Looks like Pierce Brosnan’s Bond is heading out with a whimper…or maybe with a bunch of gratuitous explosions.

I had hoped that the last of Brosnan’s Bonds would be better than The World is Not Enough, but, unfortunately, it was anything but.  In fact, it was considerably worse…one of the worst in the franchise.

It is an utter mess from the start right through to the fantasy ending.

James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) is on a mission in North Korea, and gets captured.  After being tortured for months, England arranged a trade for the terrorist Zao (Rick Yune) because they believed that Bond had been broken and had given vital information to the Koreans.  This led to Bond being stripped of his position and held in custody.  Bond escaped and headed after Zao to find out who betrayed him.

Bond followed Zao to Cuba where he met Jinx (Halle Berry) and hijinks ensued.

Meanwhile, millionaire Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens) has been having a media spree for mysterious plans that draw the attention of Bond.  Undercover MI6 agent Miranda Frost (Rosamund Pike) was working for Graves, trying to discover what was going on.

The plot was ridiculous and messy.  The characters were all one-note.  The motivation for most of them were shaky at best.  It was over-the-top in all the bad ways.  It hasn’t been this silly since Moonraker.

There are many plot points that are basically the same as The World is Not Enough.  There are actually just a few differences between the two films.  Bond, once again, sleeps with the bad girl who will betray him later.

And in fact, there is not a whole heck of a lot of things that Bond does well here.  Most of the first half of the film is Bond screwing up or being downright incompetent.

Though Pierce Brosnan was a decent Bond, the films he was in, for me, was 3 out of 4 poor.  I think that has to place him at the bottom of the list of Bonds for me.

The submarine in the third act of this movie is a perfect metaphor for The World is Not Enough.  It is sinking hard and fast.

The third film of Pierce Brosnan as James Bond was one of the dumbest of the franchise.  I have to reflect on the overall list to decide if it is lower on my list than You Only Live Twice and Monraker and Octopussy, but it is certainly now in the argument.

Sadly, after Tomorrow Never Dies, which I liked a lot, the Bond franchise sunk down into the depths of stupid with The World is Not Enough.

An oil tycoon is murdered and Bond is sent to protect his daughter Elektra (Sophie Marceau) from a terrorist who had kidnapped her when she was younger.  The terrorist Renard (Robert Carlyle) had taken a bullet in the head, but it had not killed him yet.  It left him incapable of feeling pain.  Renard is looking to steal a nuclear bomb for some convoluted reason and Bond is trying to stop him.

This movie hit almost all of the big Bond moments.  There was a ski chase! Bond had to try to diffuse a bomb.  Bond was believed to be dead.  He was in a death trap.  All that was missing was sharks!

Oh and the bad guys here make the Stormtroopers look like expert marksmen.

Seriously though, the melodramatic acting going on here was just laughable.  Denise Richards is not the first name that comes to mind when I think about nuclear physicists.  Robert Carlyle, who brought a lot of life and emotion to the role of Rumpelstiltskin on Once Upon a Time, is just totally ridiculous here.  He was anything but menacing considering he was meant to be a horrible terrorist.  M (Judi Dench) gets to do more.  For example, she is locked in a cell and sits there basically for the third act.  Then, the emotional section of the film (she was connected with Elektra) was just tossed aside for the stupid action beats.  Why use an actress of Dench’s quality if you are not going to let her act?

This is a total waste.  I have one more Pierce Brosnan Bond film to go before we can dive into the Daniel Craig films.  Hopefully, this last one is more watchable.

The nineteenth James Bond movie and the second with Pierce Brosnan is next on the Bond watch.  It is Tomorrow Never Dies, and after my personal disappointment with GoldenEye, I was wondering what to expect from this movie.

I thought this was an improvement over the previous chapter and that Pierce Brosnan felt more like he had that bit of Bond-ism that was missing from GoldenEye.

