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I’m probably defending the indefensible, but I voted out Jaws. I know the vanishing passengers on the Spectre train isn’t a good look but, other than that, the sudden and visceral Hinx attack is genuinely shocking and impressive. Shame he got an early bath though… that last section certainly could have done with him returning for a final lap of honour!
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Can both of them go?
I guess the TSWLM one is superior, if for no other reason than that creepy shot of Jaws hiding in the closet at the start of the fight. Outside of that, these are two moments where they’re trying to capture the lightning in a bottle that was the Bond/Grant fight from FRWL and failing miserably at doing so.
The SP fight is the literal definition of pointless.
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The SPY fight has going for it that it tallies with the general thrust of the Stromberg policy to cut every interference from the picture, permanently. It’s logic insofar as it aims to protect the Liparus operation, even if it fails.
The SPECTRE fight is entirely outside any logic. It’s never clear why Hinx is after Madeleine after initially going after Bond. Or why Blofeld would bother to kill White now. Of for what reason he wants to have Bond killed when it would have been easy to arrange that in Rome. And why send Hinx when he wants to do it himself later. Or how Blofeld knew when to send the Rolls.*
It’s a typical example of an action sequence existing outside the logic of a storyline, simply because it has to provide a bang at that point in the runtime.
Tie a beer keg around its neck and let it fly.
*And the way to fix it would have been to either start with a coherent story and think of set pieces later - or lean into the illogical narrative and crank up the bizarre volume to 11: show the bystanders ignoring the fight as if it didn’t exist - and all draw guns after Hinx’ demise. A train full of Spectre agents.
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Now that would have been a great reveal!
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Yes, the Hinx one is total nonsense unless Hinx is acting of his own accord due to jealousy about Bond being a better henchman than he is.
I still think that angle - that Bond has been Blofeld’s unwitting blunt instrument all along, disposing of opposition like Le Chiffre and Greene to inadvertently enable Bloberhauser’s rise to prominence - was open for exploration in Spectre and a major missed opportunity amongst so, so many in the film.
Don’t follow how Madeleine survives having the dinner table kicked into her head.
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Oh, come on, after all she IS a doctor!
Then again, she immediately after that has sex with Bond.
And Lucia has sex with Bond after being almost killed, too. Hmmm… I sense a pattern here.
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Hmm - Bond is undoubtedly and consistently a predator of psychologically damaged women (he’s really not very nice). although with Madeleine I can’t see how she wouldn’t be seriously physically damaged as well by having a table kicked with force into her skull, and that leads to some really dark territory into which they will never really go. And we probably wouldn’t want to see.
Bond is appallingly unappealing all the way through Spectre.
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Let´s just be grateful - Hinx killing off Madeleine at that point would have motivated Bond even more to make it personal this time.
Although it would have spared us NO TIME TO DIE…
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Since they were all about copying Austin Powers in Spectre, maybe Hinx could have traveled back in time to 2012 to save M from Silva, thus potentially saving us from the pain of watching Spectre as well.
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Ok… So my take is, these are the same scene reimagined, just as Spectre Craig is his interpretation of MooreBond.
Unflappable, slightly bored, quite unpleasant towards his female counterparts.
But the fight in Spectre edges it because Bond looks in trouble, and Craig bond has to outwit rather than overpower. The disappearing passengers I’ve always read as being Spectre agents and the whole sequence fits as part of a strange operatic horror of the dread of family gatherings.
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The Hinx fight goes. And as with so much about SP I have little to say that won’t be grouchy and won’t be new.
It’s an underwhelming fight featuring an underused and misused henchmen with a strangely unfufilling denouement. Oh he’s done for then? Bye bye Hinx, we barely knew thee.
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This discussion has led me to realize why the train fight even happens in SP. Hinx was feeling somewhat insecure with himself up to that point. In the pantheon of Bond henchman, he felt like he needed to step it up in order to be remembered as one of the best. Other henchmen have inflicted quite a bit of pain on Bond, from beating him to a pulp, murdering his wife, trying to kill him with a set of metallic teeth, leaving him to be eaten by crocodiles, fought with Bond on the outside of a cargo plane while hanging on a net, and the list goes on.
To that point in the story, the height of Hinx’s aggression towards Bond had been…tailgating him.
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It is even stranger then that they let Bond and Madeleine cuddle afterwards without interfering.
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They had to, otherwise that torture session at Bloferhauser’s crater day spa where Bond is supposed to forget the faces of the people he knows would have been rendered, much like the rest of the film, completely pointless and without any tension.
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Roger and Richard’s fight is always fun to watch and I’d miss it if we’re gone. Spectre never comes down off the shelf for viewing anyway, so for all I know the Hinx fight is gone already.
Easiest one yet; Hinx goes. Preferably with a tight grip on Madeleine.
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In both cases i find myself asking how the henchman knew they were on the train.
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The smart blood would be an ideal explanation - and offer a great way of showing Bond’s ingenuity getting rid of it by dialysis.
Alas, why bother…
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Both instances of sex follow upon moments of danger/assault/trauma. It is an experience I myself have undergone (details can be spared), so for me, it is one of the few times in fim that the motivation for sexual release strikes me as believable.
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Given just how pointless most of Spectre really ends up being, in addition to the fact that it just flat out cannibalizes the rest of Craig’s tenure, especially Skyfall, one almost has to wonder if them just going with the original version of the script where “Blofeld” is a warlord wouldn’t have proven to be the more preferable direction. Even if it completely crashed and burned, it would have had to have been a more interesting misfire than…this.
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