GoldenEye

We're finally into the Bond movies I've definitely seen all the way through. The gap between the last film and this one was the longest in the series' history, and they even talked about rebooting it like they would end up doing 11 years later. They probably should have, because there's no reason it had to be tied to the existing continuity. Desmond Llewelyn as Q is the only returning actor, and the hiatus between films did him absolutely no good. He's always been an old guy, but he never looked like this. Pierce Brosnan is a solid Bond, but it's weird how the opening sequence supposes something that happened nine years earlier, when the character was in transition between Moore and Dalton. Judi Dench takes up the role of M, with them needing to explain she's a successor to the old one thanks to the switch in gender, and it's weird how she refers to an actor 18 years her junior as a "dinosaur of the Cold War". Despite these little things, it's a good film, the best in the series in a while.

It's in a slightly weird position, stuck right before CGI really took off in films, and it's a little strange to see so much slightly obvious work with miniatures for the first time in the series, right before the shift into computer effects. As they enter the 90s, the sex scenes become more explicit, especially a scene where Famke Janssen (the only significant female villain in Brosnan's films that he doesn't bone) kills a guy in coitus. There's also an increase in violence; Bond's kill total jumps into the twenties as he is seen firing a machine gun wildly into a crowd as several go down at once for the first time. Robbie Coltrane is a cool Russian guy, and Sean Bean's character is interesting. I mean... yeah, he's the villain. He betrays 007. Sorry, the movie's 14 years old. It's cool to see him "die" in the beginning only to come back as an adequate, fairly rape-y antagonist. If you've ever noticed, Bean gets a lot of roles where he either dies or disappears early or gets fucked over in some way, to see it subverted before it ever became a thing is neat. Anyway, Brosnan's first Bond film was his best, and still pretty good.

James Bond stats
Theme song: "GoldenEye" by Tina Turner
Foreign locations: Russia, Monte Carlo, Cuba
Bond, James Bond: 20:25
Martini shaken, not stirred: 20:05
Ladies seduced: 2
Chases: 2
Kills: 26, plus explosion victims
Non-lethal takedowns: 7

Taken

I have to admit, my opinion of Besson's ability to make a script for and put together a kick ass movie was slipping a bit, but Taken showed me he still has some tricks up his sleeve. It's a bit light on plot and intelligence or subtlety to the dialogue, but it's the perfect vehicle for one of the most enjoyable straight-up revenge movies I've seen. You pretty much know everything you need to from the commercials that either focus on the pivotal scene where Liam Neeson's daughter get captured or show a montage of him beating the shit out of people. Put those together, and that's what the movie is. Morel's directorial debut was with District B13, another Besson script, and he really seems to know how to do action in the Bourne/new Bond style that I like so much, although the camera is thankfully a little less spastic when stuff's happening. The part is much more physically demanding than artistically challenging for Neeson, although he brings his usual great self to it and handles everything better than you'd expect from a 56 year old.

There's really not too much to say about Taken without just gushing about how cool Liam is. He's not just a good fighter, he has all sorts of skills that he uses creatively to look for his daughter. He gathers the clues he needs a bit conveniently and quickly, but it works to drive the very tight pacing forward as he tears a path of destruction to find what he came for. And when the action does get going, it's really quite good. To be honest, I wasn't completely feeling the movie for the first hour. There were some cool moments, but the biggest scene was a car chase through dirt that I didn't much care for, and it wasn't totally clicking. But as the film goes on and Neeson's daughter gets closer to being lost forever, he gets visibly more determined and starts going further to take care of things, and his desperation shows as the brutality of his actions builds. It's effective both from a story perspective and the fact that it makes the movie backloaded, with standout moments occuring more and more frequently as it approaches the end. There aren't any big surprises to watch out for or complicated repercussions, it's just an unrelenting, very direct film that puts everything on the table and says, "Here's what we did, enjoy it if you want to." And I did enjoy it quite a lot.