Now, I know this may not be a popular opinion, since the world seems to love GoldenEye considerably more than it does Tomorrow Never Dies (Rotten Tomatoes:  GoldenEye 77% and 83% [audience], TND:  57% and 53% [audience]), but I disagree.  I find these numbers extremely fascinating.

In this movie, Bond is back and this time trying to prevent World War III.  When media mogul Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce) tries to manipulate a confrontation between China and the United Kingdom in international waters all for the exclusive coverage, James Bond is on the job.  Teaming up with a Chinese agent Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh), Bond tries to stop the news from being made.

I thought the general media powered plot was very relevant still today as it was 20+ years ago.  Maybe more so.  Jonathan Pryce was exceptional as the film’s villain and his crazed performance was very believable.  I was disappointed in the role given to Teri Hatcher, who played Pryce’s wife and former Bond flame Paris.  Her part of the story was quite limited and she was not vital at all.

I thought this was one of the most exciting cold opens the franchise has had in quite a long while.  The tension was high in the scene and led to a big win for Bond.  We also got a dose of Judi Dench as M here and that is always a welcome sight.

Tomorrow Never Dies does feel a little long and could have been better if they had dropped about 10-15 minutes in the middle of the film.  Still, I believe this is an improvement from the last Brosnan film.  However, word said that the final two Brosnan Bond flicks are pretty bad.  We’ll see.  I liked this one though it was not as popular.  Maybe my thoughts on Bond differ from others.

Although my memory was not being a fan of the Pierce Brosnan version of James Bond, I have been looking forward to this movie as I have had several people tell me it is one of the best Bond films.  I am sure I have seen this once, so I was excited about revisiting it during this Bond re-watch.

I was thoroughly unimpressed.

Pierce Brosnan was fine as our brand new 007.  Reportedly, he was the choice to play Bond prior to Timothy Dalton, but Brosnan could not get out of his contract with the NBC show Remington Steele, so instead we got Dalton (who by the way was a fantastic Bond).  Brosnan does imbue elements of the previous Bonds, but I have to say something felt as if it were missing.  It was an intangible like heart.  Brosnan felt too manufactured, like they were trying to put together the perfect Bond in a factory, but could only come up short.

The story itself was a bit of a stretch and I had a hard time engaging with the threat as the whole GoldenEye is a satellite that can send a devastating EMP to the earth was just too abstract of a threat.

The villains were scattered too much as well.  Famke Janssen was the muscle in this film as Xenia Onatopp, whose wild sexual viciousness played on the old Bond trope of bedding every woman around.  Now, the sexual position was the danger.  Will kind of funny, she was not very interesting, nor very effective.

The real villain of the film was bounced around a bit and that made it feel lesser.  Rogue MI6 agent Alec (Sean Bean) and his motives were unclear.  Was his motive monetary?  Was it revenge?  Was it simply coincidental his involvement?  He did not elicit from me the valued threat to Bond as was intended.

I did enjoy hacker Boris Grishenko (Alan Cumming) with his self-importance and his computer skills.  Alan Cumming stole every scene in which he appeared.

I found myself bored through much of the movie, waiting for something with more sustenance to happen.  The action was mostly generic and even the use of the gadgets were dull.

In one of the standout moments of the film, Judi Dench was introduced as the new M.  This is a tremendous thing and her initial meeting with Bond proved her to be a powerhouse.  She had called Bond a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur” and promised more fireworks between the two.  I would have liked more of this.  We got a new Moneypenny (Samantha Bond) as well.  However, Q is, once again, played by Desmond Llewelyn.

There were a few moments that worked, but the film was flat to me and it was missing some of that Bond magic.  It was quite the letdown after my expectations had been raised.

The seventeenth James Bond film also turned out to be the second and final appearance for Timothy Dalton as Bond.  This is a fact that makes me sad as I have found him to be an exceptional James Bond.

