Brosnan stars as immature, aged 007
By Nick Norman
Meet Julian Noble. He'll be your friendly neighborhood hit man for the next 90 minutes. Call him what you will--pervert, loner, Mephistopheles--but he prefers "facilitator of fatalities." As he so succinctly puts it, "I mostly do corporate gigs, great helper in getting deals closed." On the surface, he is Bond, James Bond.
He flirts with anything exuding warmth, he slings guns with finesse, and he never flinches when explosions occur mere feet away. He even spouts lines like, "My business is my pleasure."
"The Matador" plays like an extended character study. Pierce Brosnan carries the script through its taupe sections and rescues cheesy writing with his humorous presence. Here we watch a Bond who never grew up. Between the genital jokes, cigarettes and homoerotic innuendos, we can't help but feel sorry for him. Behind closed doors, we see him forgetting his own birthday, wearing a big goofy sombrero while drinking alone in a frigid, yet stylish, hotel room.
He calls name after name from his address book: no responses, no recognition, no friends. Then he meets Danny Wright (Greg Kinnear), an unemployed goodie-two-shoes from Denver. Danny married his high school sweetheart, he has a bedtime, he never smokes and rarely drinks. He is nothing like Julian Noble.
Yet, in a moment of drunkenness, the unlikely pair become friendly, even brotherly to one another. The odd couple pull one another out of trouble for a hilarious play on Brosnan's past roles. This version of Bond is a deeply amusing meditation on those human facets that the slick-as-oil Bond of recent decades lacked.
For starters, our aging assassin awakens to a strange girl in an exotic hotel room. His pained face illustrates the hangover 007 never feels and his quizzical glance at the naked stranger betrays the memory loss that the Queen's Finest never suffers. Noble proceeds to paint his toenails, setting off a theme of latent homosexual tendencies that is amusing right up to the end credits.
When walking into the theater, I immediately noticed the aging crowd. I could spot fewer than ten viewers who looked a hair under 40 years old. This middle-aged crowd surprised me.
Then I realized the appeal of the film: these aging baby boomers are here to witness the transformation of James Bond into a slower, duller and sadder version of his formal self. It's as if they are breaking the bonds of their youth -- so typified by the gusto and confidence of Agent 007.
It takes a mid-life crisis and a death threat, but Julian Noble finally graduates from the shallow playground of loose women, booze and a license to kill. The resulting goofiness made me laugh out loud and definitely put me in a good mood.
Whether you're a Pierce Brosnan fan or just looking for a good time, go see this movie. It's silly, it's mildly clever and the images will stick to your funnybone for quite some time. You will certainly never see Pierce Brosnan in the same way again.
GRADE: B+
Contact Nick Norman at (408) 551-1918 or npnorman@scu.edu.