Live and Let Die – Blood and Porridge

June 13, 2024

Still got a Licence to Kill – and thrill

© Eon Productions

Another unwelcome reminder that I’m now old and decrepit… I’ve just discovered that 35 years ago today, on June 13^th 1989, Licence to Kill opened at the Leicester Square Odeon in London. Time, I think, for a 35^th-anniversary tribute to one of my favourite Bond movies.

Few events depress me more than when a film critic like Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian or Pete Travers in Rolling Stone, who knows nothing about James Bond and whose general opinions I don’t think much of either, decide it’s time to pen a feature ranking the Bond films from ‘best’ to ‘worst’. That invariably means that the 1989 movie Licence to Kill with Timothy Dalton playing Bond ends up near the bottom, held off the ‘worst’ spot only by 1985’s A View to a Kill. Bradshaw, Travers or whoever the no-nothing critic is will invariably damn Licence to Kill with such adjectives as ‘humourless’, ‘dour’, ‘violent’ and ‘misjudged’.

This was the film where Timothy Dalton and the Bond production team decided it was time to shake up the tried-and-tested formula of fantasy plots, over-the-top villains and unlikely action set-pieces and incorporate something more authentic. In fact, Licence to Kill is a trailblazer for the Bond films of the 21^st century, when the series was rebooted into a darker, grittier and critically acclaimed form with Daniel Craig. But it rarely gets any credit for that.

Well, today, 35 years on, it’s time to stand up and be counted. I think Licence to Kill is a great Bond movie. When it appeared, I believed it was the best instalment in the series since the 1960s and I still regard it as being among the best half-dozen in the series’ 60-year history. That its critical reputation is tarnished is down to bad luck. It was unlucky in the reaction it got from fickle film critics who’d spent the previous two decades complaining that the Bond movies, during the tenure of Roger Moore, had become ‘too silly’ and had lost the ‘serious’ tone of the Ian Fleming books on which they were based. But the moment that Licence to Kill appeared, they wailed that it was ‘too serious’ and lamented the loss of the glorious silliness of good old Roger Moore.

Licence to Kill was unlucky too because, although it made a respectable profit outside the USA, the American takings were the lowest ever for a Bond movie. Despite what many think, this wasn’t a reflection of its quality, but the result of it being released at an inopportune time when cinemas were already crowded with Lethal Weapon 2, Batman and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (a film that coincidentally was choc-a-bloc with Bond alumni like John Rhys-Davies, Alison Doody, Julian Glover and the original 007 himself Sean Connery).

© Eon Productions

And it was unlucky to be the last movie before the great Bond hiatus of 1989 to 1995, during which no new Bond films were made due to a legal dispute between Danjaq, the franchise’s holding company, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / United Artists. This gave people the false impression that Licence to Kill, and Timothy Dalton, had crocked the series for half-a-dozen years.

When I saw Licence to Kill 35 years ago, what impressed me first was that it had a plot. Not a tangle of subplots and diversions created because producer Cubby Broccoli and his writers wanted to fit in copious action and special-effects set-pieces involving, say, gondolas that turn into speedboats, and speedboats that turn into hang-gliders, and crashing cable cars, and Bond falling out of a plane without a parachute, and laser-gun shootouts in outer space, but a plot that moves smoothly from A to B and to C.

Licence to Kill begins with Bond being best man at the wedding of his CIA buddy Felix Leiter (David Hedison, who’d already played Leiter in 1974’s Live and Let Die). Leiter’s big day proves even more eventful than expected because he has to interrupt his nuptials to seize Latin American drug baron Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi). Sanchez has suddenly turned up on American soil in pursuit of his errant mistress Lupe (Talisa Soto) and her boyfriend – whose heart Sanchez cuts out before Leiter and the Feds clamp the cuffs on him.

© Eon Productions

Felix gets married as planned, but things take a dark turn when Sanchez escapes from captivity, with the aid of crooked DEA agent Ed Killifer (Everett McGill). He and his henchmen turn up at the Leiters’ home on their wedding night to get revenge. Leiter’s new wife Della (Priscilla Barnes) is murdered – Sanchez’s number-one scumbag minion Dario, played by a very young Benicio Del Toro, crows at Leiter, “Don’t worry, we gave her a nice honeymoo-oon!” Leiter himself is dunked in a shark tank in a marine research centre in Key West, which is one of the fronts for Sanchez’s US drugs-smuggling operation. Later, Bond discovers Della’s dead body and Leiter’s just-about-alive one, minus a couple of limbs, and vows revenge.

Bond starts by investigating the marine-research lab and then Sanchez’s research vessel the Wavekrest – by this time Sanchez himself has returned to base, a fictional Latin American country called Isthmus. He tangles violently with Dario and Sanchez’s sleazy American lieutenant Milton Krest (Anthony Zerbe) and, gratifyingly, he drops Killifer and his suitcase of blood money into the shark tank that Leiter was maimed in. (“You earned it! You keep it!”)

Along the way, he finds an unexpected ally in the form of Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell), an airplane pilot who’s been working for Leiter in some mysterious capacity, and incurs the wrath of his boss M (Robert Brown), who thinks he’s getting involved in matters that don’t concern him (“We’re not a country club, 007!”) and revokes his licence to kill. This was why the film had provisionally been titled Licence Revoked until, the story goes, research in the USA suggested that many Americans didn’t know what the word ‘revoked’ meant.

Now rogue, Bond steals a fortune in drugs money from the Wavekrest and uses it to fund a trip to Isthmus for him and Bouvier. There, he tries to assassinate Sanchez but fails and, in the process, unwittingly exposes a secret operation being run against Sanchez by agents from Hong Kong. This leaves Sanchez with the impression that the agents were the ones trying to assassinate him and Bond, by exposing them, is actually on his side. An unlikely bromance ensues and Sanchez, enamoured with Bond, tries to recruit him into his organisation.

© Eon Productions

Aware that Sanchez is obsessed with loyalty, Bond starts planting doubts in Sanchez’s mind about the fidelity of his many henchmen who, in addition to those already mentioned, include his head of security Heller (Don Stroud) and his whizz-kid accountant Truman-Lodge (Anthony Starke). Time, though, is running short for Bond because the two members of Sanchez’s organisation who know his true identity are returning to Isthmus: Krest, on board the Wavekrest, and Dario, who’s coming by way of El Salvador, where he’s managed to procure some stinger missiles. Sanchez intends to use these to shoot down American aircraft in revenge for his recent incarceration.

