James Bond Ultimate Edition - Vol. 2 (A View to a Kill / Thunderball / Die Another Day / The Spy Who Loved Me / Licence to Kill)
by John Glen, Lee Tamahori, Lewis Gilbert, Terence Young
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Actor: Halle Berry, Pierce Brosnan, Robert Davi, Rosamund Pike, Timothy DaltonDirector: John Glen, Lee Tamahori, Lewis Gilbert, Terence Young
Brand: TCFHE/MGM
Writer: Christopher Wood
Writer: Ian Fleming
Writer: Jack Whittingham
Writer: John Hopkins
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), DTS 5.1; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Spanish (Original Language)
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 642 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-11-07
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
DVD Reviews of James Bond Ultimate Edition - Vol. 2 (A View to a Kill / Thunderball / Die Another Day / The Spy Who Loved Me / Licence to Kill)
DVD Review: The overkill collection
Summary: 4 Stars
'Here comes the biggest Bond of them all!' screamed the ads for Thunderball. But while this is still the high water mark of the series at the box-office - selling more tickets than any other Bond, inflation-adjusted to today's prices its box-office take would exceed a billion dollars - it's also pretty much the clunkiest Bond in its determination to throw everything and the kitchen sink into the mix.
Opening with an excellently choreographed but very badly over-edited fight sequence, the formula is fully established here: the megalomaniacal villain, the ruthless disposal of underlings, perverted villain ("Vargas does not drink, does not smoke, does not make love. What do you do, Vargas?"), the obligatory three women for Bond to dally with and the archetypal Maurice Binder title sequence replacing Robert Brownjohn's earlier efforts (here an underwater ballet of men with harpoons pursuing silhouetted naked girls). It does tend to drag in places, but is still markedly superior to the majority of Roger Moore's efforts.
Much has been made over the years of the film's convoluted legal history. Fleming's novel was an unauthorised adaptation of a screenplay he co-wrote with Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham in an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to launch the series. After much wrangling, McClory was awarded the screen rights and formed an uneasy alliance with Broccoli and Saltzman to co-produce the film, a move that was have legal consequences beyond remake Never Say Never Again and lead to decades of law suits.
The new cook in the broth leads to a rather more schoolboyish Bond, but the film does take a few enjoyable swipes at him, such as Lucianna Paluzzi's villainess taunting his sexual arrogance - "I forgot your ego, Mr. Bond. James Bond, the one where he has to make love to a woman, and she starts to hear heavenly choirs singing. She repents, and turns to the side of right and virtue..." The saddest sight is Earl Cameron, the black actor who distinguished such 50's British films as Sapphire and Flame in the Streets reduced to the role of messenger boy, though at least he fares better than Quarrel in Dr No. If the role of Felix Leiter was intended to paper over gaps in the narrative, Cameron's Pinder is there only to drop Bond off at the next setpiece.
Although it appears there is no definitive version of the film - there are various cuts in circulation because of the rush to get the film ready for its premiere, while the `James Bond will return in On Her Majesty's Secret Service' caption seems lost forever - this is as close to it as we're likely to see, though a featurette does handily point out the differences between various versions. Handily one of the audio commentaries also offers the chance to hear the original Dionne Warwick title song Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, possibly the best song ever written for a Bond film ("He's smooth and he's sharp/And like a shark he looks for trouble/That's why the zero's double/Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang") only to get ditched for the Tom Jones song built around the title for promotional reasons. There's also a 48-minute TV special The Incredible World of James Bond, a radio spot advertising a beauty contest to find girls for OHMSS (planned as the next Bond film), production designer Ken Adams' home movie footage, the famous documentary A Child's Guide to Blowing Up a Motor Car and more besides on a well-packed two-disc set.
The Spy Who Loved Me holds up, along with You Only Live Twice, as the best of the special effects show Bond movies (like Lewis Gilbert's other Bond, the dire Moonraker, it more or less shares the same plot and even identical camera set-ups in places). Planned to turn the Bonds back into blockbusters after the somewhat more down to Earth Harry Saltzman left the series, Cubby Broccoli plays safe with a virtual `greatest hits' compilation album of all your favorite Bond setpieces (the train fight from From Russia With Love, a gadget-filled car a la Goldfinger, a ski chase a la OHMSS, etc), but its put together with skill, panache and a sense of the epic that carries you along. Moore's Bond still has a bit of steel in him and the script is so good you find yourself wondering if it really is the same Christopher Wood responsible for the British soft-porn Confessions series credited as co-writer.
