REVIEW: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

Extended edition? That's okay. I'll watch the movie on fast-forward to compensate.

Let’s see if this sounds familiar:

• ‘90s historical action-adventure movie.

• Based on iconic medieval English heroes who might or might not have been real, but almost certainly bore little resemblance to the legends they inspired.

• Stars an A-list American actor who can’t for the life of him figure out a British accent, and undermines him further by surrounding him with authentic Brits.

• Also stars Sean Connery as an English king with a Scottish accent, which is the kind of thing that probably starts soccer riots.

• Features a good actor playing the villain as a wild-eyed madman that even the United Nations would decide is probably not someone to lead a human rights conference.

• Godawful soundtrack written under the false belief that a trumpet fanfare actually stirs emotions in people outside a college football game.

"Excuse me. I need to find a manger and I wish to get it over with."

That’s right. If King Arthur had his First Knight, then I guess Robin Hood was the First Thief. It’s really uncanny how similar these movies are. For the most part, you could just read my review of that film, just replacing ‘Richard Gere‘ with ‘Kevin Costner.’ But if I had to watch this mess, then you at least have to read about it.

"Dude, I'm doing Shakespeare now! Loth lo hark onward yea yonder Denmark! This is awesome!"

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves starts in Jerusalem of all places, with Robin of Locksley (Costner, playing a British knight as convincingly as he played a web-fingered, urine-swilling aqua-man) imprisoned during the Third Crusade by Saladin’s forces. Trapped in a dungeon where his fellow crusaders are being tortured and executed, Robin overpowers the guards, but in order to escape alive, he’ll need to release and accept the help of a Moorish prisoner, Azeem (Morgan Freeman). Together, they ditch the dungeon and flee to England; Azeem goes along because he apparently has no better place to be than a land full of dudes at war with his people, and Robin decides that heading home during a war definitely does not constitute desertion.

"Who art thou, stranger, who can squish flies with such heroic accuracy and vigor?"

Before we go on, a short digression about accents. I think Americans are to be commended for their acceptance of Brits, Scots, Irishmen, and Australians playing classic American characters like a Revolutionary war hero (Mel Gibson in The Patriot); Batman, Commissioner Gordon, and the Joker (Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, and Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight); and that most distinctly American of roles: a crazy and evil oil baron (Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood). We’re fine with that because we like good, charismatic actors, because we’re a nation of immigrants, and because they do the damned accents. But with the shoe on the other foot, Kevin Costner attempts a British accent mainly by speaking all his lines about 10% more deliberately than he would for any of his baseball player/surfer dude/mailman/gill-man characters. I wouldn’t think he’s attempting an accent at all, except that every once in a while, he seems to mute an ’r’ or use a soft ’a.’ It’s very strange, although with Christian Slater and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (and Sean Connery, eventually, for that matter) also in the cast, it wouldn’t be right to completely single out Costner for unconvincing British accents, and maybe the clash of accents is even semi-intentional, to vilify those who are clearly British. Whatever. Suffice to say that Costner should never be allowed to play Brits or New Englanders ever again. I should also mention the great Morgan Freeman, who despite his obvious talents, plays a Moor by imitating the voice of an Egyptian professor in a 1930s Mummy movie, who warns the heroes of the terrible curse they’ve fallen under.

So this is the Lady Gaga I've heard the kids talk about so much lately.

Returning to England, they find that Robin’s father, Lord Locksley (Brian Blessed) has been deposed and murdered by the Sheriff of Nottingham (Alan Rickman), who’s collaborated with the Bishop of Hereford (Harold Innocent; “innocent,” “blessed,” and “freeman”?; is there some kind of uber-irony going on with the names here?) and the witch Mortianna (Geraldine McEwan). Yes, this movie has a witch secretly guiding the twitchy usurper. That’s right, suck it Shakespeare; you lifted all your plot devices from an earlier story, even if it took 800 years and a couple of bonehead screenwriters to properly explore that aspect of the Robin Hood legend. Rickman plays the Sheriff as the typical ’90s white guy villain: a dude who amasses influence and loyalty from his lackeys through sheer sleaziness, but who possesses no charisma, intelligence, or courage that you might think would be required for even foot soldiers to put their lives on the line for him.

