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Reviews
For Your Eyes Only (1981)
Boring Bond is a total pile of grit...
The twelfth Bond film continued the rot that started with The Man With The Golden Gun. For Your Eyes Only was, until the 007 franchise went into an even steeper nosedive with the risible Octopussy and the creaking A View To A Kill, quite comfortably the worst effort so far. Many reviewers on here have suggested this film was a much-needed return to down-to-earth, gritty realism after the space-set absurdity of Moonraker. But as ridiculous as it was trying to cash-in on the success of Star Wars by sending 007 into orbit, I would argue For Your Eyes Only is every bit as absurd. And I'd go further and say that at least Moonraker was a spectacle and was consistent with its own internal logic.
From its catastrophic casting to its laughable plot, FYEO fails at every turn, with Roger Moore turning in, once again, his pensionable-clown-spy shtick.
Director John Glen tries to bullseye all the right Bondian staples, with girls, gunfights, villains and set pieces. But like the henchmen Bond battles, he's wide of the mark every time. The girls, for instance; lead foil Carole Bouquet, playing the Elektra-like daughter Melinda, manages to turn in a performance so static she could well have been one of the Greek statues she was so interested in preserving. She may have been a Chanel model, but her performance stinks. At the other end of the emoting spectrum, superfluous character Bibi ramps up the cringe factor by literally throwing her 17-year-old self at the then 54-year-old Moore. Thankfully, Jimmy doesn't indulge. The other female character, the 'scouse Countess', was another character with zero reason to be involved. As with the winter scenes (more later), her inclusion was completely irrelevant. She was a character who posed no threat to the bad guy, so there was no reason for her to be targeted. Apart from, or course, that Bond could then have a Dune Buggy scene. Which leads me to believe dune buggy's were all the rage that summer (see the winter scenes bit below).
The girls may have been redundant, but the men involved were also totally forgettable. Apart from a charismatic turn from Topol as Bond sidekick Columbo (who still manages to train his binoculars horizontally whilst following Bond up a vertical cliff-face), the bad guys are personality vacuums. Where previous Bond films had larger-than-life foes, FYEO has the dullest and dumbest yet.
Kristatos (Julian Glover) the bad boss-man was possibly one of the more unimposing villains in the 007 canon. His master plan is so non-diabolical is could have been conceived in a monastery. Which is where he ends up. The KGB Biathalon assassin, who is supposedly a high-profile sportsman but yet still tries to kill Bond mid-competition, in broad daylight, tries to finish off Bond by throwing a motorbike in his general direction. Hardly a crotch-crawling laser beam, is it?
A mainstay of the 007 films has always been their interest in contemporary trends. Whether that be locations or cultural pursuits, the reason Moore was rocketed into space was because of Star Wars. So when planning the set pieces of FYEO, the public fascination with the Winter Olympics of 1980 in Lake Placid loomed large. Inevitable then that some skiing be involved. Spying and skiing go together like vodka and Martini. It can be extremely exciting (OHMSS, The Spy Who Loved Me). But to then add in an ice hockey assassination attempt?!! Bond body checking one thug into the net with a Zamboni?? Did the guy not see that coming? That scene was laughable. But to then crowbar in a ski-jump scene, a biathlon and bobsleigh. Mr Glen, are you sure we've referenced winter sports enough here? I suppose I should be thankful we didn't see a laser-guided curling-stone bomb, or a machine gun equipped ice sculpture...
To continue the ridiculous theme, the car chase at the start included the pursuing thugs drawing alongside Bond's 2CV and receiving a condescending eyebrow arch from our hero (where'd I put my gun, it'd be handy to have a projectile weapon right about now?), the final cliff-climbing scene had one bad guy descend on a rope alone to knock out Bond's pitons with the grip of his pistol (where did I put my gun, it's be handy to have a projectile weapon right about now?) and Kristatos's death-by-coral attempt on Bond has to be one of the most drawn out ideas ever by a villain. If Bond hadn't escaped, he could literally have been at that for HOURS (where did I put my gun... etc). The films have to be fantastical, I know, but they should at least stay consistent to their own internal logic. If Kristatos needed it to look like an accidental drowning, fair enough. But there were literally no witnesses. This was just dumb.
Which brings me, finally to the plot. Right at the start, we have a missing ATAC device. The MacGuffin that everyone is after. MI6 know it's off the coast of Albania. They know Malina was on board the ship that was looking for it. So where is Bond sent? To look for the assassin that killed Malina's parents. Why? It's irrelevant who wants the ATAC. Retrieve it or destroy it. Simple.
But nope. Bond is sent on a mission to retrieve the ATAC by finding a man hired by a man hired by another man who want to sell the device to the KGB. It just doesn't make sense. Characters make illogical decisions, trying to push the plot forward. I appreciate a good plot as much as the next man, but is HAS to be internally logical, or it just becomes a joke. For Your Eyes Only, for many reasons, is certainly laughable.
It beggars belief that Roger Moore went on to do two more (where did I put my gun....?)
Altitude (2010)
Failed to lift off...
