Sunday, March 17, 2024

Everything or Nothing (2003)

James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) is in Tajikistan to recover a Soviet suitcase bomb before it can be sold.  He tricks the buyer and seller into believing a double-cross is in progress and then uses the confusion to snatch the suitcase and retreat to his extraction point.  Cue the opening credits and theme song!

Returning to England, Bond reports to M (Judi Dench).  She immediately dispatches him to rescue Dr. Katya Nadanova (Heidi Klum), a scientist who specializes in nanotechnology.  With new gadgets and vehicles provided by Q (John Cleese), he sets out for Egypt.  Bond infiltrates and destroys a nanotechnology lab, pursues an armored train, battles his old adversary Jaws (Richard Kiel), and escapes with Dr. Nadanova.  Bond has hardly returned to England than M sends him to find Agent 003, who has gone missing in Peru.  Here, Bond tangles with the main villain, Diavolo (Willem Dafoe), a former KGB agent.  He also meets the main Bond Girl, Serena St. Germaine (Shannon Elizabeth), a geologist.  New Orleans and Moscow are other settings for the action.

A walkthrough of the entire game is available to watch on YouTube.  Though the game makes use of the actors for all the dialogue, that mostly proves to be just a line here or there.  This is not a talky game and the demands on the actors are minimal.  Oddly, both M and Q get a lot of dialogue as they direct Bond during each mission, as he has a constant uplink with them.  There is a lot of action.  The gunfights are extensive as Bond clears levels.  The car chases are long and plentiful.  The body count is astronomical.  Bond has the opportunity to drive/operate a variety of vehicles.  There's a motorcycle, an SUV, a racecar, a sports car (same one from Die Another Day), a helicopter, and a couple of tanks.

One really creepy thing was that the villain's plan for New Orleans was to destroy the levies and flood the city.  Why is that creepy?  Because 2 years after this game was released, the levies broke and the city was flooded.

The walkthrough is 3 hours and the player has not clipped out the bits where he saved the game.  Also, he's not particularly good at the game.  Sure, he got to the end, but he seldom uses his gadgets - in fact, some he never used - and mostly played as a standard 3rd person shooter.  Also, he missed most of the 'Bond Moments' where the game would show a cutscene of awesome action.  Nonetheless, it was a fun story that serves as Brosnan's 5th and final outing as Bond.  Only worth watching if you are also a fan of 3rd person shooter games.

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