"Hey, stranger."

As Robin and Azeem bumble around the English countryside and make simple work of the Sheriff’s minions, they find help from Maid Marian (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio). It’s clear why Mastrantonio was cast as Marian: she’s not British and marginally attractive at best. She fits in with her co-stars quite well. And they might as well have just hired Michelle Yeoh for all it matters, since her first appearance is as a ninja. Yes, a ninja. When Robin enters her home, checking whether his childhood friend is all right, she’s all ready to go in a full-body ninja costume, before our brave hero outduels her and the two realize who each other are. But then the Sheriff’s men ride in, and we get a wacky scene where Azeem hands Robin a telescope and sighs as Robin gets confused and thinks that the horses are right in his face. Is it highly improbable that Robin would be quite so stupid as to think that the telescope was magically warping time and space? Yes, but it gives Azeem another opportunity to urinate all over Western European culture, so it’s apparently a worthy joke before the two of them (plus an old blind guy whom I’ve exorcised from the story for the sake of keeping this review a tolerable length) scuttle off into the woods.

"I find thee enchanting, my dear. Thou art almost as feminine as I."

There, they get ambushed by a group of rogues including Little John (Nick Brimble), his young son Wulf (Daniel Newman), and Will Scarlet (that most smashingly British of all the Queen Mum’s jolly right subjects, Christian Slater). While the rogues are initially hostile, this is a great opportunity for Robin, since he has nearly all the Merry Men--save Friar Tuck, who will be introduced later so that we have enough time to properly introduce his lovable traits of constant drunkenness and hatred of Muslims--readily assembled for him. Nope, no real recruitment process or anything. He just has to beat Little John in a stick fight in the river, and all of a sudden he’s the Prince of Frickin’ Thieves.

"Hark, Wendy! Johnny doth approach, verily!"

With all the familiar characters and plot elements in place (to go along with all the new ones the screenwriters made up), the movie shows a few scenes of Robin and his men performing random derring-do against the Sheriff’s men while generic “triumphant ’90s music” swells. The one hijacked caravan that successfully fights back is Maid Marian’s (she‘s fortunate enough to get the Laurel and Hardy of Sherwood Forest), and she convinces the attackers to lead her back to Robin’s tree house village in the woods. Yes, Robin Hood and his merry men live in Sherwood Forest in tree houses, just like the Swiss Frickin’ Family Robinson. You’d think that the advantage for thieves of living in the forest is that you’re kind of mobile, not anchored to a mess of rope bridges and unnecessarily elaborate water-hauling pulley systems. Hey, back in the middle ages, it would have been nice enough to bring back paved roads and working aqueducts, but they’re about half a step away from having monkey butlers and cocoanut radios. Although apparently, for all their treehouse technology, the Europeans had not yet invented the “No Girls Allowed” rule.

"Oh, Aunt Bertha, thy ashen remains possesseth a most pleasant and smoky flavor!"

Marian hangs around with Robin for a while, suddenly getting all googly-eyed at him, realizing that she’s in love with the charming rebel. For us, this means we get about 10 or 15 minutes of Robin and his men doing nothing: they dance, they deliver a baby, they dance again. And then she’s off again back to the real world, where the Sheriff is trying to marry her, because he cannot bear to live without marrying one among the 52% most beautiful women in England. But when the blind old man tries to ride a horse into the forest to warn Robin, he inadvertently gets his ass tracked. Duh. Maybe there’s a reason we don’t generally advise blind people to ride horses in dangerous situations. In any event, this allows the Sheriff and his terrifying new Celtic mercenaries--they fight just as incompetently as anyone, but they wear antlers and crap, so they’re scary--assault the treehouses. This is truly the nadir for the heroes, as hundreds… well, dozens… well, ones of characters who we don’t know fall courageously in battle. But even amidst the carnage, Gimli, er, Little John manages to rescue his wife as the Sheriff’s men start setting the trees ablaze. Atop the trees, they run off down a rope ladder, and it makes one wonder just how extensive a network of treehouses these people have if a man and his wife, carrying their infant son, can escape across a bridge at the treeline from swarms of enemies on the ground. They must be some kinda elven Vietcong or something’.

