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Unwatched Movie Fest #4: Martin Campbell's GoldenEye

 GoldenEye

Pierce Brosnan, Famke Janssen, Sean Bean, Judi Dench. Dir. Martin Campbell, United Artists, 1995

It's the early 1990s and you're Albert and Barbara Broccolu, exec producers of the James Bond movies. Your franchise, maybe the most durable in history, is in trouble in its biggest market, the US. Though box office worldwide made your two Bond pictures with Timothy Dalton as 007 hits, the Americans have stayed away from theatres as never before. Though Dalton brings a reckless ruthlessness to Bond, a darkness Connery only hinted at, he's too much, or too little, for the US market. A change has to be made.

So you draft in Pierce Brosnan, your choice to replace Roger Moore going back to the mid-'80s, when NBC refused to give him time off from Remington Steele. You update 'M' to Dame Judi Dench, and you continue as with Dalton, positioning Brosnan as an all-around action star regardless of an individual film's story, steering clear of the Strombergs, Blofelds, and SPECTRES of the past. You roll the dice, hoping Brosnan will combine the best of Dalton and Moore without turning into a cartoon character, and assemble GoldenEye.

It's 1994 and you're helming the newest Bond picture, the debut of the newest Bond, and a new 'M.' You don't know quite what Brosnan will bring to the role, or Dench, or just quite where the franchise is headed, now. If you're Martin Campbell, you compensate by assembling a solid supporting cast and blowing as much stuff up as possible. Unless you're destroying it with runaway tanks. Or machine guns. You go ahead and make as good an action picture as the budget allows, leaving the intangibles to work themselves out while you try repeatedly to blow them up. If the action and the gags and the chases and the explosions work right, the movie, GoldenEye, will work regardless of James Bond's rebooted persona.

That's what GoldenEye gave me this time around. A Bond movie I'd seen a few times, I stopped watching the Brosnan-era Bonds altogether, considering them substandard compared either to Dalton or Craig. I actually attempted to watch GoldenEye about a week ago and couldn't get into it. Today, the ever-popular slow Saturday, GoldenEye came across as a solid, fun actioner that has this guy running around yelling he's Bond, James Bond. I'm doing my best to approach each era of Bond, and each actor, as their own distinct creation, rather than compare and rank them. Doing that helped me see how great Dalton was in his two pictures. Today, it helped me resolve to watch the next of the Brosnan Bonds before rendering judgment while enjoying GoldenEye as the big '90s action spectacle it was and still is.

Not my favorite Bond, by a long way, but a better picture, just as a picture, than I previously recognized. Campbell does good work in a thankless job. That's an achievement.

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