Your heart goes out to Brosnan, finally getting the role of his dreams. He’s handsome, there’s a touch of his native Ireland in his ace-cent, he can throw a punch . . . oh, let’s face it, James Bond is mythic or he’s zilch. Brosnan is OK, but OK isn’t mythic. Sean Connery, the most magnetic male animal since Cary Grant, established the myth. Moore’s touch of ironic self-parody added a nuance that kept the myth going. Timothy Dalton didn’t seem to have his heart in it. Brosnan has his heart and everything else in it. But he seems . . . small, as if he bears the scarlet letters TV on his tux. Years of playing Remington Steele will do that. When Connery walked into a Monte Carlo casino, the necklaces of the rich bimbos seemed to jump out of their cleavage. When Brosnan walks in, well, have a good evening, James.
Entropy, the inexorable running down of an energy system, may have overtaken the Bond saga. Technology has squeezed character to a few measly pixels on the digital screens. Explosions have replaced dramatic climaxes. Movies now die hard with lethal weapons wielded by terminators. Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming, can’t help anymore: “GoldenEye” is an original story by Michael France, with script credit to first-timers Jeffrey Caine and Bruce Feirstein. It’s a tangled story involving Mafia-infested Russia, with Bond battling an attempt to blow out the world’s high-tech communications. A swarm of villains keeps bumping into one another, all played by terrific actors, including Germany’s Gottfried John, Britain’s Robbie Coltrane and Alan Cumming, and especially Ireland’s Scan Bean as Bond’s former colleague 006, who switches sides, because he’s really from a Cossack family, so that . . . Please! Bring on an explosion!
And they do come on, a soporific succession of similar smithereenings. The fun in this 17th Bond comes mainly from the Bond girls. (That’s girls, not women; we’re dealing with cultural history here.) Good girl is Izabella Scorupco (Polish) as Natalya Simonova, a Russian cyberexpert. Bad girl is Famke Janssen (Dutch) as Xenia Ona-topp, a scoreher in S&M leather whose specialty is squeezing the life out of guys with her mighty thighs. New Bond director Martin Campbell lays down on the job here, showing us her victims’ gasping faces when we want to see a precise picture of this lasciviously lethal operation. Actually, there is one woman, the first female M, Bond’s boss, played by the great actress Judi Dench. “You’re a sexist misogynist dinosaur,” she berates Bond. Brosnan looks a bit chagrined. Connery would have withered M with a laser look. And turned her on.