"Nope, sorry, you're too late. We did Dungeons and Dragons a few reviews ago."

I’m sorry, but I’m running out of gas here. This movie certainly has a lot of action, but it’s so generic that it’s hard to describe. Suffice to say that after Christian Slater pulls his, “I’m your friend! I’m a traitor! I’m your long-lost-half-brother!” schtick on Robin Hood, the gang all gets back together for one last big bash. They enter the castle courtyard disguised in long robes and hoods, and fortunately, the guards don’t notice the increased population of cautiously-moving Gregorian monks and plague victims. Suffice to say that the final battle--to rescue several of Robin’s captured men from hanging, and more importantly, Maid Marian from a sham marriage--involves several diverse elements:

• Alan Rickman reciting lines like he’s playing a drunk Hans Gruber at 4 in the morning (for both Hans and Alan).
• Robin waiting until his people are actually hanging until he shoots out the rope with an arrow… on the second try. Hey Robin, your people are calling. The parts of their bodies that are not a completely broken neck thank you for saving them.
• People continuing to light their arrowheads on fire, thus guaranteeing another hundred or so years of historical action movies making a big deal of this practice.
• Beer barrels exploding like Sears washing machines after being struck by said flaming arrows. The likelihood of this happening? Low enough that I doubt even the Mythbusters would humor the possibility for the sake of filling up 20 minutes of show time.
  

That thar solar eclipse is kinda close this year.

Of course, once we have the big battle with all the good guys against all the bad guys, we need to scale down to a fight involving the hero and lead villain while the heroine watches on. In this case, Robin races against time to stop the Sheriff from marrying Marian. It’s very important to the Sheriff that he marry Marian, because according to the witch, legends say that “he who marries the gaunt American maiden shall be invincible against the unstoppable peasant revolt.” Or something like that. You’ve got to admire someone who takes marriage so seriously. Naturally, Robin manages to burst in through the tower window just in time to interrupt the ceremony, and we get a rousing swordfight between Robin and the Sheriff. And apparently Robin is as good with a sword in this version of the story as he is with a bow, because he struggles against the Sheriff, who’s spent the duration of the movie bickering with an old hag and muttering vague orders. But let me end the suspense: this is not Arlington Road. The good guys win. But with great sacrifice. Oh, wait. No, there really wasn’t. I think the blind guy might have died, but I wasn’t really paying attention. The Sheriff really sucked at his job.

"See? THIS is why we had the 'No Girls Allowed' rule for so long! Damn ACLU!"

And since this movie can only be classified as a comedy, there’s only one way to end it: with a wedding. Robin and Marian tie the knot, destined to produce many early-’90s children. But wait, we have a surprise guest, arriving just before the ceremony is sealed! Why, it’s none other than King Richard the Lionheart (Sean Connery), returning from war! He’s apparently not at all ticked at Robin for abandoning the Crusades once he escaped the prison in Jerusalem. No, he’s rather happy that Robin has stopped the Sheriff from rising further and taking control of England. Dude, I think Perez Hilton would have been more convincing as a man capable of conquering England. Maybe the Sheriff would have gotten traction by pointing out that the king was a Scot and the populist hero was a Californian.

If somebody says, "There can be only one!" I quit.

