Promises, promises. About eleven years ago, I promised to put up some shelves. Still haven’t done it, and I live each day with a frisson of giddy tension that Mrs Jim will mention it and do something ‘orrible to me with a stapler. It adds a diurnal sparkle to mundane reality.
You’ve been promised things too, no doubt, and remain unserved by them. Dwell on this lack; it energises my corroded soul to experience your disappointment. I am a parasite upon your unfulfilled dreams.
As this site records, entirely freely stated by you and from which record I derive gargantuan suckled gratification, the Bond films occasionally have lured you into temptation, only to betray your trust by not delivering. You should know better, although that suggests obligation and likelihood. You could know better. Maybe.
Which of these taglines from a poster or trailer promised most for you but turned out to be the bigger disappointment?
Which was…
Not DNA but DOA
(AVTAK) Has James Bond finally met his match? Not if it’s May Day, no, not really.
(DAD) Betrayed, Captured, Abandoned. For about 25 minutes until a placed product shaves it all away.
„The match“ made in PR rooms reaking of boredom and self-congratulating perceived genius in the face of job loss.
At no point I thought MayDay (or even The Walken) could have been a match for MooreBond. I did like their youth (not only the old are depraved), but the promise of Bond really getting his perfectly formed behind handed to him (that’s more than a handful, as Jinx probably would have said) was titilating. Then again, I always thought MooreBond can wit his way out of any predicamemt, so that „match“ line was always just an amped up way to make this film edgy. Quite like employing Duran Duran (whose lead singer at the time was often ridiculed for not hitting notes - yes, something most pop singers these days never can without their autotune).
As for the „shave off“ in DAD: Again, a hyped up slogan I could never believe. Although in its overachieving drama, those lines also had an endearing quality for me, like a fairy tale narrator asking something which even children can easily answer in unisono: Nooooooo! Nostalgic pleasures, you know, cressterdays…
If I am hones I have never seen that tagline for DAD, so it was not a dissapointment for me.
AVTAK I realy thought there would be a fight with MayDay like with Oddjobb, but in retrospect Moore was probably too old but he would had done something clever I am sure of it. ConneryBond had also no chance to win against Oddjobb if he didn’t do something clever.
“Has James Bond finally met his match?” - if only because I was still young and impressionable and ready to buy the Golden Gate Bridge simply on the promise of that (drawn!) lean-as-a-whip Bond next to the barbed-wire May Day…
I was imagining all sorts of thrilling things to go with the Duran Duran song. The final product didn’t really show anything to suggest Bond having ‘met his match’ - more having reached the limits of what was possible at the time to stage as credible fight between Moore and the 15 years younger Walken. It makes you glad they didn’t try to put up a fight with May Day.
By the time of DIE ANOTHER DAY taglines couldn’t sell me a bridge any more. I had heard talk of an invisible car already and was wondering how that would fare. After 20 years of John-Gardner-betrayal-bootcamp I wasn’t particularly worried about Bond, nor about the captured/abandoned combo. ‘Bond in the hands of a CGI dilettante!’ is the tagline that should have worried us…
We did see Bond betrayed, captured and abandoned in DAD. At the time, at least for me, seeing Bond with a long beard like that was a shock to the system. No other incarnation has been locked away for 14 months even if that timeframe is condensed down to minutes.
The ‘Has James Bond finally met his match?’ tagline could maybe make some sense if it’s a joke about May Day lighting her cigarette opposite Bond in the poster.
I never for a moment thought Bond would “meet his match” in the form of a pop star, so I could hardly be disappointed, there. If anything, I had a bigger problem with the scenes that TRIED to position May Day as a threat by having her perform superhuman feats of strength that were never explained, given her skinny frame. Was she the subject of Dr. Mortner’s experiments? Was she taking some kind of performance-enhancing drugs (or “vitamins” as Q would say)? Was she born on Krypton? The daughter of Baron Samedi? We’ll never know.
At least she did “match” Bond for impossibly long legs on that poster as it was the work of Dan Gouzee, but then so had Octopussy.