As with others in the series, this repackaged upgrade to 2-disc `Ultimate Edition' from the original single disc issue at times feels more cosmetic than actual in terms of extras (as usual, there are plenty of other potential supplements, such as Movietone newsreel footage of the shoot, that have not been included), although alongside brief archive footage of the massive purpose-built 007 Stage being dedicated, a vintage Roger Moore and a 1977 promo featurette covering the shoot in Egypt there are production designer Ken Adams' home movies of the shoot and a storyboard sequence. But, alongside Moore's new commentary, perhaps the most enjoyable extras are the TV spots and the teaser trailer introduced by Moore in character carried over from the previous issue.
Roger Moore and Lois Maxwell's last Bond film, A View to a Kill, was the commercial lowpoint of Moore's Bond tenure (only Licence To Kill would sell fewer tickets), but it's not the worst of his films even if it is probably the dullest. Almost entirely gadget-free, there's a pleasing return to a self-reliant Bond - trapped in a sunken car, in an oil pipeline or in a burning lift, he uses his wits and what is immediately to hand to extricate himself, which at least puts him, not the toys, firmly at the centre of the action. Although, like so much of the film, a bit on the lacklustre side, the horse-doping subplot is also a nice change of pace that feels more like genuine Fleming than EON, and Patrick MacNee makes a good foil for Moore as one of Bond's many ill-fated sidekicks.
Unfortunately some of the action scenes seem to lose energy rather than gain momentum, the Parisian car chase in particular despite some impressive stuntwork from Remy Julienne, while others - especially the firetruck chase - suffer from lousy back-projection even by Bond film standards. The opening pre-title sequence is nearly very good but shoots itself in the foot with dull scoring, a horrible overlong jokey burst of the Beach Boys on the soundtrack and a terrible joke submarine feeling like an unwelcome sharp elbow in the ribs from a very loud and very unfunny warmup comedian who keeps on asking you if you got the joke because you haven't laughed. It's not the film's only cringeworthy moment - as if Bond making quiche for Tanya Roberts wasn't bad enough (forget Denise Richards, Roberts has to be the worst Bond girl ever), the poor old boy is practically raped by Grace Jones!
Then there are the villains. Christopher Walken, a man who can turn battle-hardened Marines to quivering masses of jelly just by looking in their general direction, makes a surprisingly weak and unmenacing psychopathic mastermind (whodda thunk it?) and his Nazi war criminal mentor who looks like a cross between British astronomer Patrick Moore and eccentric Tory MP Boris Johnson cuts a particularly laughable figure fighting with a past-his-prime but still game Roger Moore on the Golden Gate Bridge. That the villain's big scheme is a melting pot rehash of Superman's engineered earthquake, Gold's mine flood and Goldfinger's monopolising the market scam doesn't help the feeling of the series just going through the motions, and while John Glen's direction shows some improvement, he's still horribly lazy with any scene that doesn't take his fancy. Throughout there's a feeling that this is a film that's been made by too many people who've just been doing the job too long and are starting to think about the size of their pension funds: it seems to have been made more out of habit than genuine desire. In many ways the worst that can be said of it is that it's rather dull, while the best that can be said is that there are worse Bond films.
The gem among the new extras on this repackaged two-disc Ultimate Edition is Roger Moore's audio commentary - just as well, since there's not a huge amount of additional material otherwise: 4 additional deleted scenes, expanded multi-angle scenes, some outtakes of the firetruck chase and test footage of the butterfly act, with all the extras from the original release carried over.
Although Moonraker is the popular fan favorite for worst Bond movie, Licence To Kill runs it a close second for some. Whereas the Moore films had a fairly gradual lowering of standards, the superiority of The Living Daylights made the drop in quality of LTK seem that much more dramatic. The lowest-grossing movie in the series' history, it's a classic case of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. "This time Bond bleeds," claimed the producers, promising a tougher, more credible Bond film only to lack the nerve to deliver on their promise. Instead they wimped out and delivered something distinctly half-hearted that adheres to many of the weakest elements of the Bond formula but which throws out much of what makes Bond himself Bond in a disastrously counterproductive attempt to widen the series' appeal in the US market. Change the main character's name and you'd never know it was a Bond film - the character has been pared down and simplified to such an extent that there's little relation either to the previous films or even Fleming's novels (despite using aspects of Fleming's Live and Let Die). Casino Royale got around having Bond as a blunt instrument by showing the character develop, but in LTK he's just a standard issue guy they pushed too far. The result is a standard issue OTT 80s action movie that owes more to Commando and Elmore Leonard's 52 Pickup and The Tall T and which feels like Lethal Weapon 2 had it been remade with Roger Moore.