And with the credits rolling, we’ve got one more arrowhead to the balls for the audience: the debut of the song “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You” by Bryan Adams. Yes, Bryan Adams was assigned to write a theme song for an adventure movie about one of England’s greatest legendary heroes, and this was the song he came up with. At least when Aerosmith did the theme song for Armageddon, the band had the word “Aero” in its name, which was vaguely fitting. And that Celine Dion song fittingly made me want to drown after hearing it 800 times in one year of high school. But this… Ugh.

See, I told you that Sean Connery shows up at the end.

After watching this movie, I have two conclusions: I’m relatively poor, and Kevin Costner is very rich. I’ll let you judge who robbed whom.

REVIEW: The Worst of Bond, Part 1: You Only Live Twice

Jack Bauer, however, lives as many times as he damn well wants.

I’m a fan of the James Bond film franchise; I just don’t like that many James Bond films. Everyone has their favorites, and I gravitate towards the few that have at least a hint of seriousness and believability to them, and which actually depict Bond doing the occasional spy stuff, not just acting like a horny college student and machine-gunning bad guys in alternating scenes. Thunderball, For Your Eyes Only, The Living Daylights, License to Kill, GoldenEye, and Casino Royale are all good or great in my book. They all manage to work in humor (well, okay, that wasn’t Dalton’s forte in his pre-Hot Fuzz days), but also had actual espionage, detective work, and covert operations involved. There’s a bunch more films that are silly, but mostly pretty enjoyable.


Then there’s the dregs. And no discussion of the dregs of the series can begin without the nadir of the Sean Connery era, You Only Live Twice.

If that's Sean Connery, I'm Arnold Schwarzenegger.

After the requisite gun barrel opening (back in the days when Bond was wobbly-kneed and wore that awful hat), we cut to a space capsule in orbit around the Earth. Don’t worry, we’re not to Moonraker yet; Bond (Sean Connery, if I haven’t made that clear yet) does all his work planetside. It’s an American capsule, and out of nowhere, another ship appears, barely detectable by radar. It bears no markings, and as it approaches the capsule, its bow opens up and the whole thing envelops the smaller capsule. The Americans blame the Russians, and the Russians deny knowing anything about the mystery ship. Gee, I’m glad the Bond series managed to wait an entire five movies after this one before completely and utterly ripping off the concept I just described. Except I guess that means I’m ripping on The Spy Who Loved Me, which I actually liked. Whatever.

"Odd. You taste like... David Niven?!?!"

For no comprehensible reason whatsoever except that the Brits are smart and the Americans are dumb cowboys, it’s the British who suspect a third party is to blame, and it’s their responsibility to investigate the suspected landing site of the ship, which is near Japan. And of course, their entire investigation is to be carried out by Mr. James Bond 007; hey, with all those billions going to Q Division, you can’t afford many actual field agents. He’s in Hong Kong, in bed with a Chinese girl and making inane observations about how Chinese girls taste like Peking Duck or some such crap. It’s like a Seinfeld routine performed by a bored Scotsman. But the girl betrays him, folding his bed back into the wall and bringing in a guy to machine gun him. When the cops arrive, they pull him out, apparently dead, and they observe that at least he died on the job. Wait, so even the Hong Kong police know who Bond is? I know Hong Kong was under British control at the time, but doesn‘t being a celebrity throw a monkey wrench into his “secret“ agent status? And is he really such a horse’s ass that British police officers, while the world is on the brink of nuclear war, are making dirty jokes about their country’s greatest hero getting killed? Well… come to think of it, he was kind of a douche bag sometimes.

American: "They spelled 'color' wrong!" Brit: "They spelled 'Technicolour' wrong!"

The opening titles feature an execrable theme from Nancy Sinatra and a shocker of a credit: Screenplay by Roald Dahl, as in the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory author. As someone who likes James Bond movies with at least a tenuous connection to something resembling a skewed version of reality, I at least appreciate the film for giving me fair warning.

