Anyway, my buddy and I obviously didn't think too highly of this film going into it as all we could think about were songs that had the words November or December in them and why they weren't playing over key scenes in the movie. Songs like November Rain should have been playing as Brosnan entered a strip club and made it rain with dollar bills (my buddy's joke) or I'll Be Gone Til November plays when his scrub protege's girlfriend gets cut up and left for dead. Thankfully we didn't find a good spot for The Counting Crow's A Long December but I think you get the point by now.
November Man is about the rush to find Mira Filipova, a woman who as a young refugee witnessed something that could possibly bring down the Russian president elect in Arkady Federov. Federov has hired an assassin to kill everyone that was linked to him in the past and Mira is the last one left on his list. So the C.I.A. reaches out to super spy Devereaux (that's too long to type, so I'll just call him Brosnan) to help bring in their undercover operative who has key information that could help find this woman before the dangerous Federov does. However once Brosnan is involved, he realizes that everything is not as it appears to be and that he is caught in the middle of some high level spy games which reach him on a personal level when he discovers his former partner is opposing him.
There are a lot of twists and turns in this movie and I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by this engaging spy thriller. The first 10-15 minutes comes off as a low budget B movie but once the story picks up, it's like the director decides to step up his game as well. He actually demands more from his actors, who all seemed like they were mailing it in early on, and the action scenes are less choppy and more impressive as the plot gets more and more complicated.
There are quite a few really intense scenes, some of which will actually cause you to cheer at the end of them. I'm a sucker for both gun play and trash talk and there is more than enough of that going on throughout this entire film. This is easily the best Bond movie that Brosnan has ever made, even though he's not playing the role of James Bond. I think even he knows that Tomorrow Never Dies and The World is Not Enough both sucked and he wanted a chance for redemption. And I have to say that he finally came through. The only thing that bothered me is that this movie could have been elevated to the next level had they actually cast his protege' with someone big. Why settle for Luke Bracey? Why not get Chris Pine or Gordon-Levitt? Everyone knows that Bourne wouldn't have worked without Matt Damon. You notice they didn't cast Justin Long for that role. But that was just a minor blip for an overall entertaining movie.
I rate it as FRESH! By the way, did you notice that I didn't include Goldeneye as one of Brosnan's Bond failures? That's mainly due to the fact that the video game was so awesome and that it had Famke in it at her peak. Which leads to the real question I wanted to get to, who was hotter at their peak? Famke Janssen or Olga Kurylenko?
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