It has some novelty value as the only film where Bond isn't a secret agent, though turning him into just another vigilante is a big part of the problem. This time Bond goes against his superiors, his licence to kill revoked, to extract bloody revenge on the drug lord who fed Felix Leiter's legs to a shark and killed the CIA man's wife. But where The Living Daylights made the most of its narrative economy, here script, editing, scoring and direction all combine to provide a lack of momentum - poorly paced, this feels a good half hour too long. Frustratingly there is the occasional germ of a good idea, such as Bond blundering into and compromising wider issues with his vendetta, but they are never pursued. Rather than explore the increasingly fine line between good or evil or the psychosis that Bond's quest should hint at, it simply spends most of its running time coming up with unimaginative ways to kill the bad guys. This Bond makes no demands on his audience.
Almost nothing in the picture works on any terms. It's certainly in no way the gritty, realistic or down to Earth movie its supporters frequently claim. Wayne Newton playing a comic religious cult leader, Bond and Felix Leiter parachuting into a wedding in full morning suit attire (in a remarkably clumsily sped-up shot) after a midair hijack of a plane, Uncle Q coming along for comic relief on what's supposed to be a grim revenge mission, inept comedy ninjas, the obligatory villain's giant lair being blown up and an exploding head almost as ridiculous as the inflatable Yaphet Kotto in Live and Let Die are hardly the stuff of The French Connection, and nor is the surprisingly weak villain (the curse of the Dalton films). Sanchez may work on paper, but onscreen he's a damp squib, which is surprising as Robert Davi has repeatedly shown - as had Jeroen Krabbe before him - that outside Bond he could deliver real menace. There's certainly a potentially more interesting character there than the script allows Davi to show. The Bond girls are pretty atrociously written too: to see Talisa Soto's "I love him so much" moment is to know pain. Even Dalton, so impressive in The Living Daylights, is a lot less impressive second time round despite his best efforts.
Worse, it doesn't work as either a Bond film or as a standalone action movie: like too many of the weaker Bond films, if it weren't for the Bond brand and the loyalty the series has it probably would have sunk into obscurity long ago taken purely on its own merits as a film. In some ways it's a bold attempt to shake up the franchise, but that's the saddest thing about it. About the only two scenes that do work are when Bond throws a suitcase filled with a blood money at a heavy balanced on the edge of a shark tank (hardly a giant leap from [I] "Where's Fekkish?", "You've had your six" or Moore kicking a car containing a killer off a cliff in previous entries) or the factory scene where he's trying to disguise himself from Benicio Del Toro. Elsewhere it's certainly no harsher nor more serious than previous efforts: even Felix doesn't seem that bothered over his wife's rape and murder and is able to laugh it off by the end of the film.
There are also a lot of plot holes and absurdities: just why does Bond attack the MI5 agents after his licence to kill is revoked and why does M suddenly have his minions shooting at his most valuable agent? Why exactly are inept suicidal Japanese ninjas working for the HONG KONG Narcotics Agency? Why, in a moment that could have come out of a Leslie Nielson film, does one tiny fire in an enclosed laboratory within seconds become an impossible-to-extinguish raging inferno that causes a massive complex to blow up? Well, because someone thought they'd make for cool scenes is about the only explanation.
It's possible this could have been made to work with a more assured sense of tone, but the larky mood, cheap gags and poor execution do it no favors. Maybe a John McTiernan could have done something with the material even with such a weak script and no chance of proper rewrites due to the writers' strike, but John Glen just flattens it all with his lazy direction. It's professionally made but it fatally lacks the courage to go all the way in the way that Casino Royale did. LTK is like a nervous bather, constantly dipping one toe in the water only to almost immediately draw back to its imagined comfort zone. Even Moonraker, bad as it was, knew exactly what kind of film it was and stayed true to itself. Alone among the Bond films, LTK is the one people constantly have to make excuses for.