"I'm here for my senior portrait."

We see Bond’s naval funeral aboard a destroyer, and his sheet-wrapped body dumped into the ocean; a mysterious figure watches from the shore, apparently verifying that Bond is dead. Which he’d be able to do a lot better if the body wasn’t cocooned, but I’m not one to tell him how to do his job. As the body falls underwater, it’s recovered by a pair of divers and brought aboard a British submarine. They cut the body bag open and, lo and behold, there’s Bond alive (and in uniform), breathing through an aqualung. As M (who apparently feels the need to have both an office and reception aboard the sub as if people are going to just wander on in) is quick to explain, creating the elaborate ruse that Bond is dead will help prevent his enemies from coming after him as he goes about his mission. I guess we’ve already established that Bond’s cover gets blown as often as the rest of him is, so that makes sense. But if all you were going to show at the funeral was a wrapped-up body getting dumped in the ocean, why couldn’t it have just been a big bag of flour or something? Couldn’t you just have used a fake body and given Bond an elaborate disguise, like a moustache and glasses? No wonder tax rates in the UK are so high. Regardless of how preposterous it is that MI-6 would stage a highly public funeral to fake the death of a supposedly-secret agent, this quickly-forgotten gimmick is what the entire title of the movie hinges on. For the title, they could have either embraced the “faked death” theme, or they could have embraced the Japanese theme by calling it Super Fast Sean Bond Connery with Much Honor Time or You Only Set Up Us the Bomb Twice, so I think they made the right call.

"Her Majesty's government can wait. Can anyone here direct me to the nearest used panties vending machine?"

Bond is sent to Tokyo to contact MI-6’s contact, an expatriate named Henderson, who has been doing his own investigation into who might have been responsible for the mystery spacecraft and where their launch point is. And since the producers spent a lot of money to film on location in Japan, they’re going to milk the country for everything it’s worth. The initial meeting with Henderson’s representative, the supposedly-hot chick Aki (supposed actress Akiko Wakabayashi, who I just hope had the excuse of learning her lines phonetically) takes place at a sumo wrestling match. Later, we’ll see Japanese bath house prostitutes and ninjas. I guess that since Roger Moore wasn’t in the series yet, they stopped short of having Sailor Moon help defend Bond from Gamera.

"This was not what I had in mind."

Aki takes Bond to Henderson, who’s actually Blofeld. Or not. The actor, Charles Gray, wound up playing Bond’s arch-nemesis only two films later. I guess the fact that he’s on-screen for about 40 seconds before an assassin gets to him helped prevent people from remembering him too well. Bond chases the assassin on foot across Henderson’s estate, and it’s a good thing that the bad guy has gout or something, because it’s not much of a chase. Bond overpowers him, then puts on his heavy overcoat and surgical mask (???) to impersonate him back at his getaway car. The bad guys drive him to Osato Chemicals; man, I never would have thought that a chemical company in a spy movie could be up to something nefarious. Bond sneaks in, beats up a bad guy, and takes the opportunity to crack open a safe. How? Well, of course he went to meet Henderson with a safecracking kit in his pocket, silly. Carefully watch the scene where Bond hurries to crack the safe while a pair of guards wander on by and nearly discover him; if you can explain to me where they are in relation to him, I congratulate you on mastering four-dimensional physics. Opening the safe sounds an alarm, and Bond has only time to grab a few documents before rushing out. He’s shot at the whole way, but fortunately, Aki drives by to pick him up and drive him to safety. I’ll ignore the question of how she knew where he was, because I have bigger fish to fry. Or serve raw for $20 a plate, I should say.

"Don't get me wrong, Sean. You would make a fine Fu Manchu. I just don't believe you can slip into the role of a Japanese man the way I can."

