- Network: BBC America , SKY
- Series Premiere Date: Jan 29, 2014
Critic Reviews
- Critic score
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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.
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