Bond's second unit crew: Nobody does it better

My current home town of Auckland has been in a strict lockdown for a while now, so I haven't been allowed to watch the new James Bond film yet. I literally saw the first Daniel Craig Bond on my wedding day, but I still have to wait for the last.

A global pandemic teaches you some goddamn patience, so I'll see it when I see it. It's been surprisingly easy to dodge most of the spoilers, but I do expect it to be awkwardly mawkish in the way the Craig films have all indulged in. Especially because it's his last - they put out a documentary about it being his final Bond that was one hour of total cringe.

But I don't care about that, because I don't judge Bond films by their plots or their acting or anything like that. I only ever judge them on the second unit work.

It's the crazy stunt work, the action scenes, the fucking injection of adrenaline that comes with every movie. The absolute mad bastards who throw themselves off cliffs and flip cars in ways they shouldn't be flipped. The fight teams that make the punches feel like they land, and the acrobats who fly through the air. The cameraperson who gets rid down to the dirt in a high speed car chase and delivers shots of power and fury.

(It goes without saying that no footage, no matter how spectacular - is worth any actual human pain and suffering, and all this insanity shown on screen must follow strict safety protocols in real life.)

The rest of the film can be as arch or grim or hard boiled as it likes, as long as it's built on a solid foundation of meat and potatoes action filming. And even an objectively bad film like Moonraker has that astonishing parachute fight (and a great villain, and fucking Jaws).

They started getting into the CGI too much in the later Bronsons, and the series suffered. There was an obvious course correction with Casino Royale and the physicality and soaring heights of the opening chase scene, but later films still had moments of confusing nonsense.

And now the Bond films have lost some of their reputation for the greatest stunts in the world to Tom bloody Cruise, who is genuinely doing great things for cinema by strapping himself to the side of a fucking plane. 

But when the real artists of mayhem work with the best craftspeople of film on a Bond film, nobody really does it better.