Aki, the movie's designated driver, takes Bond to Tiger Tanaka (Tetsuro Tamba), the head of the Japanese secret service. He and Bond hit it off. Tanaka’s a fellow womanizer, and apparently Japan has such an incredible secret service budget that the man has his own private train system running below Tokyo, complete with hot babe engineers/geishas. What’s more, this guy is the head of the Japanese secret service, so he’s actually equivalent to M in rank. I guess that Japan’s such an awesome place that even administrators responsible for entire intelligence services can be playboys. No wonder all the pothead college guys love Japan so much.

"Now you see why they call me 'Tiger,' Mr. Bond."

While Tanaka starts analyzing the photo Bond stole, trying to figure out which coastline it shows, Bond goes right back to Osato Chemicals, masquerading as a businessman and meeting with the company’s owner, Mr. Osato (Teru Shimada), and his assistant, Helga Brandt (Karin Dor). They talk about, uh, nothing as far as I could gather. But Bond does manage to blow his cover, AGAIN, by bringing his Walther PPK with him, which Osato discovers by secretly filming him with X-rays. So once again, Bond gets shot at on his way out of Osato Chemicals, and once again, Aki drives up in her convertible and saves his Scottish ass. Hey Bond, how’s that faked death doing you? Keeping all the enemies off your back? No? Wow, thought that plan was foolproof. And fortunately, the Japanese secret service has extensive R&D funds for weapons you’d almost never ever need to use, so they have a big helicopter with a magnet to pick up the pursuing car full of bad guys and dump them in the ocean.

One thing the Japanese really do better than us: valet parking.

Wanting to learn more about the liquid oxygen (a key ingredient for rocket propulsion) that Osato has been importing, Bond heads to the company’s docks and gets IMMEDIATELY ambushed by bad guys. What is wrong with him? He might as well go everywhere in a spandex jumpsuit and a cape; it won’t hurt his ability to go around incognito. He’s captured and interrogated by Brandt, an interrogation that takes about a minute before it turns to sex. That didn’t take long. But the villainess either didn’t think Mr. Bond lived up to the hype, or she isn’t taking her job of getting information out of him very seriously, because she immediately tries to kill him by taking him high up in a light plane, trapping him with a spring-loaded tray table, dropping a grenade full of purple gas, and parachuting out while the plane goes down. Yeah, I’m pretty sure I’d have read a lot more books if I had only 1960s movies to watch. Anyway, it’s a Northwest plane, so Bond’s able to break the tray table like balsa wood and land the plane sort-of safely.

If you hated all the shaky-cam close-up action scenes in Quantum of Solace, I've got just the movie for you.

The villainous transnational organization SPECTRE is behind all this nonsense, and its leader, Blofeld (Donald Pleasance, attempting no particular accent), is none too happy about his lackey, Mr. Osato, failing to kill Mr. Bond. He feeds Ms. Brandt to his piranha fish as a warning to Osato. I’ll bet Blofeld loses a lot of people to the piranha that he doesn’t mean to sacrifice, though. Just to get into his office, you have to cross a railing-free, two-foot wide bridge that goes right over the tank. I’d say that even if Blofeld hadn’t dropped the trap door and dunked her in, there was a good 33% chance she’d have slipped.

"Dammit, woman, where the hell are my pretzels and ginger ale?"

Back with the swinging Japanese super-agent, Bond sends for Q and “Little Nellie.” Little Nellie is a tiny, easy-to-assemble helicopter (must have gotten it at Ikea) that Bond has apparently used to some effect before, although not in any of the films. Before Bond goes off scouting out the island that Tanaka says appeared in the stolen documents, Q gives Bond a quick overview of the new features, since Bond already knows how to fly the damn thing: machine guns, rocket launchers, heat-seeking missiles, aerial mines (?), and rear-firing flamethrowers (???). Wait a minute, those aren’t new features, those are all the weapons on the helicopter. So I guess we’re to presume that Little Nellie went from unarmed reconnaissance craft to flying death in one single upgrade. In any event, Bond goes to scout out the island, wearing a helmet with a big camera lens on the front; I have no idea what the camera’s for except to cement this scene as the most humiliating of Sean Connery’s career. That’s right, First Knight’s Starfleet uniforms and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’s scenes with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hulk be damned.

