PS3 Review: 007 Legends (2012)

This one's a bit late. I had originally planned to review 007 Legends in tandem with my review of Skyfall last fall, but you know, things happen. Better late than never, I guess. Keep your eyes peeled for more 007 coverage from your fellow spy enthusiasts at Code Redd Net.

I liked the first Die Another Day game I played better. You know, Nightfire.

I had been hoping for a game like 007 Legends for a long time. It seems like an easy project: to collect the best action set-pieces from the best James Bond films in one game and to serve it up in a competent shooter with a few multiplayer options. From Russia With Love had the right idea, successfully converting the classic '60s spy film for PS2 in the Everything or Nothing model. It was a solid Bond game that captured the look and feel of the film while simultaneously bringing it up to speed with the more stunt-heavy recent Bond films. 007 Legends also has the right idea, as it incorporates the most spectacular scenes from five Bond films and ties them into the plot of Skyfall: those films being Goldfinger, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, License to Kill, Die Another Day and Moonraker. This is an excellent idea well suited for today's generation of games, but 007 Legends falters somewhat in execution.

The game has a real flimsy narrative excuse to revisit all these old missions. It begins with a cinematic adapted from the pre-credits sequence in Skyfall, where Bond is shot by another agent while fighting an adversary on the roof of a speeding train. As Bond hits the water, he is reminded of his previous encounters with Goldfinger, Blofeld, Jaws and others. The game proper begins with a scene from Goldfinger in which Bond finds that girl dead, covered in gold paint. What makes this recreation of Goldfinger odd is that you play as Daniel Craig instead of Sean Connery, and you have access to a smartphone device and other contemporary technology/weaponry.  This is in contrast to the architecture, as well as the design of the surrounding characters, virtually all of whom retain their 1960s clothing. It's an odd inconsistency in art direction spread throughout the entire game, and it never feels quite right. I would've liked to have seen a total commitment to each era, all the way down to its rudimentary gadgets, or a total process of bringing-up-to-date rather than the hybrid nostalgic-contemporary setting provided instead. That's not to say, however, that the structure of 007 Legends is without benefit: those five Bond films, bounded together, make room for considerable variety in setting and gameplay mechanics. Throughout the game, you switch between several styles of gameplay, including the straightforward shooting portions, stealth segments, sleuthing, vehicle combat, and fisticuffs. Unfortunately, these styles are highly organized and segregated in your missions. In other words, a bit of hand-to-hand combat is always bracketed by a cinematic that cues up the switch to this style, and stealth often becomes mandatory to mission completion upon entering a particular room rather than being simply a strategic choice with consequences. Nonetheless, each mission draws on particularly strong action scenes from its respective film to keep the game moving at a commendable pace.

I was also impressed by other improvements over the previous GoldenEye: Reloaded, particularly a dramatic increase in replay value. Whereas more recent Bond games have suffered from a weak single-player experience that did not invite multiple playthroughs, 007 Legends has a strong set of weapon upgrades and unlockables for multiplayer, based on finding objects and overall mission scores. Furthermore, I was impressed by Legends' customization options. Like most modern first-person shooters, on the default option health regenerates after a few seconds: thankfully, though, Legends gives you the option of switching to an old school system in which health does not regenerate and you must rely on body armor spread throughout the level. This is a nice addition that makes the game considerably more challenging, in many instances artificially so as body armor is unevenly distributed in these missions. Multiplayer support is fairly strong, though the lack of AI bots hurts this feature substantially, as online multiplayer is sparsely populated.

Overall, 007 Legends is only a fair-to-middling entry in the franchise, one that does a decent enough job with a promising idea but nothing more. It's much better than the other Bonds released in the last few years, yet nowhere near the level of PS2-era shooters like Nightfire, Everything or Nothing, or From Russia With Love. Fans of the super spy should give it a spin with a weekend rental, but this is probably not one you will want to own.

Movie Review: xXx (2002)

Vin Diesel's infiltration of Code Redd Net continues this week with one of his earliest star vehicles, the beautifully idiotic xXx.

What if James Bond was, like, into motocross and stuff? Well, here you go: xXx is perfect if you ever wanted to see a secret agent bust drug cartels while doing superman seat grabs. Vin Diesel plays an extreme sports exemplary and all-star faux-renegade, recruited by the NSA to infiltrate some Eastern European gangsters. He does all the things Bond does, but does them to the tune of early aughts nu-metal. How do we know he can shoot a gun? Because he broke his leg once pretending to be Matt Hoffman, and spent a few months playing first-person shooters, at least that's what he claims. Obviously, xXx goes for that coveted young male demo by washing every spy movie plot point down with Red Bull: he gets his gadgets from a nerdy white guy who follows him around like an obsessed fan (resulting in one of the all-time great screen grabs*), his globetrotting is limited to places where he can find some rad powder or surf, his language is as colorful as PG-13 allows, he seems to prefer strippers over supermodels, and all the upper-middle-class spoils enjoyed by 007 (Beluga caviar, Vodka martinis, BMWs/Astin Martins) get swapped out for lower-class equivalents, your Playstations, Vans sneakers, Corvettes.

