Sean Connery vs James Bond (2022 TV Movie) User Reviews

You can live twice.

[ulicknormanowen · 9/10 · 8 April 2024]

To shed the image of the most famous secret agent in the world was not such an easy task ; the actor had to undergo psychiatry (and other methods) to come to term with his true identity.

Sean Connery was a fascinating actor and this doc does him justice: he did not stand to be called James Bond,except if it were a child .He was conscious that it was an unheard of phenomenon -which still carries on today - ,and was furious when he realized he had signed a contract which was not so lucrative as people generally thought (Roger Moore made much more money than him afterwards ,and on a "you only live twice" poster ,his name was not even mentioned !)

But this clever man saw the danger :to be stuck up in a role ;many actors and actresses were not able to get over it ;he did, and he has all the credit. At the beginning ,what's bred in the bone comes out in the flesh : in 'the woman of straw " ,he wears the same suit as in "Goldfinger" .

His sheet anchor was director Sidney Lumet who gave him a role which would be his very favorite : "the hill" ,a settlement of scores with his time in the British Navy and his Bond-rock of Sysiphus ; later he would completely destroy his sexy macho image in the absorbing "the offense " ; Two hustonesque works -even though the latter was directed by Huston followed :"the lion and the wind" ,and mainly my personal favorite "the man who would be king " in which he and Caine blew your mind .If the late seventies were less successful , the eighties and nineties showed that he was not a spent force .

Like Robert Anderson , who urged him to become an actor,he became a mentor for the young actor of "finding Forrester" ;full circle indeed. The star had not forgotten his destitute childhood .

Includes interventions of Andy Garcia ("the untouchables") and John Boorman ("Zardoz" ,with a funny anecdote ).

Unworthy of carrying the name Sean Connery

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 31 October 2022]

"Sean Connery vs James Bond" is a really new documentary (without a narrator, which becomes more and more common these days) as this is a 2022 release, small screen release if I am not mistaken and it just had its premiere here on German television. However, this is at its core a French production and you can see that with the Arte background it has and also because the writer and director is Gregory Monro, who was born in Paris. Still, there is a total of ten countries listed as producing here and this is quite something for a film that does not even run for an hour. Anyway, with Monro you can say that he is not new to films at all. He started shooting short films at the end of the old millennium, then had a really long break away from movies apparently (according to imdb) and eventually returned to the industry in the early 2010s when he started to focus on documentaries dealing with people who have a close connection to movies. Actors and filmmakers. If you take a closer look at his body of work, you will see that he elaborated on French icons as well as American ones mostly. The former can certainly be explained by his own background. So yeah, apparently this is what he does most of the time and so nobody can be surprised at all that it was him in charge of this documentary here that focuses on Sean Connery.

You can see from the title of my review as well as my rating that I am not too happy with the outcome here. I cannot say anything negative about Andy García or a director who got interviewed and he worked on a film that included Connery and Charlotte Rampling, even if it would have been cooler if Rampling herself had commented. These were the people that actually worked with Connery and that were a part of this documentary. I understand that many have died by now, which is sad, but still they could have gotten other ones as well. Kevin Costner for example. Or well, apparently they could not have. There is a relatively young Black actor at the end of the documentary who worked with Connery in the man's later years, but this one is not even credited as an actor, but rather as a comedian it was I think and this was then the route he took later on during his career, so this is telling enough. What he has to say is nice though, but not really with a lot of substance. I myself am a big fan of Connery and James Bond movies. I also wonder what he would have thought about this documentary if he had seen it. Maybe good that he didn't. He is no longer with us anymore of course. May he res(ch)t in peace. I doubt that he would have liked the outcome. A lot of it is based on theories and hearsay the way I understand it. And it is even serious stuff. I will give a few examples: He allegedly beat his wife on one occasion. He only returned to playing Bond for one final time to get revenge on Broccoli. He was really angry that his wife got nominated for an Oscar. He took medically-prescribed LSD to get mentally healthy again, but it did not work out. And so on. Honestly, these are inclusions that I would have liked to hear from Connery himself or at least from those very close to him. There is interview footage in here from when a guy comes to his house and interviews him, so they did not take a completely different route. But if it is mostly cineastes in here that are elaborating on Connery, some of them born during a time where you can say that they are even too young to have consciously followed Connery's career in the 1960s and 1970s, then I am highly, highly skeptical.

