[5] After the unbridled silliness of Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only makes an effort to dial down the franchise’s more comic-book qualities. After an unceremonious pre-title demise of long-time supervillain Blofeld, For Your Eyes Only achieves that goal, but it struggles to forge a unique identity in the series. With yet another villain seeking nuclear power and a rehash of skiing and underwater stunts from …
[7] Robert Rodriquez and Frank Miller join forces, with a little help from guest director Quentin Tarantino, to bring Miller’s much-loved Sin City to the screen. The result is less a film adaptation than a graphic novel come to life. The color palette is restrained, usually resorting to faithful recreations of Miller’s black and white panel work. The hyper-stylized approach works well for a movie …
[8] A dorky teenager (Aaron Johnson) decides to dress up like a superhero and help people in need. He encounters a few other kids with similar ambitions, and before you know it, you have a hyper-violent, low-rent, joyous abomination of the superhero flick. Director and co-screenwriter Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake) takes some unpredictable turns, railing against our expectations to create some terrific edge-of-your-seat moments. Nothing …
[6] Roger Moore is looking worse for wear in his penultimate outing as James Bond, but Octopussy still satisfies on most levels. This time around, Bond is trying to uncover a global jewel-smuggling operation that ends up being a cover for a nuclear attack against NATO forces. I like that Desmond Llewelyn, as curmudgeonly Q, has a larger part this time around, and I’m also …
[8] A psychotic businessman (Christopher Walken) plans to plunge Silicon Valley into the ocean to create a worldwide microchip monopoly for himself in Roger Moore’s final outing as James Bond. A View to Kill is more aggressively paced than other Bond films, and features more than its fair share of set pieces and stunts, including a parachute jump off the Eiffel Tower and a climactic gunfight atop …
[3] Clint Eastwood directs and stars in this flick about a Russian jet that is undetectable by radar. This is probably my least favorite film in Clint Eastwood’s rather large filmography. The first half of the movie is unbearably boring, and when we finally get to the action, it’s too poorly paced and executed to save the movie. Adding insult to injury, Eastwood’s character is …
[7] Agent 007 must stop an arms dealer from starting World War III in the 15th installment in the long-running franchise. Timothy Dalton makes his debut as James Bond. The Living Daylights is less campy than many previous Bond films, attributed largely to Dalton’s more serious take on the character. What it lacks in cheeky charm, it makes up in action. The script does a spectacular …
[3] Chris Evans and Dakota Fanning star as supernaturally gifted people on the run from a government agency that wants to control their powers. Think X-Men, but way watered down and not nearly as cool. There’s some mediocre action in the beginning and a little more at the end, but the long middle portion of this movie is tediously boring, overburdened with more plotting and …
[4] Sean Connery returns for his final outing as James Bond in Never Say Never Again, a remake of Thunderball and the only Bond film not produced by Cubbi Broccoli’s EON Productions. Since it’s an “unofficial” entry in the franchise, you won’t hear Monty Norman’s famous theme music anywhere, nor will you see another snazzy title sequence from Maurice Binder. And who are these strange …
[5] Licence to Kill is the anti-Bond. Timothy Dalton is out for revenge in this one (his second and final outing in the role), and the performance is desperately missing the character’s trademark nonchalance. Without it, it just isn’t Bond. It’s one of a number of generic 80s action flicks fueled by revenge, centered around the drug trade, full of explosions, and scored by Michael Kamen …
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