What follows involves much mayhem and gruesome death – death by being doused in gasoline and set alight, by being blown apart in a decompression chamber, by being impaled on forklift-truck blades, by being fed into a cocaine-grinding machine. A lot of this is inflicted by a now-paranoid Sanchez on the people who work for him. Yes, Licence to Kill seems a million miles removed from the Roger Moore Bonds, where the most gruesome things were the inuendo-laden jokes cracked while Moore got intimate with ladies about half his age. But while the brutality here may shock someone accustomed to the escapist fantasises of the 1970s and 1980s Bond movies, I loved it.

This was the sort of Bond imagined by Ian Fleming, most of whose books I’d read before I saw any of the films. Not that Fleming ever wrote about 1980s Latin American drug dealers – his gangsters were of the James Cagney variety, with names like ‘Jack Spang’, ‘Sluggsy Morant’, ‘Sol Horowitz’, ‘Sam Binion’ and ‘Louie Paradise’. But Dalton nails it as the screen Bond who was closest to the character described by Fleming. Smooth and confident on the surface, but subtly troubled underneath, he does some bad stuff in the line of duty and hates having to do it. But even more, he hates the evil deeds – like the murderous violation of his best friend’s wedding – that compel him to do it.

© Eon Productions

Not that the film is unremittingly dark. It has some amusing lines and likeable performances. One thing that brings a smile to the face is the entry into the plot, halfway through, of Bond’s secret-service armourer Q, played by the venerable Desmond Llewellyn. Q takes some leave and nips over to Isthmus to help Bond and Bouvier out, bringing with him a cache of his famous gadgets. (“Everything for a man on holiday. Explosive alarm clock… Guaranteed never to wake up anyone who uses it. Dentonite toothpaste… To be used sparingly. The latest in plastic explosive.” “I could do with some plastic,” Bond notes.) After the Moore films, where Q’s main function was to be the butt of Bond’s jokes, it’s nice to see him with an expanded role and in a different dynamic with Bond. In Licence to Kill, the two men actually like, respect and care about each other.

Llewellyn, though, is just one player in a generally delightful cast. A 1980s / 1990s action-movie character actor, and nowadays a Sinatra-esque crooner, Robert Davi is excellent as Sanchez. He tempers sufficient quantities of rottenness with some unexpected integrity – for instance, he insists on honouring the deal he’s made with Killifer, even though his sidekicks urge him to take the easier option of whacking the guy. Some similarly distinguished character actors play the other villains: Zerbe, Stroud, McGill and, of course, Del Toro. Plus you get some familiar and welcome faces in smaller roles, including Frank McRae from 48 Hrs (1982) and The Last Action Hero (1993) and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa from the Mortal Combat franchise.

Also deserving praise is Carey Lowell. Just as Davi is the great overlooked Bond villain, Lowell is the great overlooked Bond girl. From the very beginning, when she shuts up the odious Dario by shoving a pump-action shotgun into his crotch, her Pam Bouvier character means business. Her gutsiness is immensely refreshing after so many Bond actresses in the 1970s and 1980s had been given roles that were wooden (Carole Bouquet), insipid (Jane Seymour) or just plain dumb (Jill St John, Britt Ekland, Tanya Roberts). It’s good too that she doesn’t just exist to follow Bond but has her own agenda. She plans to retrieve the stinger missiles before Sanchez does serious damage with them, a scheme for which she’s enlisted the help of the duplicitous Heller.

© Eon Productions

What else do I like about Licence to Kill? I like its references to Ian Fleming’s fiction. Milton Krest, the Wavekrest and Sanchez’s fondness for whipping Lupe with a stingray’s tail come from the 1960 short story The Hildebrand Rarity, while Leiter’s encounter with the shark is lifted from the 1954 novel Live and Let Die. I like how the secondary Bond girl, Talisa Soto’s Lupe, survives the film. The secondary Bond girl in many films, from Lana Wood’s Plenty O’Toole in Diamonds are Forever (1971) to Berenice Marlohe’s Severine in Skyfall (2012), ends up as a sacrificial lamb, killed to show how beastly the villains are.

And I like how the film is a spiritual sequel to perhaps the best-ever Bond movie, 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which ends with Bond getting married and then seeing his new wife Tracy murdered by his nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld. This is referenced in Licence to Kill by a moment when Bond becomes melancholic during Leiter’s wedding. “He was married once,” Leiter tells Della, “but that was a long time ago.” (When I saw the film in 1989 in a cinema in Aberdeen, someone in the row behind me declared: “Aye, an’ he looked like George Lazenby at the time!”) This suggests that later in the film Bond isn’t just avenging Leiter and Della, but Tracy too.

Licence to Kill isn’t perfect, though. There are a couple of longueurs. For a man who’s recently lost wife and limbs, David Hedison’s Leiter seems unfathomably cheerful when he reappears at the end. Maybe it’s the drugs they were feeding him at the hospital. And Carey Lowell’s Bouvier is ill-served by a scene where she encounters Lupe, finds out that she’s spent the night with Bond and reacts like a sulky, jealous schoolgirl. When Q diplomatically suggests that Bond only did it for the sake of the mission, she retorts: “Bullshit!”

Licence to Kill was, alas, Timothy Dalton’s final showing as Bond. When the franchise finally got going again with 1995’s Goldeneye, it was with the cuddlier Pierce Brosnan in the role. I like Brosnan, but always found his attempts to combine the physicality of Sean Connery with the smoothness of Roger Moore a little unconvincing. As I’ve said, Dalton strikes me as the actor who came closest to portraying Bond in the way Fleming had imagined him and, for me, there’s no higher accolade. He’s the connoisseur’s Bond.

© Eon Productions

November 21, 2022December 23, 2022

Only a few Duff moments

I’ve had a hellishly busy week. That’s why this report on Singapore’s big musical event of the month is reaching you nine days late…

It was with misgivings that I bought a ticket for the concert by the legendary – not always legendary for the right reasons – hard rock / heavy metal band Guns N’ Roses at Singapore’s National Stadium on November 12^th.

Like many things in Singapore, the ticket was not cheap and, given Guns N’ Roses’ reputation for pissing off gig-goers, I wondered if I would get anything near my money’s worth. I knew about, for example, their notorious 1992 appearance in Montreal when, thanks to both coming onstage late and leaving it early, they triggered a riot. (“Come Monday morning, the mayor was looking for apologies and fans were looking for refunds.”) Or their performance at the O2 in Dublin in 2010 when, after another late arrival onstage had angered the crowd, they played for 20 minutes, then walked off, and only returned an hour later after being strong-armed by the event organisers, by which time many fans had given up and gone home.

This year, the band was still being associated with crappy concerts. Two July spots at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London suffered from “appalling sound, everything was muffled, couldn’t hear Axl’s voice, the support act was cancelled, GNR came on real late, kept fans later, no apologies, fans walking out.” Their next scheduled gig, in Glasgow, was then cancelled ‘due to illness and medical advice’.