Perhaps you have to look at how the world has changed to understand the changes in the James Bond franchise, but I have found these past two Dalton movies to have fixed many of the issues that the earlier films had suffered from.

We get a strong woman character, Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell), who helps Bond in a big way.  Yet, we still see the streak of misogyny in the former spy.  However, there is a deeper meaning behind how Bond acts in this film.

Bond heads into revenge mode when his friend Felix Leiter (David Hedison) and his bride (Priscilla Barnes) are attacked on their wedding day, with the bride being killed.  This triggered a deep memory in Bond.  The character had been married once and had his own bride murdered on his wedding day.  This brought all of that back.  It was not just his friendship with Felix that sent Bond after the drug dealers here, but the memory of Blofeld killing Teresa way back in On Her Majesty Secret Service.

So every time I heard Bond trying to get Pam to leave, I saw it as Bond desperately trying to protect someone whom he cares about, not because she was a woman.

This subtle character development was extremely welcome in a series that did not go into too much depth in that area.  That motivation was a positive step.

The action was top notch and our villains were strong.  Robert Davi as drug dealer Sanchez was a huge win as was Benicio del Toro as Dario.

This film continued the trend of more serious, darker films in the James Bond franchise.  I would have been interested to see where the franchise would have gone keeping Timothy Dalton in the role.  However, he would be replaced for the next film, GoldenEye, by Pierce Brosnan.

A new Bond.  A new direction.  Still diffusing bombs. Still skiing.

The Living Daylights marked the first new James Bond since Roger Moore took over the character in 1973.  Timothy Dalton became the fourth Bond on film (fifth if you count David Niven) following Moore, Sean Connery and George Lazenby.

James Bond fond himself inside a plot where the KGB was trying to assassinate all enemy spies, but he discovered that there is more to the story than that.  When Bond chooses to ignore orders and not kill am apparent Russian sniper Kara (Maryam d’Abo), he joined up with her to search for Russian defector Koskov (Jeroen Krabbé) who was taken back to Russia.  The situation led to the doorstep of arms dealer Brad Whitaker (Joe Don Baker).

This was a refreshing change of pace for the Bond franchise.  There was a more realistic feel, a grittier tone for the super spy while still maintaining the fun gadgets that have been one of 007’s calling cards over the years.  There seemed to be a bit of a backlash to this movie not being as “fun” as some of the other Bond films, and I, for one, was grateful for that.  I thought this was a really great action movie and it was not being weighed down by some of the foolishness that had been so intertwined with the Roger Moore years.

Timothy Dalton jumped into the character immediately and he made a very strong Bond.  We had a less of the playboy Bond than in past movies perhaps because of the world that this film was released within.  He brought a serious tone that has been lacking in Bond for quite a long time.

There is a good performance from John Rhys-Davies in this movie as a Russian General Pushkin.  Maryam d’Abo was solid as the cello-playing Bond girl, Kara.

I liked the way this franchise flipped into more serious nature from the jokey-jokey aspect from previous years.  There was less humor, but, for me, when the one liners came, they were really funny and worked more.

I love that song from Duran Duran.  The movie…not so much.

The final Roger Moore appearance as Agent 007 turned out to be one of the worst for the James Bond franchise to this point.

The nature of a lot of these Bond movies have become fairly repetitive.  Bond has to stop a bomb at the last seconds.  The villain is a powerful businessman with a seemingly powerful henchman/woman.  Heck, in A View to a Kill, Bond does more skiing marking the third or fourth time.

Another issue that I was thinking about was…if Bond is so well known as a secret agent, why do they continue to put him undercover without any sort of disguise?  You see in A View to a Kill how simple it was for Zorn (Christopher Walken) to find out Bond’s true identity and everything about him except his shoe size.  I would think that it would hinder the undercover work.