*I love everything about this photo.

As I may have already indicated, it's impossible not to read xXx alongside or against the Bond film from the same year, Die Another Day, one of the more schizophrenic and bloated entries in the series. Whereas DAD had plenty of poorly conceptualized and executed CGI sequences, xXx has aged much more gracefully in that department. Though often implausible, the motorcycle/snowboard chases come across quite clearly, and they make sense in their own stupid way. Similar scenes in DAD don't work because the digital Surfing Bond is so obviously phony: xXx, however, has the good taste to hire a few X-Games athletes as stuntmen to give the scenes weight. It's also easier to stomach Diesel's admittedly insipid one-liners than the nonsense innuendos of Pierce Brosnan and Halle Berry. Strange to say, but with a decade's perspective, it's clear that xXx did what DAD did that same year, and did it better.

Nobody Reviews It Better: Casino Royale (2006)

Enter Daniel Craig in the chiaroscuro of film noir for a most unusual pre-credits sequence. Today Thrasher breaks down Casino Royale, a radical Bond film that thankfully challenged many of the stagnant tropes of the series. Regrettably, in the long run it may have been overaggressive in shrugging off much of what makes a Bond film distinctive. But that's a tale for Chicken Man to tell in the final installment of Nobody Reviews It Better.

 

When Bond looks at a bartender, who innocently, even expectantly, asks him how he would like his vodka martini mixed, and Bond replies, "Do I look like I give a damn?", well, that is precisely the sort of generic insouciance Daniel Craig needed to distance himself and the series from the bloated extravagance of Die Another Day. Such an unconventional response is an immeasurably important moment. It's a moment that signifies a significant change in the tenor of the series. Indeed, so much of Casino Royale is given over to reconfiguring Bond that it seems like Craig's Bond is not quite Bond yet, he hasn't earned that title; he's very much Bond-in-training. And quite unlike the others, you would never think to describe his 007 as a smooth operator. He fails at his job, and often. For his first real mission after attaining 00-status (has there ever been a starker contrast in the series than the one between the CGI-driven finale of Die Another Day and the film noir pre-credits sequence of Royale?), Bond must travel to Montenegro to enter an ultra-high-stakes poker game organized by Le Chiffre, one of the world's most notorious and terrorist-friendly bankers. During the game, Bond loses. It's something that would never have happened to Sean Connery, Roger Moore, or Pierce Brosnan; they were all faultless, invincible gamblers. Sure, Bond gets back in the game with the help of his old CIA pal Felix, but seeing Bond lose like this, even once, shakes loose decades-old expectations and prepares us for something new. That's what makes his unexpected, monogamous devotion to fellow agent Vesper Lynd work so unexpectedly; when you unseat one set of conventions, you make it possible to unseat them all, and Craig thankfully tosses aside the womanizing connotations of the role in favor of love, something Bond hasn't hasn't had the courage to try since On Her Majesty's Secret Service (and, to some degree, in the Timothy Dalton films). Lest you think it's all wine and roses, Casino Royale has many outstanding action and suspense numbers, even though I think the hand-to-hand fights, despite their suitably brutal presentation, are sometimes filmed in a confusing, headache-inducing manner. For all his "failings," though, this Bond emerges with our respect, and soon enough our sympathy. When the iconic theme music finally plays at the end (an astoundingly astute use of the music, I might add), he's earned it.



Nobody Reviews It Better: Die Another Day (2002)

It's Thanksgiving today in our cushy Montreal office, so to celebrate, we offer you the second part of a 007 double-header this weekend. Thrasher returns to Die Another Day for the first time in 10 years, and believe it when we tell you, it hasn't aged gracefully. Unlike Moore-Bond's final outing, Brosnan-Bond was still more than suitable for the role; it's just the material that got bloated. Casino Royale was the recoil, and that's next up in Nobody Reviews It Better.

At least we got Nightfire out of all this.

