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This movie barely gets four stars. Don't get me wrong though, this is definitely a good classic movie and worth a watch, but after having rewatched it recently, I think I have some further thoughts on this movie that differs a bit from the norm that I'd like to put down.
What this movie has in spades is nice dialogue with great acting and casting to deliver it all. The final script here that they delivered was definitely excellent, and the Bond girl here is a mega-cutie who is actually refreshingly intelligent and mature. Unfortunately though, the achilles' heel of this movie is the action most of the time. It's just... It just doesn't fit the script we got for this movie and creates a bit of ludonarrative dissonance. The story and characters set the viewer up for a Bond movie with more grounded action (note that I said, "more," not, "completely"), but deliver that more grounded action, this Bond movie does not. Normally it wouldn't be such a problem, but since this IS a Bond movie, we're gonna get a lot of action, so it tends to really impact the movie's quality here.
The action has two very simple issues. One, it's full of plot holes, and two, it's not just unrealistic, it's WILDLY unrealistic. Bond here is gunning down absolute hordes of Russian soldiers as they mindlessly rush through every damn door conceivable like a bunch of lemmings wielding AK-47s. And hey, they're mooks, and this is a James Bond film. I get it. But damn, man, there IS a limit here, and when that limit is passed, the action just starts to feel like it was ripped out of a scene of Spaceballs or something.
And again, I STILL would not have minded nearly as much if this was a more fun campy Bond film like Die Another Day, but you have to choose. If you want to do fun camp, I'm fully there for it. If you want to do a more serious and grounded film, I'm also fully there for that too. You can't do a serious and grounded plot though along with campy-as-fuck action. It just doesn't work. Or at least, doesn't work very well anyway. Now, thankfully, the action mostly fixes itself towards the end of the movie as things shift to more one-on-one fights, and with them, we see how good this movie could have been if the action focused more on that more grounded and contained action, but alas.
So, see this film absolutely, but know that the action is going to let the movie down some... Tank scene was pretty funny though.