And I hate to continually beat a dead horse (which Bond seems to ride all the time as well), but why do these Bond villains not just shoot Bond in the head and be done with him?  Why do they continually leave him in some kind of death trap in which Bond “easily” escapes from?  You guys do use guns.  It reminded me of the old 1966 Batman series where the Joker or Penguin or whomever would leave Batman and Robin in a ridiculous death trap every episode.  At least there were no guns in Gotham at the time.  Bond bad guys have been letting James off the hook for decades now.

Another issue I had was a specific sound effect.  I actually heard this several times.  It was when a plane is getting ready to crash and it has this dive bomb sound.  Except, here, it was made for a helicopter, and the helicopter was just spinning around in midair.  It was a ridiculous moment and made me laugh out loud.

These are the thoughts I had while much of the first act of this film bored me.

As for A View to a Kill, Bond’s recovery of a microchip from a dead Double O (hence the skiing) leads him to a plot by industrialist sociopath Zorin (Christopher Walken) and his henchperson May Day (Grace Jones) to destroy Silicon Valley and corner the market on microchips.

The entire plot is gobbledygook as they attempt to use the fault lines to destroy the area of California.  The dialogue is pretty poorly written as well.  Walken is good as the psychotic Zorin and you can tell why Grace Jones does not get much to say as the silent assassin.

The action was not great either.  The entire fire truck chase scene was cringe-inducing and the fight on the Golden Gate Bridge made no sense.  Unfortunately, Roger Moore looked his age most of the time as well.

The characterization was also a problem for me, especially the inconsistent way that May Day was presented.  We have SPOILERS seen the henchman change sides in the third act before (aka Jaws in the travesty Moonraker), but at least I understood why.  He was in love.  I understand that May Day was left to die by Walken and that is why she is working with Bond, but why does this woman, who was happy to let millions die in Silicon Valley, become such a self-sacrificing hero at the end?  That did not make any sense and went completely opposite of everything I had been told or shown about May Day up until this point.  END OF SPOILERS

This was Roger Moore’s seventh and final Bond film and we also got the final appearance of Lois Maxwell, who had been playing Miss Moneypenny since the beginning.  This felt like a change for the Bond franchise as the films moving forward take a step away from the Roger Moore silliness of many of the past films.  A View to a Kill was a sad way to end Moore’s run.  He was the Bond that I grew up watching and, looking back, still hold with a soft spot.  Though he had a few big time stinkers, when the films were allowed to balance the camp with the serious, Roger Moore excelled.

And, once again, the title track by Duran Duran is most likely in the top 3-5 Bond songs in the entire franchise.  Truly wish there was a better film to go with such an epic tune.

The original James Bond returned for one last film, sort of.

Sean Connery, who appeared as Bond in the first five films in the franchise and then the seventh film, came back once again, but this time 12 years after his last appearance.  Famously, Connery had proclaimed that he would never again play James Bond, which helped lead to the title of the movie, Never Say Never Again.

When I say “sort of,” I mean that this movie is weirdly different than any other movie in the franchise.  The difference was hard to nail down, but the absence of some of the iconic Bond traits altered the tone.  There was no Bond theme, and the absence of that was noticeable.  There was no opening credit gun sight beginning.  There was just a feeling that threw me off at the beginning of this movie.

And I kind of dug it.

I also felt as if there were some “Old Man Bond” characteristics in this movie and sprinkled throughout Sean Connery’s performance.  I know there is a trend in Marvel Comics these days to tell future stories involving the “Old Man” characters, including Wolverine, Hawkeye, Star-Lord etc.  They have been effective stories, but this would have preceded those comics by several decades.

While Bond was still very successful, little details such as pain in his back or his bosses wanting him to get in better shape brought a very effective relatability to the character.  We all get old, even James Bond, and to let him show the age, even if it is for just a few scenes, is awesome.