Meanwhile, I’m not a fan of stadium rock shows, where the venue’s scale and the distance between most punters and the stage kill any sense of intimacy. And I was not enthused about seeing a band at Singapore’s National Stadium because I’d read some complaints about it on Trip Advisor. The main gripe was that the place doesn’t let people bring food or drink onto the premises, obliging them, inside, to spend ages waiting in queues at the stadium’s vendors, where refreshments are sold at predictably high prices.

I had to work on November 12^th until six o’clock. As Guns N’ Roses were officially due onstage at seven – “Huh,” jeered a colleague, “do you really expect Axl Rose to come onstage at seven?” – I hopped on a taxi and went straight to the stadium lugging a knapsack full of important work material. This meant I had to spend a couple of minutes at a security desk outside one of the stadium’s entrances while a lady went through every nook and cranny of the knapsack, rummaging among papers, books, stationery, my (empty) lunchbox, etc., with airport-style thoroughness. But that security lady was undeniably chatty and pleasant.

Having made it inside, at about 6.50, I joined a queue to get some beer – also airport style, with lines of people threading through twisting passages formed by retractable-belt stanchions – and spent the next 20 minutes glancing nervously down into the arena and at the distant, empty stage, hoping that Axl Rose and co. would come on a little late. I also feared that the beer would have run out by the time I reached the counter, although I was reassured when a guy propelled a trolley past me, laden with crates of Tiger beer, in the direction of the vendor. Presumably much needed.

Each customer, incidentally, was allowed to buy a maximum of four alcoholic beverages at a time. If you purchased four Tiger beers – as I did, not wanting to experience that queue a second time – these came in four plastic glasses planted in an eggbox-like tray. Transporting them without spilling anything, down to my seat near the bottom of one of the terraces, required mind-reader levels of concentration. Furthermore, I had to decide where to stash those drinks when I reached the seat. The only space for them was on the floor between my feet, which meant I spent the gig reminding myself, “Keep your legs apart! Keep your legs apart!”

Most of the stadium is roofed over. Only one section of it, directly opposite the stage, is exposed to the elements. The cheapest concert-tickets were for seats in that open area but, this being the wettest month in the Singaporean calendar, I’d decided not to risk it. There’d been a downpour earlier that day and, sitting there, it was possible that whilst listening to Guns N’ Roses performing their famous ballad November Rain, you’d be subjected to November rain for real. Thankfully, the bad weather held off that evening. The show’s most expensive tickets, meanwhile, were for the pitch, which was beyond the barrier a few rows below where I was sitting. Spectators there could snuggle against the front of the stage. Also, they were enviably unconstrained by having rows of seats all around them and could dance and jump and jig around as much as they liked. Although the folk passing on the other side of the barrier, heading towards the stage, seemed to be mainly moneyed, middle-aged expats and I doubted if Axl and the gang would be looking down on much mosh-pit action tonight.

So, there I was, weary from a long day at work, jaded after waiting in a lengthy refreshments queue, worried that an accidental twitch of my foot might knock over my hard-won quartet of beers, and wondering if the evening ahead would prove to be a giant waste of money. Then, at 7.30, the lights dimmed and… The general stadium-crowd roared with excitement. The well-heeled crowd pressing against the stage-front suddenly became densely spangled with light as hundreds of smartphone-cameras sprang into action. From the speakers rushed the blood-stirring chords of It’s So Easy, a song on the first and best Guns N’ Roses album Appetite for Destruction. And on the towering screens that flanked the stage, there appeared… Axl Rose! Duff McKagan! Slash! Or as someone sitting near to me exclaimed, “Sla-a-a-a-ash!”

I’d seen footage of Axl performing a few years ago, as temporary vocalist for AC/DC, and he’d looked worryingly porky. But he’s slimmed down since then and is in decent shape again. McKagan looked admirably lean and mean. As for Slash… Well, he’s evidently been putting too much middle-age spread on his sandwiches lately, not that the excess pounds affected his guitar-playing. He and Jacob Rees-Mogg remain the only two men on the planet in 2022 who aren’t embarrassed to wear top hats in public.

While Axl, Duff and Slash loomed large on the screens, I wondered why Dizzy Reed didn’t appear on them too. Keyboardist Reed, after all, has been in Guns N’ Roses since 1990. He remained in the band after Slash, Duff, guitarist Gilby Clarke and drummer Matt Sorum quit in the 1990s, and he even stuck with Guns N’ Roses throughout the seemingly never-ending recording of the Chinese Democracy album, finally released in 2008. This was when Axl operated a ‘revolving door’ policy regarding Guns N’ Roses membership – though guitarist Richard Fortus and drummer Frank Ferrer, recruited during this period, remain in the present line-up – and, apart from Reed, the band sometimes seemed to consist of Axl ‘and your granny on bongos’. So where was Dizzy? Did he have a hump on his back or a wart on his nose that made his bandmates too ashamed to show him off? It wasn’t until halfway through proceedings that Axl announced ‘Mr Dizzy Reed on keyboards’, and the screens finally gave us a glimpse of this elusive but long-time and loyal bandmember. I snatched a picture of the moment. Here’s Dizzy!

This evening, Guns N’ Roses played 27 songs over three hours, a very pleasant surprise. Considering some of those notorious past performances, I feared I might get three songs in 27 minutes before they called it a night. The lengthy setlist did have a few drawbacks, though. It meant we were treated to the whole musical smorgasbord that is the Guns N’ Roses experience, which in my opinion contains a few lows as well as numerous highs. There were a few too many wibbly, wanky guitar solos designed to remind us that Slash hasn’t lost his musical prowess, as if anyone needed reminding. That said, it was fun when he did an instrumental workout of Albert King’s Born Under a Bad Sign.

Also, though the setlist was weighted towards their late 1980s / early 1990s stuff, with a half-dozen songs coming from the mighty Appetite for Destruction, it was inevitable that something would slip in from the long-awaited, then much-derided Chinese Democracy. I actually like the title track, which they bravely served up immediately after It’s So Easy at the start. But the same album’s Better, which came a few songs later, just sounded a mess.

And then there were the ballads. I realise that every heavy metal band in the world feels obliged to record a ballad now and again – well, every mainstream heavy metal band, as I don’t recall Cannibal Corpse ever recording something slow and smoochy to keep the ‘lay-deez’ sweet – but there is something about your average Guns N’ Roses ballad that sets my teeth on edge. Probably it’s Axl’s voice, a melodramatic beast at the best of times. When it’s emoting through the likes of Don’t Cry from the 1991 album Use Your Illusion I, for which tonight Axl donned a show-bizzy silver-lame jacket, I find it hard going indeed.