Back in the Geocities days, I wrote this about Die Another Day: "I meant to say that [Halle Berry] is clearly not very good in her role as Jinx, and together with Bond they are content to trade insipid sexual innuendos throughout the film, something that was immensely annoying on my second time through." Go ahead and add a third time to that statement. Without question, Halle Berry is the worst of Bond's coterie of gal pals, and she doesn't just "trade" those insipid sexual innuendos with Pierce Brosnan, she speaks entirely in them. Pun is just about the only language she knows, and everything she says will make you cringe ("Ornithologist, huh? Wow. Now there's a mouthful."). It's too bad, really, because when she's not onscreen the film isn't that bad, certainly not as bad as I remember it. Of course, there's a rather odd plot involving a few North Koreans who use gene therapy to become snooty, sneering Brits, and a giant satellite laser called Icarus that melts away an ice hotel, but that's fine. It works generically, anyway, seeing as how most Bond narratives are pretty far-fetched. What matters most is that everything is executed well, and with conviction, and the first half of Die Another Day works. By far the best action sequence in the film is Bond's fencing match with "white" playboy Gustav Graves; it's so carefully constructed and exciting it manages to overcome the completely unnecessary Madonna cameo by sheer, boundless will (incidentally, I'd be remiss if I forgot to mention just how god-awful her theme song really is, about as bad as her acting). And for eagle-eyed Bond aficionados, there's plenty of Easter eggs and hidden references to find. But such references, cute though they may be, only serve to remind viewers of much older, much better, and much less anniversary-driven films. This becomes even more clear once Halle Berry, after disappearing following a short introduction at the beginning of the film, suddenly reappears for Round 2 of her pun war with Bond ("Oh yeah, I think I got the thrust of it."). Patience wears thin during these exchanges, and it seems as if their uninspired dialogue has been matched by a series of equally uninspired stunts in the second half. There's a phenomenally lame laser grid boxing match between Bond and Gustav's muscular bodyguard, and in the background Jinx flails around while strapped to a malfunctioning chair, still saying idiotic things ("Switch them off, or I'll be half the girl I used to be!"). Bond even goes surfboarding for a minute or two, and his CGI self hasn't aged gracefully over the past decade. Furthermore, there's a strange and intermittent use of slow-mo in the fight scenes that seems absolutely at-odds not only with the style of this film, but of the whole series as well. DAD may be an overblown mess, but there's still some enjoyment to be salvaged from the rubble. There's just a lot of rubble to clear first.



License to Kill and Die Another Day (!) in 007 Legends

Well, this is a small surprise.


Guess I was right about License to Kill and OHMSS. As for Die Another Day, quite frankly I'm shocked at that choice. They might be able to get some fun out of it, and maybe I'm only sceptical because I've never been a fan of that one, but it seems like an odd pick. And what's going on with the whitewashed Halle Berry? Like I told Chicken Man, they should've just redone Nightfire, since that was a better movie anyway. It was even released at the same time, and it has multiplayer and Skyrail (Nightfire fans know what's up).

007 Legends is supposed to feature five classic Bond missions, in addition to an unspecified amount of Skyfall material. Keeping this latest announcement in mind, we now have four films confirmed for the game: Moonraker, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, License to Kill, and Die Another Day. Will my original prognostication come true, that being Dr. No as the fifth and final classic Bond? Stay tuned.

Bond 23, Skyfall

The title of the 23rd James Bond film has been announced:


Read more about it here.

Personally, I think it could be worse, and just about anything is better than "Die Another Day."

Friday From the Archives: Die Another Day (2002)

I never used to detest this movie. In fact, I can remember enjoying Die Another Day quite thoroughly with my crew in the theater. But time, and a second viewing, have not been kind. I’m a fan of the Bond film series, but Die Another Day is just a disreputable mess. While the action is solid, and the special effects are on point, the plot is nonsensical garbage. I’ll see if I can sort this out: Bond is captured by the enemy in a secret mission in North Korea, and from there he goes to Cuba to follow some guy named Zao, back to England to trail Gustav Graves, and then to Iceland, presumably for no reason except that the setting is a neat place to film stuff. See, I sorted the narrative out. Well, mostly. But these things don't matter to me, and shouldn’t matter to you. Halle Berry does absolutely nothing for me, but that may be due to the fact that she is a movie star, and I’m a lowly student from the Midwest. I suppose that I’m digressing, aren’t I? I mean to say that she is clearly not very good in her role as Jinx, and together with Bond they are content to trade insipid sexual innuendos throughout the film, something that was immensely annoying onw my second time through. At times, Die Another Day seems to wonder if it wants to go a completely different direction than the past films, or if it wants to pay homage to them. Frankly, I couldn’t care enough to hope for either route. I give the film credit for some fun action sequences, a rare humorous dialogue or two, and Pierce Brosnan for at least trying to make Die Another Day anything else but a chore to slog through. Unluckily for him, he isn’t successful. Try to avoid this one, people.