However, another strange situation here was that the continuity was way out of whack.  Never Say Never Again was based on the novel Thunderball, which was also a film earlier in the franchise.  The earlier film was loosely based on the novel and, for the most part, only had its name.  It was not produced by Eon Productions, as most all of the Bond films had been, and, instead, by Taliafilm.  Because of this, Never Say Never Again has been considered outside of the Bond film family, treated as it did not exist, much like the original 1967 version of Casino Royale.  Neither movie is included in any compilation of Bond movies, and this is the reason why the upcoming Bond movie, No Time to Die, is considered Bond 25, instead of the 27th movie with the character.

This film saw the return of Ernst Blofeld (Max von Sydow), despite deaths at least three times in the series.  He was back with SPECTRE and stealing nuclear weapons once again.  Blofeld was in the background though as the main villain was Maximillian Largo (Klaus Maria Brandauer).  There was an Emilio Largo who appeared in the 1965 movie Thunderball.  Maximillian Largo was very entertaining as he was a sociopath and completely unbalanced.  He made a fantastic villain.  However, like all Bond villains, they just refuse to simply shoot him in the head.  Instead of leaving him chained up alive for the vultures to eat, shoot him in the head and be done with it.

Oh, and then suddenly, there was a young Kim Basinger as Domino, the film’s Bond girl.  I was quite surprised at her arrival on screen as I did not know that she was ever a Bond girl.

As the film went on, it started feeling more like Bond, but it never truly seemed to completely fit, and as I said, I liked it.  The Bond gadgets were here, but were not over used.  The humor was well placed and delivered expertly by Connery.  There was a bad ass female assassin Fatima (Barbara Carrera) who was trying to kill Bond through much of the first two acts of the film (the final battle scene between her and Bond was just perfectly done).

I thought this was going to be a flop film, since it was treated as if it wasn’t a part of the franchise, but I enjoyed this one a lot more than many of the films that preceded it.

The 13th film in the James Bond franchise was also the fifth film starring Roger Moore in the lead role.  It was one that I had never seen before, and I had not watched it mainly because of the negative word of mouth that I had heard about it.

After watching it, it was not as bad as what I had heard,but it was not good either.

Bond this time is on the case after the murder of a fellow British agent at a circus.  He was found with a Fabergé egg in his hands.  This leads Bond to a jewel smuggling ring and a plot to use a nuclear devise to cause international unrest.

Honestly, the plot of this movie is one of the biggest problems with it.  The film is too long and it really makes little sense.  The gadgets are kept at a reasonable level, but they throw Bond in so many ridiculous situations that it almost made me wish for the gadgets.

The whole Bond is dressed as a gorilla or Bond is dressed as a clown bring the film down drastically.  There was a Tarzan sound effect too.  These make Bond feel like a joke instead of the super spy he is supposed to be.

The jewel thief involved here is named Octopussy (Maud Adams, who played Andrea Andrews in The Man With the Golden Gun).  She arrives at first as a villain, but does not stick on that path as the film progresses. The main villain is a guy named Kamal Khan (KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNN) played by Louis Jourdan.  He was very unremarkable and his henchmen did not stand out either.

It all ends with a ridiculous fight on the top of an airplane.  While some of the other action scenes in the film were decent, this final one overshadows any of the others.

Though I did not hate this one, it is certainly in the lower section of the Bond movies.  You could tell that Roger Moore was on the downward trend as 007 as well.

EYG Hall of Famer Akira Kurosawa had directed many classic international films during his life, but many believe that his greatest work is the black and white film Rashomon, which I watched today.

This movie inspired the storytelling technique called the Rashomon Effect, which is the style of telling the same event in a contradictory manner through the POV of different characters, having them adjust the events to benefit themselves.  It is a technique that I have seen many times, but I hadn’t been aware of until this movie crossed my path.

I was able to see an English subtitled version on Amazon Prime.  As in all of the subtitled movies, after awhile, it feels as if I am no longer reading the subtitles and they are just happening.  It is a very interesting effect that I have seen and it has changed my tune on the subtitled movies.  At one time, I did not want to “read” a movie, but now, it does not bother me at all.  In fact, I was 100% prefer that over dubbing voices over top of the film.