Firstly, a quick confession; I'm a real soft touch when it comes to a good movie poster, a cool DVD cover, or back-cover teaser descriptions. I've sat down in many a theatre or shelled out for many a DVD on the basis of this alone. A strong concept with plenty of potential, and I'm in. So with Altitude, it had me at 'Fear is in the air'. My hit-rate for finding good movies this way is about 50-50. But I sometimes get as much pleasure from watching a bad movie as a good one. And so to Altitude, which lands firmly in this former category. But pleasure was something sadly lacking in taking this flight.
The description on the back of the DVD case hinted at a malevolent force, picking off teens, as teens usually are in these films, but in the unique setting of a light plane; a nice twist on the usual claustrophobic settings. A supernatural killer on the loose at 10,000 feet... cool, I thought. But from this intriguing take-off position, the film crashes and burns in its most important areas; a coherent plot and interesting characters. Five friends fly a twin-prop to a concert 'because the drive is bad', or some other rubbish reason - so we have our set-up. The five tick all the cliché boxes for the teen victim demographic; the jock, the nerd, the sensitive artist, the prom queen and the bookworm. And despite these stereotypes bucking the usual trends slightly (the arrogant jock turns out to be a coward and a drunk, the artist brave and resourceful), the characters are so weakly sketched out that we do not care for anyone as things start to go wrong, even our spunky heroine pilot, Sara (who has achieved somewhere in the region of 100 hours worth of flying time whilst keeping this a secret from her dad, and also learnt to fly because her mum was killed in an air crash. As you do.)
So after establishing such hateful and idiotic people are our main protagonists, it's left to the plot get us off the ground. Initially, it's a bit like Twilight Zone: The Movie, where a nervous John Lithgow sees an evil imp trashing the wing of his passenger jet but can get no-one to believe him. But a closer look at that 1983 movie reveals an even more blatant lift. The Joe Dante-directed third segment, where an evil child who can create his own reality around him, trapping his family in a murderous world where he has to be kept happy and entertained for fear of violent and bloody retribution.
So no external entity of malevolence, just an insecure man-child with a violent id (Forbidden Planet?); subconsciously brought to the fore by the heroine's plan to leave to go to university and his repressed anger at the death of his parents (yes, in the same air crash that killed Sara's mother).
Throw in a prescient comic book (Heroes, anyone), a giant flying squid and a climactic face- off between good and 'evil' (is he? I still don't know who we were supposed to be rooting for) that is resolved by the biggest cliché of them all, and all that back-sleeve potential finally runs out of fuel.
It's such a shame, because I thought the direction from Kaare Andrews was solid and some clever scenes, with the lightning flashes making the screaming faces look like skulls, even had me considering the possibility everyone was already dead. No such luck.
I'd like to think I've learnt my lesson after paying full price for this DVD. But I probably haven't....
The Ferryman (2007)
Missed the boat
I've just got in from watching The Ferryman and felt I had to vent my frustration. This film had the potential to be excellent, I think, but it's badly let down by quite a few key points. Based on the mythic character of the Ferryman from Greek legend, who's only task was to carry people across from the land of the living to the land of the dead (was it the river Styx?), the premise was that someone who had 'died', and so was bound to 'cross over', had found a way to cheat death and stay on this side of 'the river'. He hadn't, in essence, paid the ferryman. So far so good, and a great set-up for a film - the character was essentially on the run from death and had been for hundreds (or was it thousands?) of years. He could've made a killing on property, either way. Anyway, the plot device to drive this story, though, was a dagger that allowed the bearer to 'switch' bodies, and thus stay one step ahead of the punting ghoul with the invoice of the title. This dagger had NO connection whatsoever, as far as I could see, to the Greek myth. Fair enough if you're expecting the audience to buy into one 'fantastical' concept, but TWO,totally unrelated ones? Is there a dagger that transfers souls in Greek mythology? I don't know of one... I'm prepared to be corrected though. And don't get me started on where that coin came from, either. Or the kid... That's not even my main gripe though. Here's where I think the film really let itself down: as the characters stab each other with the knife, and so transfer the evil soul from body to body (Wes Craven's Shocker?), some of these incidents occur off camera. Brilliant idea. So you don't really know which character is the baddie, right? Wrong. But it's still a brilliantly tense situation where the audience is thinking 'is she just cracking under the strain of seeing someone get stabbed/being trapped on a boat in the fog/not knowing what's going on?' or is she in fact the evil entity, right? WRONG again. The baddie is flagged up every single time cos there's a ruddy great tattoo that appears on their back when they're possessed. Nice one, Mr Director. Why not just put them in a Hi-Vis vest with a rotating bow-tie? Apart from this, the acting from the high-maintenance blonde is titanically bad, as is the work from the Maori chap who's as wooden as the decking. The Ferryman himself gets about 5 minutes screen time, and seeing as how he's quite a terrifying looking chap, that's a Darth Maul-esqe waste. The direction in general is not dynamic enough, and some scenes linger a couple of painful seconds too long.. reminding me of the classically bad soap opera, Sunset Beach... but the music, and the performance of the bolshie Cock-er-ney captain were quite enjoyable. All in all, if you're after body-swapping horror, go for Denzel Washington in Fallen. That's got better music, too... Ti-i-i-ime, is on my siiide, yes it is....