INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
There are two groups of people given to lengthy discussion about characters named Mr White: Reservoir Dogs fans, and the Double-0 division
All in all, when No Time To Die releases in November, Bond will have spent 14 years and five films tracing the steps and life story of the
elusive Spectre lieutenant
Yet all but the most dedicated Bond nuts would struggle to remember anything about him beyond his favourite color
capacity to be everywhere yet unseen; that sounds like a line you might hear in one of the Craig-era Bond films
stretches of film, sometimes fading into nothing
building to long, mournful shots across the Thames
And while Casino Royale opens with grounded pugilism in a bathroom, the action under Mendes has tended towards the spectacle of the
illogical: Bond driving a heavy-duty vehicle across a train, exposing his chest to depleted uranium bullets; Bond braining the pilot of a
helicopter as it veers towards a crowded square in Mexico City; Bond chopping the wings off his plane so that he can plunge its nose into an
Any wordplay is reserved for special events
Director Martin Campbell was brought in as a safe pair of hands, having ushered Pierce Brosnan into the series a decade earlier
While Casino Royale succeeded in stripping away the bloat of the Brosnan era, it did so by returning to the same well.These are not films of
a kind, then, and moreover, serialization has not been kind to them
Spectre in particular suffers for its dedication to the cause, trawling through the history of the White family as if the viewer had
accidentally agreed to sit through their holiday photos
Is it really so shocking that an MI6 agent has had numerous encounters with an organization that professes to control all crime? You might
Avengers: Endgame became the highest-grossing movie of all time partly on its individual merits, and partly because it promised the
conclusion to a story told across 22 films
Being asked to remember what happened in Quantum of Solace feels more like a cruel reminder of mortality than the thrilling unfurling of an
That trauma, and the convincing complexity that makes Bond both complicit and victim of her death, has lasted the years
Ultimately it turns out to be character, not plot, that can keep the flame burning in the fallow years between Bond films.Lately, the series
surely to celebrate the rare sense of occasion that comes with each Bond film; to treat each as an opportunity to remix the man and his
situation, rather than the latest episode in a serial nobody can quite remember