Anyway, in Rashomon, three men congregate under shelter in a rainstorm at the Rashomon city gate to stay dry.  While there, they exchange eye witness accounts about a crime that had just happened. The infamous bandit Tajômaru (Toshiro Mifune) came across a marred couple and he becomes enamored with the wife, Masako (Machiko Kyô).  Tajômaru chased after them and captured her husband, Takehiro (Masayuki Mori).  After raping the woman, her husband wound up dead.  This is where the contradiction comes into play.

Fascinatingly enough, the film never really reveals what the actual events were.  There were four versions, and it may seem that the fourth version is the one that is the truthful one, but there is enough questions raised to bring uncertainty to the film.  According to the details on Amazon Prime, even the actors in the film had approached Kurosawa, to find out what the answers were, and he would not tell them.  He said the film was meant to explore the multiple realities.

The film showed the nature of eye witnesses and how unreliable they may be.  You can never tell what might color the perception of an eye witnesses story.  In Rashomon, even the story that seems as if it should have been the most unbiased brings questions as to the viability of the tale.

The film is shot beautifully, with the black and white creating such a rich and textured backdrop for this story of betrayal and struggle for power and honor.  There are many examples of symbolism throughout the film, the entire story itself an analogy for the perception of man.

The acting was tremendous and, once again, shows me that I do not want English translation dubbed over top.  The voices, speaking in Japanese, is required to feel the connotation and the emotion within it.  You do not have to understand Japanese to understand the feelings of those involved.  The actors do an amazing job.

Rashomon truly was an experience that I was glad to have undertook.  It is a beautiful looking story of the depth of man and the ways each person can adjust a story to make it fit their world view.  It was truly a masterpiece.

For the fifth time, Roger Moore strides onto the screen as British Secret Service Agent 007, James Bond.

After the sloppy sci-fi schlep Moonraker, the James Bond franchise took a giant and grateful step back towards its roots with For Your Eyes Only, the 12th Bond film.

For Your Eyes Only was considerably better than the previous Bond film as the producers decided to make a film closer to the old days of secret spies.  The gadgets were kept at a happy medium and in a much less campy manner.

Check that.  The cold open was very much full of camp as, apparently, Bond’s old enemy Blofeld made another appearance, only to get killed with the help of an over the top helicopter trick.  This did not match the tone of the rest of the film, but it was a nice shout out to anyone who wanted the camp in a Bond film.  It was just enough for my tastes.

In this film, Bond must find a communication device, known as an A.T.A.C., which went down with a British spy ship before the Russians.  During the adventure, he meets a woman named Melina Havelock (Carole Bouquet), who is out for revenge on the people who murdered her parents.

I really enjoyed For Your Eyes Only.  It returned the franchise to a much better place.  Sure there are still jokes and over-the-top antics, but they are not played for total camp or slapstick humor.  This felt like a spy movie again instead of a parody of one.

The action sequences are crisp and entertaining.  I talked about how I thought I had remembered a ski scene in this movie during the movie, The Spy Who Loved Me, and I had.  The ski scene was very well done and more extensive than in The Spy Who Loved Me.

How many times does Bond have to avoid some giant predatory animal in one of these movies?  We have seen piranha and giant snakes before.  This movie was, at least, the third time that sharks make an appearance in the Bond films.

Roger Moore was starting to look his age here.  He was fine during this movie, but it was clear that his days as James Bond was going to be coming to an end sooner rather than later.

The ending scenes of the Bond franchise, especially during the Moore years, seem to be fairly similar with Bond getting the girl, literally as his bosses try to talk to him.  It has grown to be a bit repetitious.

This was also the first film that M was not on screen.  Bond’s long time boss was said to be on leave during this filming because the actor Bernard Lee had died of stomach cancer before they could film his scenes.  Out of respect for the actor who had been in the previous 11 Bond films, producer Albert R. Broccoli refused to recast the role.