"Bond to base. Will need three more tickets to continue with ride, over."

Flying over the island, he initially finds nothing. But fortunately, the bad guys send four machine gun-firing helicopters after him; after all, we wouldn’t want Bond to actually have to think about the possibility that he’s found the right target. (Nor would we want to give the audience time to realize that all the work Bond did since recovering those documents was apparently pointless.) There’s four helicopters, so what do you want to bet that Bond gets to use each of his weapon systems exactly once? (The machine guns are useless, so they don’t count.) That’s what I like in my Bond movies. A hero who serves purely as a delivery system for the tech nerds’ overpowered weapons, a guy who is skilled enough to fly a helicopter and wear a dopey-looking helmet, but otherwise needs only press clearly-labeled buttons when enemy aircraft wander into his weapons’ sights. Even the flamethrower, something I think tends not to be equipped on aircraft too often, gets to kill a bad guy in a Crusader Rabbit-quality special effects shot.

"Avenge me, Jet Jaguar!"

Time grows short: a Russian space capsule has been captured by the mysterious spaceship, leading the Commies to think the Americans are actually behind it, and if the soon-to-be-launched American capsule is taken, the Americans promise to start war with Russia. Because while the Americans can accept losing one space capsule to the evil fake Russians, two is just crossing the line.

"You will be pleased to know, Master, that we have cornered the world market in cheezburgers."

Now that we’ve established that something’s definitely going on in the island, Tanaka prepares an operation to sneak himself, Bond, and an army of secret service ninjas into the island village’s population so that they can look for the bad guys’ base unnoticed. In addition to training as a ninja--”Hey, thanks guys, but my people have already trained me in combat, and our side kicked your side’s ASS in World War II.”--it’s absolutely essential that Bond blend in. So he gets a bit of makeup so that he looks Japanese (well, more like the typical Western actor playing Fun Manchu, but I guess it’s close enough if you squint). But in Tanaka’s perverse world, blending in will also require that Bond actually get married, for real, to a Japanese girl.

"Good! Now you are ready when Blofeld's men come at you with pointed sticks. Next, we prepare for when the escalate and deploy bananas."

OK, Mr. Tanaka. We need to have an intervention here. I know your operation isn’t terribly fiscally responsible or efficient. You keep a private subway system for your own personal use, and you spend money on outdated (throwing stars) or spectacularly impractical (magnet-hauling helicopters) weapons. And that’s okay; it’s not like North Korea was being run a whole lot better, and it’s not like Russia saw you as a big target at this point. You could afford to waste time and taxpayer money on useless crap. But now that you ACTUALLY need to do something in defense of world peace, you’ve decided that the mission hinges on Bond actually, REALLY getting married to one of your agents so that his cover is authentic. I think it’s time for you to step down, Mr. Tanaka, in favor of someone more qualified to lead the defense of Japan: Shigeru Miyamoto, Sephiroth, Ultraman, Jet Jaguar, Ken (any of them), Pikachu, that freak who eats all the hot dogs, and The Vapors are all more viable options. What’s more, while Bond’s doing his ninja training, he’s attacked by an enemy agent who’s infiltrated the camp. If Tanaka had half a brain cell left, he’d know this meant that the bad guys had infiltrated his operation enough that a marriage ceremony wasn’t going to fool them, but dammit, Operation: This Marriage is a Hollow Lie is going to proceed no matter what.

"So how long is it until you girls get back into bikinis and start washing my naughty bits again?"