Besides, I also think the film feels rushed in general and it is sometimes jumping from one topic to the next so quickly. This is maybe the price the filmmaker has to pay here because he only got a green light make a 54-minute documentary, but even there better focus could have been possible. Should have been possible and the goal for this to get a positive recommendation from me. Said goal was definitely not achieved. So yeah, the interviews in the now are really poor, except with those (now old) people that actually worked with Connery in person. The old footage that shows us Connery on a few occasions (including the aforementioned interview) is what makes the film somewhat worth watching and keeps it from being a failure altogether. I am also struggling with the key idea by Monro behind all this, namely to elaborate on how it troubled Connery to manage a successful and awards-packed career away from Bond and not always only be seen as 007. I will tell you why a little later. There was another specific comment by somebody who told us that Connery was even angry at little kids when they asked him for an autograph and called him Mr. Bond, but there is again no evidence for that. No quotes, no footage, nothing. The only thing they do is display a child while they make this statement. What was that? That is not journalism and the opposite of high-quality documentary filmmaking. With stuff like this I am not surprised at all the filmmaker is not allowed to go for 1.5 hours. Very poor level honestly. Not even film school territory.

I also found it a bit sad that the only woman who is interviewed on a few (not many) occasions, also a self-proclaimed cineaste and that's all apparently, unleashes here in a way that Bond is sexist and misogynist by today's standards. I would say this is at least debatable. If not incorrect. The scene they used as an example when he removed a woman's top was not a good choice as she turned out to be an antagonist or at least a henchman and Bond needed to get information out of her. If you look how he treated male antagonists, then this scene actually makes a case for the opposite of what they wanted to tell us, namely it showed that Bond went easier on female villains than on male villains. Very poor inclusion already in the first third of the film, but I guess they really wanted to get it in to appeal to the politically correct mainstream these days and once again such an approach works against authenticity and creativity and it is painfully obvious. Now that I am getting closer to the end of my review, I would like to elaborate on two inclusions that I liked more than most of the other content. One is the idea that Connery was not too different from the character that got him his Oscar win and even there it was a bit of a mess because they emphasized earlier how mad Connery was that he did not manage to score an Oscar nomination when he was between 30 and 40, but in terms of his win they barely said anything at the end. Just rushed it in quickly. Also no footage. I guess the Academy would not give it to the filmmaker here. The other inclusion I liked is the elaboration on how Connery started playing mentor characters in the second half of his career.

But in here for every good inclusion, there's two or three poor ones. It is at least debatable if Connery really made poor casting decisions before that, if he got unlucky, if they were actually solid or whatever. It is also almost offensive how Connery was described here as a somewhat sleazy old man in the scenes from his movie with Catherine Zeta-Jones and that it was in a way wrong, but I am sure that if it had been the other way around with a much older female love interest, then they would have applauded the scenes. Some of the interviewees seemed extremely spiteful here and I am for example referring to the one who said that "Never Say Never Again" was a catastrophe, which is definitely not true. Many critics loved it even, some called it the best-acted Bond film in history. Anyway, with regard to that, I said that I am struggling with the key idea behind this documentary and this is definitely the case here. We have to keep in mind that Connery did not only return to Bond once, but twice, so clearly he could not have despised the role and character as much as they want us to believe in here, even if he decided to watch another film and not a 007 movie when an old friend paid him a visit during his final days. Was it Jackie Stewart? I think so. Nice anecdote, but once again it would have been much cooler if said anecdote could have come from Stewart himself in an interview and not from a third person that was not there. Still a bit sad to find out this way about what dementia turned Connery into. One hell of an illness. I think he was a really great artist, almost unmatched in charisma and a gifted actor. Speaking of superlatives, there was also a superlative used by one of the interviewees during this documentary on one occasion to make it probably more interesting when the material couldn't, but it felt about as try-hard and superficial as almost everything else about it. You will know what exaggeration I mean exactly when you hear it. Connery deserves infinitely better. I give the outcome here a thumbs-down and that became clear for me relatively quickly. The way I see it there is almost nothing of value that Monro and his crew brought here with this production and it is Connery's aura and career that keeps the outcome from being a complete failure. Don't watch.