This film featured one of my favorite, most underrated Bond themes.  For Your Eyes Only was recorded by 80’s diva Sheena Easton and the rich vocals and sultry voice fit beautifully with the tone of the film.

This was a welcome return to pseudo-seriousness after the stupidity of Moonraker.  For Your Eyes Only was a huge success and one of the most under rated of the Bond films.

I had set a goal to watch Moonraker today, the next in line for the Bond watch.  Then, my internet/TV/phone service crapped the bed for a big chunk of the day.  Fortunately (perhaps), it came back in time for me to watch this Bond film.

I had never seen Moonraker before.  There are a few of the Bond films that I had not seen, specifically those whose reputation may be, let’s say, a tad shaky.

Shaky is kind.  This was dreadful.

It felt more like an Austin Powers movie than a James Bond movie.  And not in the good way.

The United States space shuttle Moonraker was hijacked in midair as it was on the way to be loaned to Great Britain.  James Bond (Roger Moore) was put on the case to investigate and he discovered a plot for global genocide.

The gigantic and, I guess, nigh invulnerable Jaws (Richard Kiel) was hired as muscle for Bond villain Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale).  Oh, and there is a Bond girl named Dr. Holly Goodhead (Lois Chiles).

The slapstick becomes way more than just campy in this film.  It takes all of the silliness and amplifies it 100% and then it doubles down on it.  The silly situations and the gadgets are just too much.  There was always elements of camp in the series, even the most serious of the films, but this takes that to an utterly absurd level.  Especially after the fairly well-balanced The Spy Who Loved Me that proceeded this in release.

In space, no one can hear you scream.. but they can hear the pew pew of lasers …and the crashing ships.  Oh, and astronauts do scream when hit with the pew pew lasers.  The third act of this is such a travesty that any positives that may have been in the earlier part of the film was absolutely ripped apart.  It is utterly ridiculous and not in the good way.

Space Bond simply is too stupid and does not work.  Amazingly, the Rotten Tomatoes score has this as a “FRESH” film.  I just do not understand.

This is one of those movies that many of my friends think is awesome, but I have always avoided watching.  I am not much of a fan of Chevy Chase and Fletch feels like Chevy Chase to the nth degree.

Recently, Fletch turned up on a Top 10 Show and I know that Matt Knost has unbridled love for the film, so I decided that I would finally watch it, placing it on my Summer-Watch list.

Irwin “Fletch” Fletcher (Chevy Chase) was an investigative journalist who went by the name “Jane Doe”  He was working undercover on the beaches of Los Angeles on a story about drug trafficking when a wealthy businessman Alan Stanwyk (Tim Matheson) found him and asked him to commit a murder.  His own.

Stanwyk told Fletch that he was dying of cancer and he would be doing him a favor if he killed him.  He offered Fletch $50,000 to to the humanitarian thing.

This kicked off the central mystery of the movie, and Fletch, the investigative reporter, smelled a story.

I found this movie to be fine.  I certainly would not place it in the upper levels of comedy movies, but it is probably my favorite Chevy Chase movies.  It had some good laughs and Chevy’s zany banter was mostly entertaining.  Fletch was written with a lot of intelligence and was filled with a quick wit.  He felt very much like David Addison from Moonlighting.

The story beats worked fairly well and the investigation allowed you to try and determine what was happening as Fletch found out about it too.  The conclusion was a tad anti-climatic for my tastes, and perhaps somewhat unrealistic.  The whole thing of Fletch being picked by Stanwyk was fairly coincidental, but you are able to ignore those issues because the rest of the film is engaging.

I am glad that I finally watched it.  Check that one off the list.

I have found some strange tidbits while doing this James Bond re-watch, such as I don’t remember much about any of these movies.  For example, I am up to The Spy Who Loved Me and I remember watching it.

Yet, I have seemingly forgotten most of it.