With the big day approaching, Bond finally boinks Aki, but as they sleep, an assassin sneaks in and tries to drip poison down onto Bond. Aki rolls over onto him at the wrong time and winds up taking it for him and dying. This leaves the movie briefly, distressingly, without a babe. And Bond’s pissed about it; while his unseen fiancee is on her way to the wedding, Bond pouts like a little bitch because he thinks his real/fake wife is going to be ugly. Fortunately, she (Mie Hama) is not, and she’s got the ridiculous name, Kissy Suzuki, to prove it. Unfortunately, she’s a committed spy (pretty much the only one in Japan) and isn’t interested in Bond’s advances for the time being, just on stopping SPECTRE.

"Um, sir, isn't putting all our flat panel TVs so close to the launch pad going to void the warranty?"

Bond and Kissy discover that a lake in a dormant volcano is actually not a lake at all: it’s a retractable roof for an underground facility from which the evil rockets are being launched. Bond sneaks into the facility, and tries to board the craft disguised as an astronaut, but Blofeld notices him on a security camera and realizes that he’s holding his air conditioner incorrectly (Hey, I’m just reporting here). Taken captive, Bond asks Blofeld if he can have a smoke while he watches footage of the evil spaceship about to capture the American capsule on the monitors. (So which spaceship did they send up there to film their own evil spaceship from a side angle?) Blofeld hasn’t watched any of the previous Bond movies, apparently, so he doesn’t know that the cigarettes are actually mini-rocket launchers. Bond blasts a guard to create a distraction and opens the roof to allow Tanaka’s ninjas to pour in and wage a huge battle against the SPECTRE thugs. It certainly looks like the filmmakers spent a lot of money, by 1967 standards, on the fight inside the base. But from this scene, and its clone in The Spy Who Loved Me, all I can gather is that both the Japanese and SPECTRE should have just spent the money to get everyone a handful of grenades, because every single time they‘re thrown, the grenades wind up killing three enemies. Forget the throwing star and sword crap, and focus on just bombing the bejeezus out of everybody.

"Did you see that film? Mike Myers does a terrible impression of me." "I know. It's the same thing with me and that zero Darrell Hammond. I hate him almost as much as I hate Alex Trebek."

Fortunately, the evil spaceship has a built-in self-destruct device, so after Bond escapes Blofeld and kills a few more perfunctory henchmen, he reaches the control room again and blows the thing up before it can reach the American capsule. Blofeld was foresighted enough to also equip the base with a self-destruct mechanism as well, one that sets off a series of explosions from random areas of the base that clearly don’t contain any actual explosives. Both Blofeld and the surviving good guys flee the base in opposite directions as the whole place goes up, with the volcano apparently even going active and spewing lava. Not really sure how Blofeld managed to arrange that. Regardless, Japanese-ified James Bond and Kissy swim out to sea and climb into an inflatable life raft that appears out of nowhere just as Tanaka and the rest of the ninjas disappear into nowhere. They start to make out until, wouldn’t you know, the British sub pops up from right underneath their raft and M demands that Bond be debriefed immediately. Um, yeah, not the same way Kissy would have done it.

Ninjas: Even they have reserves.

If it sounds like this movie was a bit short on plot, then I communicated it poorly, because it actually has no plot whatsoever. Bond movies are usually high on style and short on substance, and I can accept that. But man, if it weren’t for all the travelogue stuff about how great Japan is, this whole film would just be a series of vignettes where Bond goes somewhere, gets immediately ambushed by bad guys, and gets bailed out by either a Japanese agent or a Q gadget. SPECTRE’s plot to have the Americans and Soviets destroy each other, then fill the superpower vaccuum, is pretty darn goofy. As pure camp, I guess You Only Live Twice is watchable, but be sure to remember this movie and Diamonds are Forever next time you bash the Roger Moore movies for being too silly.

"Dammit! My Russian doppleganger from the future is messing with my mojo!"

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must be off to practice being more Japanese so that I can exponentially improve my greatness in all aspects of life. For great justice!