But my least favourite Guns N’ Roses ballad is the afore-mentioned November Rain, also from Use Your Illusion I, which seems to drone on forever. Two hours into the set, the song hadn’t been played, and I began to entertain hopes that I’d get through the evening without hearing it. Maybe the band would forget to play it? But no. Axl sat down at a piano and began tinkling its ivories and the bloody thing started. At this point, a large percentage of the crowd, who thought November Rain was the best thing ever, sprang to their feet and started waving their lighters, or phone-lights, en masse in the air above their heads. This made me feel like I’d suddenly been teleported into a Bryan Adams concert just as Bryan was starting to sing Everything I Do, I Do It for You (1991). At least, for this rendition of November Rain, Slash didn’t attempt to play his guitar on top of Axl’s piano, as he’d done in the song’s video.

But enough of the negatives. What of the positives? Well, there were plenty. Lots of spiffing tunes off Appetite for Destruction for a start: Welcome to the Jungle, Nightrain, Rocket Queen, etc. Though for some reason not Mr Brownstone, which, the show’s official statistics tell me, makes this the band’s first gig since 1993 that they haven’t played the song.

I was also pleased that they treated the crowd to their bombastic cover versions of Wings’ James Bond theme Live and Let Die (1974) and Bob Dylan’s Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (1973). Yes, they throw all subtlety and nuance out of the window and, basically, murder both songs – but they murder them gloriously. For Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, Axl put on a cowboy hat, which made me wonder if he was acknowledging the fact that Dylan originally wrote the song for the soundtrack of Sam Peckinpah’s masterly western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973).

Splendid too were their covers of the Who’s The Seeker (1970) and the Stooges’ I Wanna Be Your Dog (1969). The latter was sung by Duff McKagan with the instrumentation stripped back and it made for an impressively intense couple of minutes. Commendably, McKagan wore a Motörhead T-shirt for part of the show. Also, by coincidence, I’d just finished reading Sing Backwards and Weep (2020), the autobiography of the late, great grunge singer Mark Lanegan, in which Lanegan credits McKagan with helping to rescue him from homelessness and drug addiction in the late 1990s. An all-round top bloke, then.

And I was very happy that, for the third song of their set, they performed Slither (2004) by the underrated Velvet Revolver, the group Slash, McKagan and Matt Sorum formed with Scott Weiland of the Stone Temple Pilots during their estrangement from Guns N’ Roses.

Even with 27 songs played, it was inevitable that they missed out a few things I’d have loved to hear. They performed nothing off their album of punk and hard-rock covers, The Spaghetti Incident? (1993), which nobody in the world seemed to like apart from myself. Their boisterous version of the UK Subs’ Down on the Farm (1982), which Axl sings in a hilarious ‘Mockney’ accent, would have slotted in nicely tonight.

And I’d have welcomed a rendition of the sweary, vitriolic and exhilarating Get in the Ring, off their other 1991 album, the imaginatively titled Use Your Illusion II. Get in the Ring is basically a rock ‘n’ roll update of the Scottish poetic tradition of flyting. It contains such lyrics as “I got a thought that would be nice / I’d like to crush your head tight in my vice,” and takes aim at all the “punks in the press” who “want to start shit by printing lies instead of the things we said… Andy Secher at Hit Parader, Circus Magazine, Mick Wall at Kerrang!, Bob Guccione Jr at Spin…” If they updated that shit-list for 2022, which modern-day journalists would be on it, I wonder?

Oh well. You can’t have everything, I suppose.

As the band took the stage at 7.30 that evening, and as everyone around me went wild, it occurred to me that this was the first time in almost two years I’d been at a concert. After all the restrictions imposed by that cursed bloody virus, it felt marvellous to experience live music again. Yes, I had a massive, uplifting sense of joy and relief… Just because I was seeing Axl Rose and the crew amble into view on two giant stadium screens. Not something I ever expected to happen, but it did. Thanks, guys!

October 2, 2021October 4, 2021

Stop getting Bond wrong! (Part 1)

© Eon Productions

When I’m browsing through a newspaper or magazine website, or a website devoted to popular culture, no headline is more likely to fill me with despair than the one ALL THE JAMES BOND FILMS RANKED FROM WORST TO BEST. (Well, maybe except for the headline FLEETWOOD MAC TO RELEASE NEW ALBUM.) That’s because such articles invariably get Bond wrong. And that’s because they’re written by young, acne-pocked dipshits with zero life experience and less-than-zero knowledge of James Bond in either his cinematic or literary incarnations. Or, worse, they’re written by someone from the older end of the Generation X demographic, i.e., they were a kid during the 1970s and believe Roger Moore was the best actor who ever lived.

Now that the latest Bond epic No Time to Die is being released – after a zillion Covid-19-inspired delays, which had me worried that by the time it finally was released poor Daniel Craig would be turning up at the Royal Premiere with a Zimmer frame, hearing aid and dentures – there’s been another rash of these hopelessly ill-informed articles, in the likes of the Independent and Den of Geek.

So, to sort out this confusion, misinformation and stupidity once and for all, here is my – and hence the correct – ranking of all the James Bond films from best to worst. Don’t even think about arguing with me.

© Eon Productions

24: Die Another Day (2002)

Winning the unenviable title of Worst Bond Film Ever is Pierce Brosnan’s final outing as 007. Because it was released in the 40^th anniversary year of the franchise, the makers of Die Another Day packed it with homages to the previous 19 films, such as bikini-ed heroine Halle Berry rising out of the sea like Ursula Andress in Dr No (1962) or villain Toby Stephens swooping into central London with a Union Jack-emblazoned parachute à la Roger Moore in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). But these homages, as well as seeming smug, highlight how inferior Die is in comparison. And with the film’s stupid plot contrivances (an invisible car), its derivativeness (what, another killer satellite?), its Carry On-level, innuendo-ridden dialogue and Madonna’s horrible theme song, we’re talking greatly inferior. What I hate most about it, though, is its use of Computer-Generated Imagery during the action sequences, an insult to the stuntmen in the old Bond films like Vic Armstrong, Terry Richards, Eddie Powell and Alf Joint, who did those stunts for real and made them so viscerally exciting.

23: Octopussy (1983)

I remember seriously not liking Octopussy when I saw it because it seemed desperate to cash in on the recent success of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and deposited Roger Moore in a version of India populated with palaces, turbaned swordsmen, fakirs and snake-charmers, which had only ever existed in the imaginations of Hollywood scriptwriters and looked ridiculously corny by 1983. Having worked in India several times since then, I suspect I would hate it even more now. The film’s one saving grace is the sub-plot taking place in its other main setting, Germany, which has Steven Berkoff as a deranged Soviet general wanting to knock NATO for six by engineering an ‘accident’ with a nuclear warhead. Opposing, and in part thwarting, Berkoff’s insane plan is General Gogol (Walter Gotell), who appeared in half-a-dozen Bond films as 007’s respectful adversary and occasional ally in the KGB. Indeed, I’d say Octopussy marks Gogol’s finest hour.

