 5 stars

Starring Pierce Brosnan, Famke Janssen, Izabella Scorupco
Directed by Martin Campbell

Amazon Link

Pierce Brosnan (James Bond)

Famke Janssen (Xenia Onatopp)

Izabella Scorupco (Natalya Simonova)

This one was very entertaining. Pierce Brosnan isn’t my favorite Bond (in Tomorrow Never Dies I found him tedious) but in GoldenEye he displays a charming, youthful energy. If one smashed Sean Connery, Roger Moore, and George Lazenby together, you’d get Brosnan (note my intentional omission of Timothy Dalton).

I believe the six year hiatus (due to legal issues) between the not-very-entertaining Licence To Kill and GoldenEye forced everyone involved to revisit the Bond classics, note what made a good Bond film, add a few careful updates, and execute on it. It’s essentially a remix of standard Bond into a more modern, realistic, and exciting style of film-making.

One aspect I adore about the older Bond films is the classy, luxurious setting (a casino, usually) where violence could erupt on a moment’s notice. Not even twenty minutes into GoldenEye, Bond is matching wits at a casino table against the smoking (literally) Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen). Xenia is one of my favorite Bond women ever - ravishingly beautiful, plus sadistically insane. She’s an evil henchman, on the level of Odd Job or Jaws, but as a feminine nemesis, she’s a welcome twist. Bond’s boss “M” is also similarly updated, as played by gravitas-laden Judi Dench.

After a fairly ridiculous opening sequence with Bond climbing into an airplane and righting it as both are in free fall, we meet the Russian rogue general Ourumov (Gottfried John) an the evil mastermind Alec Trevelyan (Sean Bean) who is a former mission partner of Bond. This film took place after Soviet Union collapsed in the real world, and dramatizes the concerns about what would happen to all the cool, cold military technology if it fell into the wrong hands.

The not terribly nefarious plot involves GoldenEye, a space satellite, which Trevelyan wants to explode over London to cover up his financial thievery. It’s controlled by a giant radar dish in Cuba, providing yet another exotic location for Bond to voyage to. The ending battle in the jungle and within said dish is reminiscent of earlier Bonds with a secret hideout in a worldly location.

Another plus is the film’s nerdy computer engineers, Boris Grishenko (Alan Cumming) with round glasses that make him look like a deranged Russian Harry Potter (he keeps yelling “I am invincible!” and just when this line gets tiresome, he dies), and lady-of-the-perpetually-waving skirt Natalya Simonova (Izabella Scorupco). Boris is featured during an especially tense moment in which he nervously twirls and clicks a pen, not knowing it’s one of Q’s gadgets, designed to explode if the clicker is toggled correctly.

Some minor complaints: the plot is notably less ambitious than the world-dominating ones of earlier films, the ending drags a bit, and finally, Xenia is so awesome she overshadows the evil mastermind(s) and the actual Bond girl, Natalya.

While a few elements aren’t quite right, because of its firm foundation in other Bond films, GoldenEye is such a return to form after several lame Bond movies that I give it five stars, although it’s probably closer to a high four. Xenia made me do it.

IMDB: GoldenEye
Wikipedia: GoldenEye
Rotten Tomatoes: GoldenEye 84%

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