Amazon.com video review:
Sean Connery casts a long shadow over the James Bond legacy. He created the movie persona
and starred in six of the first seven features, all but establishing the cool cold warrior as the
world's most suave secret agent. The six titles in MGM's third collection celebrate the Connery Bond
with three of his classics, including From Russia with Love, 007's second and perhaps finest
outing. A blond, buff Robert Shaw plays Bond's most ruthless nemesis, and Lotte Lenya and the great
Pedro Armindáriz costar in this sleek, high-energy trip through the Iron Curtain. Connery
travels to the Far East in You Only Live Twice, which introduces the international criminal
conspiracy SPECTRE and its cat-loving mastermind, Blofeld (Donald Pleasence). After a brief
retirement, Connery returned for Diamonds Are Forever, his final "official" appearance in the
Bond series (15 years later he played Bond for a rival studio's Never Say Never Again). This
more tongue-in-cheek adventure takes 007 to Las Vegas, where he battles Blofeld (this time played by
Charles Gray) and his minions--namely, a pair of fey, sardonic henchmen and a team of bikini-clad
karate killers.
Octopussy, a colorful cold war thriller and one of Roger Moore's better Bond outings, stars
Louis Jourdan as a corrupt Afghan prince and Maud Adams (making her second Bond appearance) as the
ringmaster of an all-babe traveling circus team that unknowingly carries a nuclear bomb. Christopher
Walken hams it up under a platinum-blond hairdo while his Amazon bodyguard, Grace Jones, growls
through A View to a Kill, a silly but often visually impressive adventure that made it
obvious Moore was too old and stiff to carry on the Bond legacy. The torch was passed to Timothy
Dalton in The Living Daylights, an attempt to clear away the camp elements of Moore's
portrayal and return to a lean, hard-edged spy thriller for the post-cold war era. It lacks the
larger-than-life characters and spectacle of previous Bond pictures, but Dalton was a tough,
ruthless 007 and a worthy inheritor of the legacy, which was then passed on to Pierce Brosnan.
The DVD editions of the films each feature audio commentary by the director and key members of the
crew, "making of" documentaries, and a host of stills, TV spots, trailers, and other supplements.
--Sean Axmaker
Amazon.com video review:
Timothy Dalton made his 007 debut in the lean, mean mode of
Sean Connery, doing away with the pun-filled camp of Roger Moore's
final outings. He establishes his persona right from the gritty pre-credits sequence, in which he hangs from a speeding truck as it barrels
down narrow cobblestone streets, battles an assassin mano a mano, and
lands in the arms of a bikinied babe. This James Bond is ruthless,
tough, and romantic. The Living Daylights, set during the thaw
of the cold war, begins with the defection of Russian KGB General
Koskov (Jeroen Krabbé) and his revelation of a Soviet plot to
eliminate Britain's secret agent force. Assigned to eliminate Koskov's
Soviet boss (John Rhys-Davies, cutting a memorable figure in his brief
appearance), Bond uncovers a conspiracy involving Koskov and an
American arms dealer (Joe Don Baker). Maryam d'Abo makes a fine Bond
girl as Koskov's beautiful cellist girlfriend, a classy
innocent who soon loses her naive blush and shows her pluck. The
villains are lackluster--Krabbé is a clown and Baker a blowhard--and Dalton hadn't yet mastered the delivery of the trademark quips,
but it's a sleek script with a no-nonsense attitude. Veteran series
director John Glen's action scenes have never been better--especially
the show-stopping mid-air battle on the net of a speeding cargo plane--and he returns the series to the smart, rough, high-energy adventures
that made the Bond reputation. --Sean Axmaker