22: Moonraker (1979)

Moonraker also attempted to cash in on a recent hit movie, in this case Star Wars (1977). Thus, it has Roger Moore going into outer space in search of a stolen space shuttle. It piles silliness upon silliness: not just the far-fetched science-fictional plot, but also sequences with gondolas turning into speedboats, speedboats turning into hovercraft, speedboats turning into hang gliders, steel-toothed villain Jaws (Richard Kiel) crashing through the top of a circus tent, Jaws finding a girlfriend, and so on. Michael Lonsdale as the big villain Hugo Drax gives Moonraker some dignity it really doesn’t deserve. Brace yourself for the inevitable “He’s attempting re-entry!” joke at the end.

© Eon Productions

21: The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)

Another entry in the series where the only thing going for it is the villain, the impeccable Christopher Lee as the super-hitman Francisco Scaramanga. Elsewhere, Lulu warbles the cheesy, innuendo-slathered theme song (“He’s got a powerful weapon / He charges a million a shot!”), Britt Ekland is barely contained by her bikini, and redneck comedy-relief American policeman Sheriff Pepper (Clifton James), who was so annoying in the previous film Live and Let Die, makes an unwelcome reappearance even though the film’s set in East Asia. Pepper just happens to be holidaying in Thailand with his wife when he bumps into Bond again. (He refuses to have his picture taken with a local elephant, telling Mrs Pepper: “We’re Demy-crats, Maybelle!” Surely not.)

20: Live and Let Die (1973)

And that brings me to Live and Let Die, in which Roger Moore makes his debut as Bond. From all accounts Moore was a lovely bloke and he kept the franchise massively popular during the 1970s and 1980s, but his lightweight acting style meant the character was far removed from the one imagined by Ian Fleming in the original novels. Even by 1973’s standards, Live and Let Die’s plot about a villainous organisation of black drug-smugglers, headed by Yaphet Kotto’s Mr Big, dallies worryingly with racism, although Moore’s presence actually defuses some of that. His portrayal of Bond as a posh, silly-assed Englishman gives the bad guys some gravitas in comparison. I suspect modern audiences might feel more uncomfortable with Bond’s pursuit / stalking of love interest Jane Seymour – Seymour was only 22 years at the time while Moore, already in his mid-forties, was old enough to be her dad. The film’s spectacular speedboat chase anchors the film in most people’s memories, though it’s spoilt somewhat by the involvement of the aforementioned Sheriff Pepper. The theme song by Paul McCartney’s Wings is, of course, great.

© Eon Productions

19: A View to a Kill (1985)

A View to a Kill, Roger Moore’s final film as Bond, is often ranked bottom in lists like this, but it at least has something most 1980s Bond movies lack – memorable villains, i.e., Christopher Walken’s Max Zorin and Grace Jones’s Mayday. Also, Moore gets to form an agreeable double act, for a while, with Patrick Macnee and I like how General Gogol pops up at the end to give ‘Comrade Bond’ the Order of Lenin. Still, the film contains much duff-ness. Duran Duran do the theme song and one unkind critic once described Simon Le Bon’s vocal performance as ‘bellowing like a wounded elk.’

18: Quantum of Solace (2007)

Daniel Craig’s second appearance as James Bond, in which he comes up against a sinister, secret organisation called Quantum, was savaged by the critics. When I watched the film, I remember thinking it didn’t seem as bad as everyone made out. That said, I can hardly remember anything about it now.

17: The World is Not Enough (1999)

A frustrating film, The World is Not Enough has much going for it, including Sophie Marceau and Robert Carlyle as the baddies, Robbie Coltrane returning as ex-KGB man / lovable rogue Valentin Zukovsky, and a plot that anticipates Skyfall (2012) wherein Judie Dench’s M is threatened by a villain whose relationship with her is more complex than one of simple professional enmity. And like Skyfall, it has scenes set in Scotland, the introduction of a new Q, and an explosion that rocks MI6’s London headquarters beside Vauxhall Bridge in London. Plus, the theme song by Garbage is the best one in yonks. But the quality stuff is cancelled out by some rubbish bits, including Denise Richards as Bond girl Christmas Jones – so-named, apparently, to allow Pierce Brosnan to crack a joke about ‘coming once a year’. Particularly cringe-inducing is John Cleese’s debut as the replacement for Desmond Llewelyn’s Q, here making his 17^th and final appearance in the franchise. Not only does Cleese clown around to no comic effect whatever, but the scene where he’s introduced is also the one where Llewelyn bids farewell and Cleese’s slapstick robs the scene of its poignancy.

16: Diamonds are Forever (1971)

Diamonds are Forever features a beyond-caring Sean Connery, enticed back into 007’s shoes by a 1.25-million-pound paycheque after George Lazenby jumped ship, in a lazy film where the plot meanders nonsensically from one action set-piece to another and the visuals are packed with easy-on-the-eye spectacle and lavishness. At least it’s pretty funny. It depends on your tolerance level for sledgehammering 1970s political incorrectness whether or not you enjoy the banter between gay assassins Mr Kidd and Mr Wint. (Sticking Connery into a coffin and feeding him into a crematorium furnace: “Heart-warming, Mr Kidd.” “A glowing tribute, Mr Wint.”) However, uber-Bond-villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld is very amusingly played by Charles Gray. While he’s wreaking havoc with a deadly laser beam mounted on a satellite, he sneers: “The satellite is now over Kansas. Well, if we destroy Kansas, the world may not hear about it for years.”

© Eon Productions

15: For Your Eyes Only (1987)

For Your Eyes Only makes a noble attempt to bring the franchise down to earth again following the excesses of Moonraker. Mostly, it works nicely as an action / adventure piece, although the villain Krystatos, played by the normally reliable Julian Glover, is a bit drab. More effective is the excellent Michael Gothard as the taciturn Belgian assassin Locque. Alas, it runs out of puff towards the end. After some exciting mountaineering stunts while Roger Moore and the good guys ascend to a mountaintop monastery / villains’ lair, the climactic battle is a damp squib. Also, there’s an excruciating ‘comic’ final scene where Margaret Thatcher (played by impressionist Janet Brown) phones Bond to congratulate him on a job well done and ends up speaking instead to a randy parrot: “Give us a kiss!” “Oh, Mr Bond…”

14: Goldeneye (1995)

Pierce Brosnan’s debut as Bond, after the franchise had endured a six-year hiatus, won a lot of praise. I find it slightly unsatisfying, though. It tries a bit too hard. There’s a bit too much packed into it, a few too many twists and turns, as it tries to prove to audiences that a Bond movie can still be relevant and with-it in the 1990s. Also, its good intentions are undone by the occasional piece of Roger Moore-style silliness and a cobwebbed plot-MacGuffin – yes, it’s another killer satellite threatening the world, or in this case, the City of London. Sean Bean and Famke Janssen are cool as the main villains, though it’s a pity that Alan Cumming and Joe Don Baker are both allowed to act with their brakes off.