The DAD tagline could not possibly have disappointed me as this is the first time I’ve heard it in the 23 years the film has existed, and even now I can’t find an image of a poster with it. BUT…in terms of encapsulating a key element of the film, I rate it the bigger disappointment, as it reminds me of how strongly DAD started, only to veer quickly off the road and crash into a ditch after plowing through a line of hard-used Porta-Potties. The promise of something new and different – quickly abandoned to flee back to the tried-and-true (only with the “ridiculousness” dial turned up to 11) – is easily more disappointing than never getting around to a one-on-one fight between a 57-year-old Roger Moore and a skinny supermodel/singer who, trust us, honest, wields the power of a flesh-and-blood T-800 Terminator. DAD is disappointing for what it didn’t give us, while AVTAK’s failure to deliver is a blessing.
With everyone else I don’t remember the DAD tagline. And while the AVTAK probably is the one of the dafter slices of rhetoric, I definitely felt the Walken-Jones combo was more threatening than that of the “interesting dinner companion” schtick of Kamal Khan in the film prior.
Bond’s imprisonment is well down the list of things to beat up DAD with, but the reality is that, not counting credits, it lasts about 3 minutes. Frankly, if he didn’t have the beard, there wouldn’t be a clue as to his “ordeal.” As invisible as the car…
I think that is indeed a lost opportunity: Bond escapes Mi6 and there is no scene of PTSD afterwards, only his wrath at Graves in the fencing scene which hints at the experience.
Then again, getting your balls maimed, apparently is of no consequence for the studly Bond either when he can heal that fast and have forceful sex again.
So maybe, Bond as a punching bag does not really work in the films because we want to see him be a superhero who always quickly recovers. And DAD would have been a different movie if we had seen Bond hesitate when his memory of being tortured had been triggered.
I know that Jim will have a joke ready about torture triggers in the Actor Pierce Brosnan era.
To be really fair, no Bond film ever has been interested in any form of actual science that has played a major (or minor) part in the plot. They’ve all been defying the laws of physics to no end. But then again, most movies did.
I am shocked…SHOCKED…to witness in this thread such off-handed dismissals and disrespect for the fine men and women of the United States Space Marine Corps, not to mention the builders of hovercraft gondolas, re-entry proof, shock-absorbent space station pods, and dental appliances that can bite through massive steel cables.
As repeatedly explained by the likes of Stephen Hawking and Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Moonraker is science FACT.
I will say that I expected a more engaging Madonna song - but knew from the start her acting would be contained to a minimum. Which didn’t disturb me unduly.
Having Bellucci and then doing next to nothing with her, not even with the obvious ins her character would offer in the context of the film up to then, is downright criminal. There’d have been potential for a whole film around Lucia Sciarra - that Bellucci actually could have filled with everything from sex appeal to nefarious manipulation and back again.
While the fan discussions about the female Blofeld, Irma Bunt or finally a 50-something Bond gi- WOMAN for the duration of the whole film might have been unrealistic from the start, this is definitely one thing the SPECTRE production really messed up.
You don´t cast Dame Judi Dench to give her just an exposition scene - but you cast Monica Bellucci and you just give her that one great sequence and never mention her character again?
Why, oh, Eon, why? If the budget for SPECTRE was such a problem and the whole last act had to be rewritten… why not concentrate then on that potentially magnificent interplay with Lucia Sciarra whose husband drew Bond into the whole story? The story really dictated that the widow was part of the whole narrative!
Madonna… well… I liked her during the 80´s. And then I did not care anyway. Even the “cameo” was pointless - cut it out and nothing is lost.
Bellucci is the more underwhelming, in that you are left with “is that it?” when she exits stage left. SP is not my cup of tea, so her appearance is in-line with the rest of the film, which specializes in “underwhelming”, whether it be a Blofeld that doesn’t deliver, a henchmen that feels somewhat peripheral, a finale that is, well, you get my drift.
Madonna on the hand, is just bad, and one should only be surprised if one actually expected anything else.
