Andrew Kay: Broken bond
It has long amused my friends and family that I have never done something that almost everyone in the world seems to have done. I have never seen a James Bond Movie, until recently, that is.
In fairness, I have probably seen enough clips and trailers over the years to have attained a fair idea of what I was missing – but I just never saw the need to see one through from start to finish, in a cinema or on TV for that matter.
When I say ‘missing’ I should probably say missed as missing suggests that I suffered a sense of loss. I cannot imagine how I have managed this. I mean the things seem to litter our holiday TV schedules like confetti, as ubiquitous as Morecambe and Wise once were.
Last year, whilst holed up in Taunton on my own, I finally sat down and succumbed to the genre. I was alone in a town where I know no-one. The weather outside was frightful and there was little to do except watch the box. The choices were pretty bleak and only Quantum Of Solace stood out. This mainly because so many people had told me how good Daniel Craig was in the role made famous by a list of actors I cannot even be bothered to type.
I turned on and tuned in.
The title sequences have always appealed as I am a fan of Maurice Binder’s work, and the theme tunes, for the most part, have been pretty good but I was sure I was meant to be listening to Adele and this was certainly not her.
This was my first mistake. I had stupidly thought that the film was the most recent one that everyone was raving about. It was not.
My second mistake was to carry on viewing. I can enjoy a good thriller, an action movie has a certain appeal for sure. It does, however, require and intelligent and well crafted script if it’s going to engage me. Quantum Of Solace was a let down.
I sort of warmed to the crazy opening car chase, madly improbable as it was, with Bond avoiding death from a meteor shower of gun fire that could have wiped out a small army. From there on though, it was all down hill. The plot was thin and clichéd for sure but it was the almost comedic pantomime like characters that made me so cross. How Dame Judy could bear to utter the dismal lines beggared belief and her costumes made her look like a bank clerk at best.
Daniel Craig is a sneering cartoon cut out whose rebellious attitude to the Secret Service should have seen him dead years ago, but somehow he survives.
This is in all probability due to the fact that the villains are almost all portrayed as ruthless buffoons. All of the characters are written to have a certain ambiguity, is he/she a goodie or a baddie? Who can tell?
Bond trusts no one and no one trust him either. This does not stop him flirting and bedding most of the females in the story. Except, of course, for Dame Judy. That might have been worth sitting through the whole dreary affair to see.
Having never seen one through I felt a sudden need to get to the end of the film and tick it off as something done and never to be repeated. At the end I poured myself a stiff drink and pondered the wasted time. In all honesty I think I would have felt less angry watching some appalling reality TV show like ‘Get Me Out Of Here, I’m A Nonentity’.
I feel doubly disappointed in that I can no longer claim to have never seen a James Bond movie. It was an odd feather in my cap, I know, but one that I now see as having real merit.
“There are some bad people and a man has to try and catch them, killing a lot of people, both good and bad, along the way”
Maybe I chose the wrong one to watch, I will never ever know because I will never ever put myself through the dismal process of watching goodies and baddies (interchangeable) in a petrol and testosterone fuelled chase through
a multitude of exotic locations in a plot that amounts to this: There are some bad people and a man has to try and catch them, killing a lot of people, both good and bad, along the way.
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