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Comments
Yet a minute later he’s laughing at the self inflating tires in his Q branch BMW.
Really? I always thought the character was overall appreciated, sometimes disliked, but overall not controversial. I think he's one of the best parts of TND, but hey.
You got there before me! Agreed, it's ruined after that, and some people had trouble with Felix at the end of LTK!
I think it's fine, he reiterates to himself that he's 'just a professional doing a job', gets his game face on and heads into a superfluous action scene. It is all a bit easily moved from, but folks complain if there are personal stakes so whatyagonnado? :D
It’s a weak scene with a cartoon character played for both laughs and to be serious?
It’s a controversial scene for sure.
Some fans like it some fans hate it.
There’s no right or wrong,
Apparently we’re laughing at Kaufman for his joke about shooting Bond from Stuttgart. We’re horrified that Paris struggled and we’re impressed with the professionalism of the two of them doing their jobs.
And then we’re laughing again with Bond as he drives his Beemer from the back seat…oh yeah a former girlfriend was just brutally murdered.
It’s all over the place.
The tone is inconsistent. It would have been useful to see Kaufman earlier (either killing Paris or in action some other way) to establish that even though he's a jokey weirdo, he's also a legitimate menace. Being introduced cold to this character makes you uncertain as to how to react. They further muddle the tone with how they handle Kaufman trying to help the thugs break into Bond's car. I would have preferred that Kaufman be presented more with a Grant-like arrogance but without the gags.
I would have thought most of the world would have seen the mega hits Ghost or Independence Day at some point. He's in those, and let's face it, you'd never forget that mug..😁
I have seen a few actors who might just about pull it off, but Vincent Schiavelli is not one of them. I do remember him, but I wasn't sure from what, as he has had small parts in many films, it turns out he was in "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest".
However I agree that he has a more satisfactory culmination scene than the likes of "Gabor", who I was expecting to see take on Bond in hand to hand combat (which Mr Kil did at least) but instead he is just shot in an incidental and offhand way, like he was just another anonymous henchman, rather than someone who had been foreshadowed as a physical threat earlier in the film.
I've always thought of Mr Kil as a Gabor "clone", added into DAD in an attempt to redress that error
His ridiculous accent doesn't help. It's so over the top it just kills any tension we're supposed to feel.
But I get why some like the scene.
I think “Herr Stamper” was an even bigger offense to the German people. :-) Shouldn’t he have been called “Stampfer,” @j_w_pepper? As it stands, the name sounds like a “Germanized” version of the English verb to stamp, which doesn’t exactly strike fear into anyone.
As for Götz Otto, born in Frankfurt, if I recall correctly, his Tomorrow Never Dies look seems modelled after the Aryan ideal. Ignore the decade, and he feels as if he were handpicked straight from a lineup of Hitlerjugend boys. It works for a villain, but it’s also a bit cartoonish.
Then again, Le Chiffre’s haircut in Casino Royale had a faintly Hitler-esque vibe too, and his bald henchman gave off that familiar Nazi menace. Herr Mortner, with his evil-doctor monocle, and Dr. Kaufman, with his over-the-top “German-ish” accent, hardly shy away from the stereotype either. Bond films do have a tendency to go rather unsubtle when it comes to German villains, that’s for sure.
Thank you. Nailed it. I’ve always despised this scene. Finally we get some stakes. Paris has been killed and the man who killed her, is sitting right there, and he’s here to wrap up a “murder/suicide”, and vanish into thin air.
It’s a fantastic set up that should have been nauseatingly tense.
Instead I watched a human cartoon with a silly accent have a playful exchange with Bond.
I was, and still am, deflated after watching it.
John Seru is a Fijian actor and former professional wrestler.
That's right and I'm not surprised you don't recall what happened to him
However for me, living in the South Pacific, I was quite excited to see an actor from down this way as a henchman, and assumed by that he was going to get a crack at Bond in the traditional fashion, a la Odd Job and Jaws, or at the very least Sandor (Milton Read, the broad, bald henchman who appears alongside Jaws in the early stages of TSWLM). So I was very disappointed.
Fortunately (from this particular perspective at least) another polynesian (Lee Tamahori) got the job of directing DAD, and a second polynesian henchman (Lawrence Makoare) made an appearance, this time getting to duke it out to the death with Bond, as all good henchmen should.
Lawrence Makoare is a New Zealand actor. He is most known for his roles in The Lord of the Rings film series as several prominent antagonists, including Lurtz the Uruk-Hai, the Witch-King of Angmar and Gothmog, the Orc commander at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields.
I knew him from Amadeus, but that's it. I'd say Schiavelli has a memorable face (one of the reasons he was cast in Amadeus, by the way, another small but memorable role).