Thunderball is the 4th movie in the James Bond saga and the fourth time Sean Connery plays the leading role – he does a good job as usual.
This movie gets off to an interesting start, with a cross-dressing agent trying to trick James Bond, who kills him and takes time to throw some flower over his body before running away and escaping from the rooftop via jetpack to his bag-of-tricks car. We then begin to hear the Thunderball theme tune by Tom Jones, all within the first 5 minutes.
It’s good to see Desmond Llewelyn back as Q, around the 1 hour mark.
This movie is a bit slower, more monotonous and more one-dimensional and yet still messier than Goldfinger, but not devastatingly so.
The main antagonist in this movie is Emilio Largo (Spectre’s “Number 2” agent) played fairly well by Adolfo Celi although he’s probably a bit podgy and effeminate for such an active top agent in such a physically demanding role.
There are several women in this movie but none get significant enough screen time or deliver a significant enough performance to be particularly worth mentioning here, although it’s good to see the return of Martine Beswick after the strong impression she made in her minor role (in the gypsy girls’ cat-fight) in From Russia With Love – two Bond movies ago.
The Patriot starts off seeming like a B movie in terms of cinematography, script detail and acting quality – seemingly worse than his worst early movie (Marked For Death). But it picks up and becomes a watchable movie with a mildly engaging plot, some decent scenes and a fair quality of work from the main man, Steven Seagal.
Within the first few minutes, it reeks of him not being challenged in the slightest way as he runs rampant with his own style of acting and storytelling. While there are advantages to this, in how he can unabatedly bring his visions and persona to life in the fullest form, there are of course downsides to such lack of critical feedback.
It starts to get a bit spicy within the first 10 minutes, then it deflates, then we get a bit of a plot twist as the core concept unravels.
Camilla Belle plays Steven Seagal’s androgynous-looking child in this movie. I honestly couldn’t tell if they were playing his son or his daughter until I looked it up.
Seagal drops a truth bomb or two in this movie, for example on the topic of western medicine vs alternative ways – at first I wondered how he got away with that, but it soon became apparent that it was little more than a bait & switch, as it proceeded to push modern western contagion theory, military enforced quarantine culture, and urgent blind acceptance of injectable cures. Add to that, how this movie also encourages its audience mistake patriotism for terrorism, then what we ultimately have, is 90 minutes of typical Hollywood filth, on a B movie budget!
We’ve already Steven Seagal go from skinny in his first few movies, to a stronger build in Under Siege, to getting chubby after that. Now he’s clearly gained weight on another level for this movie since his last one (Fire Down Below). He tried to hide his belly under a long trench coat in the opening scene here, but he’s not fooling anyone with that. He also took a break for a few years after this stinker, before coming back strong with Exit Wounds in 2001, so I guess he was going through a difficult time in his personal life around about when this movie was made and for some years after. Or maybe he just felt guilty about the shameful aspects of this movie, and entered a bout of depression?
Seagal divorced Kelly LeBrock in 1996 – the same year as he got written out of Executive Decision after a dispute behind the scenes – then he had mild success with The Glimmer Man (1996) and a little less success with Fire Down Below (1997) before making The Patriot (1998) under the wing of his own production company in partnership with some others. Then he took 3 years off, and came back strong with Exit Wounds co-starring DMX, Anthony Anderson, Michael Jai White and Eva Mendes.
Honestly, The Patriot is watchable – it’s a shame about its malevolent intent, but if you can overlook that and try to enjoy the movie, it’s not too bad if you’re bored and haven’t seen it before or recently enough to remember much about it. I won’t be in any hurry to rewatch it, but several years down the line I might forget almost everything about The Patriot and then be simultaneously mildly entertained and disgusted by it all over again – who knows.
Steven Seagal stars in this movie as a hotshot senior bomb squad technician who doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty and has a very casual borderline-delusional shallowly-serious demeanour & stride like even bombs & bullets can’t touch him.
Terrible Irish accents from Dennis Hopper and Michael Halsey are almost comical.