13: Spectre (2015)

Another Daniel Craig Bond that got a critical kicking, I think Spectre deserves a little more love. The film brings back Ernst Stavro Blofeld, played here by Christoph Waltz as a Euro-trash scumbag who commits crimes against fashion by not wearing socks under his loafers. Also back is Blofeld’s insidious criminal organisation SPECTRE. (After decades of legal wrangling, the Bond producers had by 2015 won the right to use Blofeld and SPECTRE again in the franchise.) However, Spectre’s Bond / Blofeld backstory earned hoots of derision. Blofeld, it transpires, is the son of Hannes Oberhauser, the man who looked after the young James Bond after his parents were killed in a climbing accident. Oberhauser much preferred little James to little Ernst, leaving his biological son with some serious personality issues. Yes, it sounds contrived, but I didn’t have a big problem with this, since the adoptive father-figure of Hannes Oberhauser existed in the original, literary Bond universe created by Ian Fleming and Bond referred to him in the short story Octopussy, published in 1966. The opening sequence in Mexico City, filmed by director Sam Mendes in one long, supposedly continuous take, is brilliant, but the film’s attempts to incorporate / retcon the previous Daniel Craig Bond films into its plot are clunky. For example, we learn that the Quantum organisation in Quantum of Solace is only a subsidiary of SPECTRE. Another negative is the comatose theme song performed by Sam Smith.

© Eon Productions

And my next blog-post will rank the remaining Bond movies from number twelve to number one.

June 7, 2021June 9, 2021

Patrick’s progress

I’ve just finished reading a biography of one of the 20^th century’s greatest travel writers, Patrick Leigh Fermor. The biography, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, was penned by Artemis Cooper, who’d known him since her childhood, and was published in 2012, a year after his death.

My problem with biographies is that invariably the subjects are, or were, famous and successful. Although I find the story of their fortunes interesting while they’re on the way up, and having to overcome hardships and obstacles, those stories become less compelling when the subjects have achieved success and settled onto a plateau of comfort, wealth and well-being. With Fermor, at least, that secure but less interesting plateau is delayed because his success didn’t really come until when he was middle-aged. And the first 200 pages of this biography, more than half of it, are devoted to Fermor’s youth. Happily, these pages contain the two most dramatic events of his life: the epic trek he embarked on in 1933, at the age of 18, from the Dutch coast to Istanbul; and, while a Special Operations Executive officer during World War II, his heading of a mission in 1944 to kidnap Major General Heinrich Kreipe, commander of German forces on Nazi-occupied Crete.

Furthermore, the number of books Fermor had published in his lifetime barely reached double figures. He also continued to travel. This means that the latter part of Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, while more sedate, is still interesting because it isn’t just about the boring business of writing.

Cooper is clearly a fan. She admits to once having a ‘schoolgirl crush’ on Fermor and writes early on: “Radiating a joyful enthusiasm, he was one of those people who made you feel more alive the moment he came into the room, and eager to join in whatever he was planning to do…”

However, she quickly acknowledges one of the controversies about Fermor, that he wasn’t adverse to embroidering reality with fantasy in his supposedly factual writing. Sometimes, this was unintentional because he was trying to remember events from decades earlier, but sometimes it happened because, well, the fantasy made for a better yarn. Indeed, Cooper introduces the issue with examples from the early years of Fermor’s life when he was being looked after by a family called the Martins in Northamptonshire, while his real family were in India. The setting was not as bucolic as Fermor liked to recall: “Mr Martin, whom he was later to remember as a farmer, in fact worked at the Ordnance Depot as an engineer and served in the local fire brigade.”

Also, Weedon Bec, the Martins’ village in Northamptonshire, provided Fermor with a startlingly gruesome anecdote that he recounted in his book, A Time of Gifts (1977). At a community bonfire celebrating the end of World War I, “…one of the boys had been dancing around with a firework in his mouth. It had slipped down his throat, and he had died ‘spitting stars’.” However, Cooper notes: “There is no reference to this tragedy in the Northamptonshire Chronicle, nor is it mentioned in the Weedon Deanery Parish Magazine which described the celebrations in considerable detail.”

Similar question marks appear during Fermor’s accounts of his journey to Istanbul in his teens, which are recorded in A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water (1986) and the posthumously published (and edited by Cooper and Colin Thubron) The Broken Road (2013). I’d known that the material about him crossing the Great Hungarian Plain on horseback in Between the Woods and the Water was suspect – the horse was a fanciful addition to events. However, I wasn’t aware that a memorable scene in The Broken Road was questionable too. According to Fermor in 2003: “Slogging on south, I lost my way after dark, fell into the sea, and waded soaked into a glimmering cave full of shepherds and fishermen – Bulgars and Greeks – for a strange night of dancing and song. It was like a flickering firelit scene out of Salvator Rosa.” Cooper suggests that this incident was really a conflation of two incidents, one of which happened at a later time on Mount Athos. As for the period described in The Broken Road, Cooper states: “At no point in his original account did he walk down this stretch of coast alone, nor did he lose his footing and find himself floundering among freezing rock-pools after dark.”

Unambiguous, though, is the bravery and audacity shown by Fermor and his comrades in wartime Crete. It reflects well on Fermor that he valued the role played by the island’s tenacious resistance fighters in the operation to abduct General Kreipe from under the nose of the German forces he commanded. Indeed, their high-ranking captive was astonished when he found out what was going on. “For Kreipe,” writes Cooper, “being on the other side of the occupation was an eye-opener. He had no idea that the Cretans and the British were working so closely together.”

Accordingly, Fermor wasn’t pleased at how the operation was portrayed on celluloid, in the 1957 Michael Powell / Emeric Pressburger movie Ill–Met by Moonlight, in which he was played by Dirk Bogarde. Writing to another of the operation’s British participants, Billy Moss, Fermor said of the film: “You and I are perfectly OK, we emerge as charming, intrepid chaps. It’s really the Cretans I’m worried about…” The film’s depiction of the Cretans upset him because it relegated them “to the role of picturesque and slightly absurd foreigners constantly in a state of agitation, coolly managed by these two unruffled and underacting sahibs.”

