- Network: BBC America , SKY
- Series Premiere Date: Jan 29, 2014
Critic Reviews
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Their [John Brownlow and co-writer Don Macpherson's] saga is so vividly shaded, even minor characters resonate.
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With fine supporting players like Anna Chancellor as Fleming’s wartime superior, Second Officer Monday, and Rupert Evans as Ian’s brother Peter, this four-part series makes us care about people whose fate neither we nor they can easily summarize.
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Directed with aplomb by Mat Whitecross, who periodically decides, in the course of this four-hour feast, to stop making a movie about a man and instead make a Bond movie, Fleming is the kind of movie that winks at you constantly and you never get annoyed by the intimations.
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Actually, his greatest gift was that of imagination, and Fleming is especially enjoyable as it dramatizes the exploits that would give birth the immortal 007.
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The performances here are all good, and the chemistry between Cooper and, particularly, his lovers is palpable.
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Despite its troublesome subject, the series succeeds, moderately, in letting you know that it knows that Bond, as his creator conceived him, is a relic, and that Fleming's pulp-novel aspirations are worth skewering.
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The Bond stuff is, on the whole, more enticing than Ann and Ian’s psychological pas de deux, which skirts up against real issues--and rape fantasies--before giving them a gauzy gloss of true love.
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Cooper is compelling as an overconfident hothead who sees creative potential around each corner. Trouble is, no matter what the writers dream up for Fleming, Fleming has already dreamed up better for Bond. [10 Feb 2014, p.48]
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If only writers John Brownlow and Don Macpherson focused more on Fleming's wartime spy-jinks than on his extended mating dance with the already married and cheating Ann.
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Fleming’s life could have used an editor; the four-part series feels repetitive and should have been cut in half.
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Cooper does a solid job with the title role, and the early installments have an engaging briskness. However, Fleming drags a bit in its second half; given its slender budget, it might have worked better as a three-episode miniseries.
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An enjoyable if inflated and overwrought four-part mini-series.
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Cooper and Pulver are fine in the lead roles, although there’s little to like about either character’s comportment. The music swells on cue but the story just doesn’t jell.
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Fleming seems to want to have it both ways--a warts-and-all portrayal of a famous writer paired with heart-stopping adventure and intrigue. The problem, of course, is without Bond at the center of the excitement, we don't care much about what happens to Fleming.
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Ultimately, Fleming will leave you neither shaken nor stirred.
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The mini-series and its characters are all over the map, stylistically, seeming unable to find the right tone for the time period.
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Fleming’s problem is not the story it tells, but the details it chooses to enhance.
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Fleming sketches the inspirations for Bond and also indulges the criticisms of Bond (misogynistic, brutish) via his boorish creator (played by Dominic Cooper). Yet there's little depth to Cooper's rake, and the female characters are Bond-girl problematic. [31 Jan/7 Feb 2014, p.96]
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Fleming works only fitfully, despite conjuring an impeccable period look and feel filming in a trio of locales.
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When not trapped in the effort to wring excitement from Fleming's adventurous sex life, the series rolls on compellingly with his spying adventures, his role in creating a special operations unit.
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Fleming has its moments, but they are too few and even farther between. The last of the four episodes is the best, but you have to slog through the other three to get there.
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Fleming the character is Bond without the mystery, and Fleming the miniseries is a Bond epic reduced to the most generic of redemption stories.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 16 out of 22
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Mixed: 4 out of 22
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Negative: 2 out of 22
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Jan 31, 2014