In fact, the only things I remember from this movie was the cold open with the skis (although truthfully, I thought this was in For Your Eyes Only), the underwater car, and Jaws (Richard Kiel) on the train (by the way, I don’t know why Bond keeps going on trains.  He seems to always get attacked there).  The rest of this movie felt like a brand new one.  I know I saw it, but it really blends together with other ones.  So I am glad I am doing this re-watch because it gives me an opportunity to have a better knowledge of each movie and to separate them more.

Plus, of course, most of these have been really good.

The Spy Who Loved Me is the tenth movie chronologically in the James Bond franchise and the third film with Roger Moore as 007.

James Bond (Roger Moore) teams up with Soviet Agent XXX, Major Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach) to investigate the disappearance of two nuclear submarines, one from the Soviet Union and one from Great Britain (Yes, I got a definite You Only Live Twice vibe to it).  The Bond villain in this case was Stromberg (Curd Jürgens), who was looking to launch the missiles at New York and Moscow.  He hired the all-time henchman Jaws, the indestructible man with metal teeth.  Jaws made it through a couple of Bond movies because he was such a great villain.

It was refreshing that Stromberg was not interested in a blackmail scheme (unlike all of the other Bond villains… yes, I’m looking at you Blofeld!).  However, I still do not understand these villains.  They have Bond captured, why not just put a bullet in his head.  They let him live and he always comes back and kills them.

I enjoyed the relationship between Bond and Anya.  There is an interesting conflict thrown into the relationship that causes some strife between them.  That conflict is not really handled as well as it could have been.  I would have liked to see more from Anya as she wound up being rescued by Bond quite a bit.  She was very smart, but her dialogue in the last third or so of the film was, “James,” and then pointing at something that was about to happen.  I know this was the 70’s but I like strong women.

There are some fun gadgets involved here and it was not over top.  The underwater car was a cool gadget that worked well.  You can see though that the franchise is going to be moving more in that direction.

I find this strange, but I really enjoyed this film despite it being a low Rotten Tomatoes score of 44%.  I mean I found it very weird when I looked at Rotten Tomatoes and saw that score.  I expected it to be much higher than it was.  It is one more example of how movies are subjective, I suppose.

In The Man with the Golden Gun, James Bond (Roger Moore) returns to action to search out an assassin named Scaramanga (Christopher Lee), a marksman who uses a golden gun and hires himself out to the highest bidder.  Scaramanga lives on his own island with his manservant Nick Nack (Hervé  Villechaize, best known as Tattoo from Fantasy Island).

I thought the combination of Christopher Lee and Hervé Villechaize was inspired and that they were,perhaps, the best boss/henchman combo in the Bond franchise up to this point.  They were distinctly menacing and I got the feeling that Scaramanga was the equal to 007.  The training pieces where Scaramanga would have Nick Nack hiring killers to “test” him were fascinating.  The whole solar power plot point felt as if it did not fit with the story that they should have told.  I was not interested in the search for the MacGuffin of this story, but I was into the one on one aspect between Bond and Scaramanga.

The film went further with the slapstick humor and, for the most part, it did not bother me.  I am not sure that I needed to see Clifton James reprise his role of Sheriff Pepper from Live and Let Die, but it did not hurt anything either.

Some of the negative reviews I have seen are because of an unfavorable comparison of Roger Moore to Sean Connery.  As I said in my last review, I grew up with Roger Moore as James Bond so I was not swayed away from his interpretation.  While I do now prefer Sean Connery, I am not willing to just dismiss Moore because the two men have different styles.  Moore received a lot of unnecessary hatred for his acting here and I found him to be fine.  The stories being told during this stretch of time works more with Moore than it would with another Bond.

The Man with the Golden Gun was better than the reviews give it credit for and I though Christopher Lee was an excellent villain.  I would have loved it if the film focused more on the rivalry between Bond and Scaramanga instead of the typical Bond plot.