Thereafter, with Fermor finding his vocation – a slow, gradual progress, because he was anything but a disciplined writer – the book inevitably becomes less eventful. However, there are still some intriguing moments. A trip to the Caribbean brings him into the orbit of James Bond creator Ian Fleming, ensconced in his Goldeneye Estate in Jamaica. I’ve heard speculation that the dashing war-hero Fermor inspired the character of Bond, but at this point Fleming was already “bashing away at a thriller”, the first Bond novel Casino Royale (1953), so Fermor couldn’t have been the original inspiration. However, Fermor’s writings about voodoo, something he became immersed in whilst on the island of Haiti, informed Fleming’s depiction of it in the second Bond novel, Live and Let Die (1954).

Then we get an account of Fermor’s involvement with the 1958 John Huston movie The Roots of Heaven, for which he was commissioned to rewrite Romain Gary’s original screenplay and had to attend several weeks of filming in Chad, Cameroon and the Central African Republic. The film, about “a maverick loner, Morel, who is determined to stop the slaughter of elephants by big game hunters and ivory poachers,” brought Fermor into contact with Trevor Howard, who “drank nothing but whisky from morning till night,” and Errol Flynn, of whom he wrote in a letter, “Errol and I have become great buddies… He is a tremendous shit, but a very funny one…” In a predictable instance of Hollywood hypocrisy, Cooper notes: “Despite the fact that The Roots of Heaven was a plea to save the elephants, John Huston was very keen to shoot one… The back of his Land Rover was an arsenal of shotguns, rifles and ammunition, and it was obvious that he lived not for the film, but to slope off into the bush with a gun.”

We also hear about Fermor participating in 1972 in a Greek TV programme reuniting the surviving members of the 1944 Kreipe operation. The last participant to come onstage, “to gasps of surprise and a round of applause from the audience,” was the focus of the whole operation, General Kreipe himself. When Fermor asked him in German if he held any grudges about what’d happened, the general gamely replied, “If I had any bad feelings… I wouldn’t be here, would I?”

And we get some short but melancholic accounts of him revisiting eastern Europe during, and just after, Communism. During these visits he tried, often fruitlessly, to track down people and places he’d known during his wanderings through the region in the 1930s. He found one, formerly aristocratic acquaintance in an old folks’ home in Budapest, physically broken and wits wandering. This sad exchange ensues: “‘My old friend Patrick Leigh Fermor lives in Greece.’ – ‘Yes, Elemér, it’s me, it’s Paddy!’ – ‘No, no, you are much too young… But if you go to Greece tell him I’m here, I hope he remembers me.’

Fermor belonged to an era when travelling (for pleasure) and, indeed, writing were largely seen as activities for the upper classes. Thus, certain of his traits can be annoying, traits emblematic of being raised in that privileged stratum of English society: his boundless self-confidence, his shamelessness at making use of the contacts he’s accrued, the fact that he has all those contacts in the first place. This struck me especially when I read Between the Woods and the Water, which sees him stay with a succession of posh eastern European aristocrats and enjoy lavish hospitality that, at times, he seems to think is his entitlement.

Cooper is at least aware of these potential criticisms. Regarding what happens in Between the Woods, she points out: “For his hosts, there was nothing unusual in having guests stay for days or even weeks at a time.” Also: “The greatest blessing that a guest can bring is the right kind of curiosity, and it bubbled out of Paddy like a natural spring…”, which must have been gratifying for his hosts, who by then probably felt like “a useless fragment of a broken empire.” It’s worth mentioning too that Fermor never received a university education which, if it had happened, would presumably have put him among the elite in Oxford or Cambridge Universities and set the seal on him as an establishment figure. Perhaps the fact that the system never fully processed him, and didn’t condition him entirely about what an English gentleman was and wasn’t meant to do, explains why he retained the ‘common touch’ throughout his life. He seemed as much at home blethering with a Macedonian shepherd as he was with a Romanian Count.

If Fermor appears blessed with more than his fair share of luck, it’s probably more to do with Joan Raynor, who became his long-term companion and finally his wife. The daughter of someone who was, successively, a Conservative MP, a First Lord of the Admiralty and a Viscount, she received a private income that enabled Fermor to continue with his travel writing even when he wasn’t reaping great financial rewards from it. She was also broadminded about their relationship, which at times could be described as an ‘open’ one, allowing Fermor to indulge in a few dalliances on the side.

Eventually, the Fermors built a handsome villa for themselves in a rustic part of Greece. As I approached the biography’s last chapters, I wondered how they’d reacted to the country’s growing tourist industry in the late 20^th century. Wouldn’t they have been disgruntled at how travellers of a different pedigree from them, folk from less well-off backgrounds intent on getting a week’s break in the sun rather than on experiencing the glories of Greek culture and history, were swamping the beauty spots of their adopted home? But the changes caused by mass-tourism seemed not to impinge on their idyll. Neither did they object to their Greek neighbours making some money out of it. In fact, the building of a hotel nearby seems to have come as a relief to them. Their villa was frequently crowded with guests and now they could farm some of them out to the new establishment.

It must have been tempting to portray Fermor simply as an unstoppable force of nature / Renaissance man-of-action. To her credit, Cooper admits that while he had many admirers, he didn’t charm everyone. Turning up in Athens in 1935, he soon got an invitation from the son of the British ambassador to stay at the embassy. But the ambassador himself proved “quite immune, if not allergic, to Paddy’s high spirits and exotic conversation”, growled at him, “You seem bloody pleased with yourself, don’t you?” and soon gave him his marching orders. Nor was a post-war stint at the British Council in Athens a great success. As one colleague observed, “There was a very insensitive side to Paddy… He was very bumptious, a bit of a know-all, and his enthusiasm and noisiness could be rather wearing.”

While Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure is certainly no warts-and-all exposé, it doesn’t get entirely swept away by the awe-inspiring, larger-than-life aura that Fermor projected. You’re left with the impression of someone who, yes, was remarkable but who, like all of us, sported a few imperfections too. Which actually makes you like him more as a result.

Taken by Joan Leigh Fermor

April 16, 2021April 18, 2021

Bungle in the jungle

Godzilla versus Kong. The King of the Monsters versus the Eighth Wonder of the World. The supreme clash of the titans, the ultimate showdown between the royalty of kaiju cinema. In the left corner, we have King Kong, the giant simian star of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s 1933 classic that created the template for movies wherein prehistoric monsters rampage through human metropolises. And in the right corner, we have Godzilla, the massive radioactive-breathed lizard who first surfaced in 1954, courtesy of Toho Studios, to flatten Tokyo as a thinly-disguised metaphor for the atomic bombs that’d flattened real Japanese cities a decade earlier – although, while he appeared in dozens of subsequent movies battling against similarly-sized monstrous adversaries, he gradually morphed from being the destroyer of Japan to being the unofficial champion of it.

