The closing sequence of ‘The Good, The Bad & The Ugly’ is undoubtedly one of the greatest ever committed to celluloid.
I’d defy anyone to switch channels when you happen upon it as I didn’t (if you follow me) a few weeks ago on TG4, an Irish TV station whose output is predominantly in my native language. There was just a handful of minutes left in the picture but I felt a mild hypnosis come over me. Sleep could wait.
The dancing eyes of the movie’s three protagonists whose respective gazes fill the screen across 65 shots represents Sergio Leone’s greatest legacy to cinema, a miraculous 150-second sequence edited by Eugenio Alabiso and Nino Baragli.
Set against the astounding Sergio Leone score, it’s difficult to imagine a collaboration ever replicating the power, indeed, the downright brilliance of this scene.
But can you imagine how much power this scene would have lost had Tuco (Eli Wallach) gunned down The Man With No Name/Blondie (Clint Eastwood) before the end credits rolled? Audiences, exhilarated just minutes previously, would have felt decidedly short changed if our anti-hero had been plugged. Thankfully, that didn’t come to pass.
Which brings me back to ‘No Time To Die’, the 25th James Bond movie which I’ve now had an entire week to digest. And the more I’ve thought about it, the more disappointed I am in a closing act which undid so much of the goodwill the opening two hours of this movie had established.
At last, Daniel Craig’s Bond indulged in some Moore-like fun in a terrific Cuban sequence with Ana de Armas (the criminally underused Paloma) and demonstrated full Dalton rage in a wheel/foot race against some heavies in a Norwegian forest.
This finally felt like the 007 Craig deserved to be: the hero who killed for a living before downing a Dry Vodka Martini. At last, at long, long last, Craig’s Bond appeared to enjoy being Bond. Alas, that feeling lasted for about as long as Bond realised he was a father.
‘No Time To Die’ forced me to think about the dreadful mis-step of retconning Blofeld (in ‘Spectre’) as the architect of all Bond’s pain since Craig succeeded Pierce Brosnan, but also making both hero and villain stepbrothers.
Whoever considered lifting the storyline of the worst Austin Powers movie (‘Goldmember’) and applying it to the Bond universe should consider a career change.
That Christoph Waltz’s Blofeld was so insipid and forgettable, unlike any of the other actors who played the role previously, is difficult to fathom, all the more so given that Waltz was the incarnation of evil when written and directed by Quentin Tarantino in ‘Inglorious Basterds’.
Between ‘Spectre’ and his Hannibal Lecter-like cameo appearance in ‘NTTD’, Waltz proved as underwhelming a villain as Jonathan Pryce’s Elliot Carver in ‘The World Is Not Enough’. What an incredible waste of immense screen talent. That Bond then kills Blofeld by accident is fitting in the sense that not only was this a jarring characterisation of Bond, but it also underlined just how terrible Blofeld’s return was handled.
“Stop getting Bond wrong,” Alan Partridge famously bellowed before hilariously recreating the opening sequence of ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’. That same mantra now also applies to Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
That ‘Spectre’ was chosen as the title for the previous movie in the wake of MGM and Danjaq winning back the rights to the character in 2013 was as predictable as it was lazy.
Within a movie and a half of reclaiming the rights to Blofield and Spectre, the entire organisation has been eliminated. Go figure.
Which brings me onto Danny Boyle, who was announced as the original director of ‘No Time To Die’ back in May 2018 on the back of a script written by his ‘Trainspotting’ colleague John Hodge which the Bond producers apparently loved.
“What John (Hodge) and I were doing, I thought, was really good,” Boyle told Empire Magazine about their vision for ‘Bond 25’.
“It wasn’t finished, but it could have been really good. We were working very, very well, but they didn’t want to go down that route with us. So we decided to part company, and it would be unfair to say what it was because I don’t know what Cary (Joji Fukunaga) is going to do. I got a very nice message from him and I gave him my best wishes… It is just a great shame.”
A great shame indeed, if my hunch is correct. More on that anon.
In the closing frames of ‘Spectre’, Bond walks off Westminster Bridge with Madeleine Swan (Léa Seydoux) and out of the franchise. Craig had said enough to suggest as much in the wake of that movie, including that unfortunate wrist slashing comment. It really felt like that was the end of his time as Bond.
But back Craig eventually came, with a producer’s credit thrown in for good measure, giving him, undoubtedly, some input into the storyline.
His Bond was the only one to have a beginning and a middle and I suspect he must have agreed to ‘NTTD’ on condition that his Bond would meet his end, which he does, under a cloud of missiles on a virus-ravaged island.
If the widely circulated rumours are to be believed, Danny Boyle disagreed with killing off Bond, something Messrs Broccoli, Wilson and presumably Craig clearly felt was the right thing to do for this iteration of 007.
Well, my being a bit of a traditionalist, like Boyle, who directed Craig’s 2012 Olympic Games sequence with Queen Elizabeth II, killing James Bond must rank as the biggest mis-step in the near 60 years that these movies have been made.
Of course, Ian Fleming himself toyed with the idea of knocking off Bond as the written conclusion of ‘From Russia With Love’ clearly suggested but ultimately the man who knew Bond best thought the better of it.
In terms of the arc of this particular Bond, there’s no denying the logic of ending it for Craig here – but did he really have to be obliterated?
Was there no room in so lengthy a movie for a laboratory on Safin’s island containing an antidote to undo the damage Bond had suffered? Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you ought to but one suspects Craig’s ego demanded such a thoroughly downbeat outcome. And let’s face it, the star has clearly got his way here given how sunny he has been about it all since the movie’s release.
One could still have shot a scene in which Bond is dead – many decades later, granted – as an adult Mathilde leaves flowers beneath a gravestone featuring the inscription, ‘All The Time In The World’.
“Thank you for your love, Papa,” Mathilde whispers, linked to an elderly Madeleine, while still grasping the soft toy her father retrieved from the island all those decades ago. “And thank you for your stories.”
That particular movie ends with both a nod to Craig and Fleming as Louis Armstrong’s number oozes like honey out of the theatre’s sound system. That may not have been what Danny Boyle and John Hodge had in mind, but for me, as a life-long Bond fan, such an outcome would have felt altogether more satisfying than what we’ve been served up with.
Heroes ought to be eternal and the James Bond series is based on a suspension of reality on behalf of the audience. For that reason alone, 007 should never, ever die. So let’s not do that again.
Sex for dinner? Yes. Death for breakfast? Ditto. James Bond actually enjoying being James Bond? Absolutely.
James Bond Will Return…
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