Anyone else here watch Hawaii Five-0? Being born and raised in Hawaii, I’ve been watching it since the reboot, and I remember thinking then that they rebooted and revitalized this franchise in a similar way that Casino Royale did for Bond. It wasn’t until much later that I found out that Alex O’Loughlin was up for the role at the same time Henry Cavill and Daniel Craig were, and did in fact screen test for it. (side note, I would love to see all of the screen tests of these potential Bonds). I think Alex could have pulled it off, and certainly looks the part:
I’ve been rewatching the series with my fiancee, and I gotta wonder if EON had been inspired by some of their story ideas when they made Spectre. I’ll spoiler tag this stuff in case people haven’t who haven’t seen Hawaii Five-0 yet don’t want to be spoiled.
Spoilers
The big thing for me that reminded me of Spectre was the fact that they gave Wo Fat (the big behind the scenes villain of most of the original Hawaii Five-0) a sort of familial relationship to Steve McGarrett (Alex O’Laughlin’s character), and made them brothers of sorts. It’s a little complicated, but apparently McGarrett’s mother raised Wo Fat for a time after accidentally killing his mother. Wo Fat taunts McGarrett by calling him “brother,” similar to Spectre.
The other thing is that there is a scene where Wo Fat is crawling from a crashed helicopter, scarred, and McGarrett is there with a gun, and Wo Fat is screaming at him to “Do it! Kill me!” McGarrett refuses and takes Wo Fat into custody. Sound familiar?
The show likes to nod at O’Laughlin’s almost history with Bond, with them throwing him in a tuxedo now and then and playing some very Bondian music. There’s also a recent episode where the team encounters a MI6 agent and they have fun with lots of Bond references.
Of course, the original series had it’s own Bond connection, in that Jack Lord was the first Felix Leiter.
The show by it’s nature is a police procedural, similar to the NCIS shows, but it’s quite entertaining.
