Was Richards cast because a majority would not believe her, the tabloid-attention playmate-kind of B-movie star, as a nuclear scientist? Were they mainly banking on the moment she slipped out of the protective clothing and show off her physique in that tank top?
Absolutely.
Still, so what? It was a great movie entrance. And whether her acting was good or not cannot be decided on, it is a matter of opinion. Technically, she did everything that was needed - so that would be considered as good acting. I do like her in that role. Others don’t. But that is just a highly subjective assessment.
Also, let’s not be revisionist about this.
If you criticize her, you have to criticize almost all the other Bond girls in the previous films.
Were any of them not cast for their looks? Were they absolutely believable in portraying the particular profession of their character? Were their roles always absolutely necessary to the plot? Would it have been more interesting not to have them in the story or to recast them?
Bond girls were named that way for a reason. To focus on Christmas Jones and fault TWINE for it would have to mean that you have to fault every Bond film for that. Because Bond films started out as a sexist, chauvinistic enterprise. They changed and evolved with a more enlightened view - but they still are at their core a male fantasy. We have to own this, as fans.
For me it was a disappointment, a missed opportunity, I enjoyed GE but thought it was like an extended trailer for the promise of how good Brosnan’s tenure was going to be. TND could have benefited from a longer gap in scheduling to fix the jarring tonal shifts in the script. So I remember thinking finally we would get the real movie Brosnan’s Bond deserved, I think we got another committee designed lost opportunity.
Actually, that factored in for me. By the time of TWINE, we’d seen years and years and years of sexy starlets babbling on about how “my character isn’t the typical Bond bimbo” or “my character is more developed” or “my character is Bond’s equal” and “you shouldn’t call her a ‘Bond Girl’” only to have them show up on screen in bikinis, playing dimwits who need Bond to rescue them repeatedly, just. like. every. other. Bond girl. When Richards peels down to her tank top and short-shorts and is introduced as a nuclear scientist, it’s almost like a fourth-wall-breaking joke to the audience. And where I saw it, it did indeed get a lot of laughs.
Having said that, Richard’s casting is way, way, way down on my list of complaints about this movie. As you say, such casting is pretty much tradition at this point, and no more ridiculous than a million other facets of the Bond formula. And if we’re going to be blunt, I’d buy a Playboy model-turned-physicist long before I’d buy a cologne-ad model turned secret agent, and that little bit of suspension of disbelief is a lot more central to the project.
I respectfully disagree that we must throw all the female leads under the bus with Richards. I bought Lois Chiles in Moonraker when she was supposed to be a scientist, and similar characters besides.
Richards, I think, was too young, particularly for Brosnan. I don’t mean to get personal, but she had a gormless, open-mouthed look and the body of a twelve year old boy. But they had to get the American tweenies in to see a British espionage story about oil pipelines, so she was cast.
I’m intrigued by the notion, raised a couple times already in this thread, that the studio needed to resort to stunt casting to convince American audiences to buy tickets to a James Bond movie. Surely we Yanks were in the bag already by the late 90s?
As far as that goes, we already had the star of an American TV show in the lead role for this film.
On the other hand, it would go a long way to explain why Bond was watered down to such a generic, American-style action franchise in the Brosnan years. Apparently locking in the U.S. was Priority 1.
I don’t think there’s any question that Eon considered the US market more than the ROW during the Brosnan years; if you look at the two Dalton movies, they both took 4-5 times the US gross in the ROW
Licence To Kill’s US box office was a disaster; They needed the Brosnan movies to work in the US.
Goldeneye showed a massive improvement over even the last few Moore movies but then TND did even better, at that point EON absolutely played up to the US market with DAD being the pinnacle of that.
As for Richards, she was incredibly hot in the US (in every way) after ‘Wild Things’ and her casting was completely logical; However, her role was horribly written (in a generally poorly written movie) and she was on a loser from day one.
Is she the worst Bond girl? Absolutely not, she’s significantly better than Tanya Roberts and Britt Eckland to name just two, but she is saddled with probably the worst written female role in the entire series;
Not really he fault.
As for the 12 year old boy comment??? I can only guess that referring to the newer skinnier actress mold these days and I guess you could say that about Scorupco or Hatcher, but Denise Richards??
holy crap, somebody needs a visit to an optometrist!
I’m not sure Christmas Jones is the worst written female character in the whole series. Shes still better than Stacey Sutton and less creepy than Bibi Dahl. Then there’s the pretty whiny and incredibly dumb Mary Goodnight. I’m pretty sure Bond even makes a joke about how dumb she is. The movie version of Tiffany Case is pretty awful. At least Christmas actually does something.
Tiffany starts out supposedly savvy and street-smart and ends up a useless nincompoop (just one film after 007 utters “those three little words” to Tracy, he has three different ones for Tiff: “You stupid twit!”). Anya Amasova I felt managed to mostly salvage her “superspy” dignity despite having to play “damsel in distress” at the end of “Spy.” Holly Goodhead I bought for the most part, though when she runs up to Bond at the end, does the “Charlie’s Angels” hair spin and says, “Where’s Drax?” I thought, “What a dim-bulb!”
I agree Bibi was a bad idea (“I know what this Bond film needs: a horny teen-ager with a sense of entitlement!”) but for me, so was Stacey. Besides being a dead weight in the action scenes, Stacey’s also the least exotic and intriguing love interest in the series, being pretty much a glorified secretary in the office of a low-level bureaucrat. She’s there mainly to give information to Bond that he could just as easily have unearthed by breaking into City Hall.
I hadn’t thought about it until this thread, but you’re right. That goes a long way to explaining my disillusionment with this era, I guess. As a Yank, the last thing I wanted from Bond was another standard-issue American action movie. I already had too many of those as it was. When you’ve got a guy like Brosnan, whose forte is style and sophistication, it makes no sense to take him into Arnold territory. There’s nothing a slim guy in an expensive haircut and Armani suit could do in a straight-up action flic that any number of meatheads in sweaty t-shirts couldn’t do better. No one can out-Bond Bond, so why handicap Bond out of the gate by making him a rich man’s Chuck Norris? I remember at one point thinking, “If I see another extended sequence with Bond firing a machine gun, I’m out.”
I may have exaggerated.