Having this pair square up to one another – an event that’s only happened once before, in the ultra-ropey but endearingly goofy 1962 Toho movie King Kong vs Godzilla – should be an epic cinematic experience, the kaiju equivalent of Muhammed Ali versus Joe Frazer or Ali versus George Foreman, of the Thrilla in Manilla or the Rumble in the Jungle.

Alas, the recently released Godzilla vs Kong, the fourth entry in Legendary Pictures’ MonsterVerse franchise, isn’t so much the Rumble in the Jungle as a Bungle in the Jungle.

Of its three predecessors, the first instalment, 2014’s Godzilla, directed by talented Welshman Gareth Edwards, is the one that stands as a quality film. It had some truly cinematic sequences and a memorably sombre tone, embodied in the apocalyptic clouds of ash and dust that swirled around Godzilla while he went about his city-demolishing business. However, it wasn’t the big, enjoyably dumb monster-on-the-loose movie that many people expected and in some quarters it was met with disappointment. And I have to say that while I admired Godzilla, I didn’t massively enjoy it.

Edwards’ downbeat film was the antithesis of the second film in the franchise, Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ Kong: Skull Island, which arrived three years later. Set in the early 1970s, this was a brash, colourful rollercoaster of a movie that managed to balance crowd-pleasing action with enough smart touches to engage the more cerebral members of the audience – smart touches ranging from jokes about Richard Nixon to an outrageous sequence where Kong takes on what is basically the fleet of helicopters from Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), though to the accompaniment of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid rather than Richard Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. Kong: Skull Island also benefitted from having a cast of veteran character actors like John C. Reilly, Samuel L. Jackson and John Goodman chew up any scenery that Kong wasn’t stomping on.

By the third movie, though, Michael Dougherty’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), the rot had set in. The kaiju remained magnificent, but too much screen-time was devoted to the human characters, most of whom barely qualified as two-dimensional let alone three-dimensional. Also, between the film’s set-pieces were sections where screenwriters Dougherty and Zach Shields couldn’t be bothered plotting in any credible or meaningful way. You got ridiculous sequences like, for example, the bit where 12-year-old kid Madison Russell (Milly Bobby Brown) strolls out of the heavily fortified, heavily guarded lair of master-terrorist Jonah (Charles Dance) carrying a vital piece of technology that can communicate with and summon the monsters. She then manages to set up the device and operate it in Kenway Park, home-ground of the Boston Red Sox. Wow. When I was 12 years old, I was still having problems tying a knot correctly in my school tie.

Brown’s Madison Russell character is, unfortunately, back in Adam Wingard’s Godzilla vs Kong and the chasms in plot logic are as gaping as they were before. Here, she and a couple of conspiracy-theory-obsessed associates infiltrate, no, wander into the premises of a secretive corporation called Apex, which they suspect is up to no good. With almost no visible effort, this motley collection of teenagers / conspiracy nuts discovers and breaks into a series of secret subterranean levels that are full of futuristic technology. Apex might be the bees’ knees when it comes to developing high-tech gizmos, but they are evidently shit at hiring competent security staff.

The human characters involved in the film’s other main storyline, played by Alexander Skarsgård and Rebecca Hall (who, by accident or design in this movie, looks a bit like New Zealand premier Jacinda Ahern), fare no better. They’re saddled with a don’t-even-try-to-think-about-it subplot where they join an expedition, sponsored by that shifty Apex corporation, to travel to the fabled ‘hollow earth’ alluded to by previous movies in the franchise. To get there, they need to use King Kong to lead them, like a giant homing pigeon or upstream-swimming salmon, through the labyrinthine tunnels that connect it with the earth’s surface. The hollow earth, which looks like the planet in James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) with some gravity-defying upside-down bits, is not only the home of Kong’s ancestors but also the location of a new energy source that Apex are keen to procure. Once they find the energy source, they promptly download it to a computer in Hong Kong. Yes, download it. Don’t ask me how.

But I’ll try to be positive. What did I like about Godzilla vs Kong? Well, the first battle between the kaiju is a cracker. Godzilla erupts out of the waves to confront Kong, who’s chained to the deck of one of a fleet of battleships and aircraft carriers, and the two beasties then slug it out while hopping from one beleaguered ship’s deck to another. The sequence put in mind slightly of the 1974 Bond film Live and Let Die, in which Roger Moore escapes to safety by using some bobbing alligators as stepping stones.

Also, I liked the character of the little girl who learns to communicate secretly with Kong via sign language. Played with a charming simplicity and straightforwardness by Kaylee Hottle, who in real life is a member of the deaf community, she wins more of the audience’s sympathy than all the synthetic, going-through-the-motions adult characters put together.

And I liked Milly Bobby Brown’s nerdy friend Josh, who gets unwillingly roped into her scheme to infiltrate Apex. This is partly because he’s played by Julian Dennison from Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) and partly because when we first meet him he’s listening to Breaking the Law by Judas Priest.

And I liked how, two-thirds of the way through, a third classic kaiju, one who made his debut in 1974’s Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, suddenly shows up to give Kong and Godzilla a common foe. It’s just a pity that the ensuing stramash, which takes place in Hong Kong, feels a bit second-hand. Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim (2013) has already featured giant organic monsters and giant robotic ones beating the crap out of each other in Hong Kong. Also, the final denouement, involving a heavily foreshadowed flask of whisky, is stupid even by the recent standards of this franchise.

At the end of the day, I can’t say I liked Godzilla vs Kong any more than Godzilla: King of the Monsters. The earlier film at least treated us to spectacular re-imaginings of some of Toho Studio’s kaiju heavyweights, including the vicious three-headed dragon King Ghidorah, the scaly giant Pteranodon Rodan and the vast gorgeous lepidopteran Mothra. The new film doesn’t have that level of interest, seeing as we’ve already met Godzilla and Kong in previous films.

At least I managed to see Godzilla vs Kong on a big screen, for this was my first outing to a cinema during the Covid-19 pandemic since I saw Christopher Nolan’s Tenet (2020) in one last summer. That no doubt made the film appear more spectacular than if I’d seen it, streamed, on a domestic-sized screen. And I have to say that in this large-sized format the film certainly held the attentions of the Sri Lankan kids and teenagers whom I watched it alongside.

I’m not, however, in any rush to see a fifth instalment in the MonsterVerse franchise. Unless they figure out a way of getting Gamera into Movie Number Five.