Oh and it’s a terror-themed movie in 2001 – what a surprise.
Tom Sizemore co-stars in this movie, as possibly the main character – a detective trying to track down the Irish terror cell. Dennis Hopper plays the main baddie. Rappers Nas and Ice-T also take minor roles in this movie. And Jaime Pressly (star of Poison Ivy III) plays a major role, as a captured member of the terror group. Joe Spano (the FBI guy from early seasons of NCIS) plays the police captain responsible for managing Seagal’s and Sizemore’s characters.
Seagal has a big belly already in this movie, making him hobble slowly when he tries to walk fast, and his action work is significantly reduced from previous movies to the point where he’s not even the clear number 1 star of the show any more. Sizemore is kind of the main guy in this movie, based on screen time and acting talent. And in the closing credits, Dennis Hopper is listed 2nd, so Seagal is officially deemed only the 3rd main character in this movie, which is weird since it portrays him as some kind of untouchable hotshot throughout, and the main hero at the end, as if it were just another show based around him, but lacking in screen time and action work compared to what we’re used to from his other movies.
The penultimate ten minutes, when the drama moves over to City Hall, is pretty poor to say the least, reminiscent of Seagal’s worst ever movies, even though prior to that things were pretty captivating, and in the very final 5 or 10 minutes things pick up a little bit as Seagal and Sizemore try to defuse a bomb each at different ends of the building. Although the very last few minutes, from when Seagal focuses on his own task, to when the movie ends, that stretch is barely watchable – it’s 99% suspense and white noise, very little actually happening.
Even though this movie is a bit of a cheap mess, its cast quality, acting quality, genre, pace of action, and its general atmosphere, make it an OK movie in my eyes, relatively speaking, if we can forgive its underlying motives which are hard to avoid in Hollywood, hence relatively speaking. It’s no worse than most of Seagal’s early movies prior to Under Siege (1992). Indeed it’s about equal to Above the Law (1988), Hard To Kill (1990), and Out For Justice (1991). And it’s not nearly as bad as Seagal’s worst early movie, which was unequivocally Marked For Death (1990) in my humble opinion.
This movie is thoroughly entertaining – it’s one of Jackie’s slightly more gritty performances but still provides great action for his usual fanbase just with the omission of the usual comedic edge. The only letdown is the socio-political message being pushed by this movie. That aspect of it really stinks. Still, Jackie holds it down very well so it doesn’t upset the movie too much. We’re treated to a very strong performance by Pierce Brosnan too, as an Irish politician and former IRA leader who has to defend his farm-come-castle from an angry elderly Chinaman who happens to be ex special forces – a role played flawlessly by Jackie Chan with the help of a great all-round movie production.
It’s slightly minimal on plot aside from the core concept – hardly as many twists & turns as The Matrix – but that’s fine. It focuses on one theme – a slowly developing scenario – and does it exceedingly well.
We’ve previously seen how fantastic a movie can be when a top martial arts movie star teams up with a former James Bond, as happened when Van Damme worked with Roger Moore on The Quest (1996). The Foreigner is no exception to this trend – Jackie Chan makes a great team with Pierce Brosnan here, only this time they are adversaries.
There’s a good amount of combat but this movie, but the entertainment value comes more from the story. Action wise, it’s not nearly so complex or grandiose as James Bond, but it’s got a good amount of simple action throughout. Script wise, it’s a very simple story, well executed. Cast wise, there are several strong characters in this movie.
Rumour says Jackie had been craving a more serious romantic or dramatic role (minus the comedy) for a long time. Now that he’s finally had one, we can see why. He’s an outstanding actor. It’s a very moving movie. This follows the pattern of his first few American movies, where he wasn’t permitted to choreograph his fight scenes in the ways he knew would work best, because the directors couldn’t think beyond trying to imitate the old established style of screen combat, but when Jackie eventually gained enough authority to do his own thing, the world loved it, and I hope those early directors held their heads in shame.