New extras for the two-disc Ultimate Edition are fairly thin - 9 deleted scenes, one of Bond unpacking in a hotel room while watching TV coverage of Sanchez arriving at a charity gala good enough to have stayed in the film - location scouting footage, archive interviews with John Glen and interview footage from 1989, with the extras from the original release carried over.
Die Another Day was surprisingly impressive first time round but doesn't hold up well to a second viewing for a number of reasons. The pre-title sequence is particularly strong, and the film is plot-led with a good premise that it explores far more effectively than License to Kill - Bond screws up, gets captured and finds his license to kill revoked and has to go it alone. But to many wrong choices are made in the casting of those both in front of and behind the cameras to do it full justice.
Brosnan is certainly a major problem here, getting lazier in the role far sooner than his predecessors. He takes too much for granted and doesn't seem to be putting much effort into it in the assumption that he's got it down pat, when in reality he's starting to go to seed - certainly he must be the only man to come out of 14 months of torture in a Korean prison chubbier than when he went in, something his tendency to spend much of the opening of the film with his shirt off and hidden under a bushy Monty Python castaway beard only exacerbates.
He's not helped much by his co-stars either: Halle Berry, who seems to become a worse actress with each successive film, really can't handle sass or wisecracks, which is a shame since that's almost all her part consists of, and their initial meeting exchange of innuendoes seems more like eavesdropping a married man picking up a hooker to prove he's still got it than anything else. Rosamund Pike's other fatale femme fares a little better purely on he grounds that, while an extremely one-dimensional performer, to least her limited abilities fit the part. Toby Stephens' villain is a bigger problem. While it's a neat touch that he models himself on an unflattering portrait of Bond's vanity, Stephens actually seems to be basing his performance on Rik Mayall's caricatured MP Alan B'stard from sitcom The New Statesman, and the results aren't pretty - a largely ineffectual screen actor, it's no accident that he needs to don an electronic suit of armour to become a credible foe for Bond in the final punch-up. Curiously, two of the better performances on display come from bit-players John Cleese (pleasingly restrained) and Michael Madsen as a distinctly unimpressed company man. Even Madonna's unnecessary cameo as a lesbian fencing instructor is considerably less painful than her terrible title-song, easily the series' worst. Still, the resulting overly enthusiastic swordfight is okay but would probably have been even better had they hired William Hobbs to choreograph it instead of Bob Anderson (Anderson may have coached Errol Flynn, but only in some of his worst films).
The direction adds to the problems. Lee Tamahouri is a maddeningly variable director, and too often its his weaknesses on display here. For a series that prides itself on globe-trotting, he has a very poor sense of place (aside from the Iceland scenes, this is the first Bond film that really looks like they were afraid to leave the studio backlot) and his handling of action isn't always effective - indeed, the car chase actually looks like several shots are missing. Still, at least they manage to just about get away with the science behind the invisible car more effectively than the awful CGI that undermines the series' reputation for doing daring stunts for real: along with the occasionally slo-mo or sped up scene intros, it just seems horribly out of place without ever quite ruining the film.
Another big problem is the tone. As the 20th entry in EON's series, the desire to celebrate its heritage threatens at times to overwhelm the film as it becomes increasingly self-referential. With almost every scene having an homage, a prop or an audio or visual reference to a previous movie, it stops being fun and becomes labored long before the halfway point. Bond is feeding off himself so much here that at times it reminds you of one of those animals that, when caught in a trap, gnaws its own leg off. It just about gets away with it, but it gets messy. There's fun to be had, most of it in the first half before it goes all Diamonds Are Forever, but there's still the feeling that this could and should have been much better.
It's well-worth tracking down the original 2-disc DVD release for the wealth of extra features that weren't carried over to the very underwhelming recent 'Ultimate Edition,' but if you just want the film to fill in a gap in your collection, this version or the single-disc version are good enough.
More James Bond Ultimate Edition - Vol. 2 (A View to a Kill / Thunderball / Die Another Day / The Spy Who Loved Me / Licence to Kill) reviews:
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Description of James Bond Ultimate Edition - Vol. 2 (A View to a Kill / Thunderball / Die Another Day / The Spy Who Loved Me / Licence to Kill)
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