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Spin-offs to fill the spaces between the movies had been expected. Perhaps there’d be a TV series featuring Bond’s CIA buddy Felix Leiter, who’s had solo outings in graphic novels, or one centred on Miss Moneypenny, who the Daniel Craig films reinvented as a woman of action rather than just M’s secretary.
Maybe Lashana Lynch, who was excellent as the temporary 007 in No Time to Die, or Ana de Armas as rookie CIA agent Paloma in the same film would get a vehicle of their own.
The last thing anyone expected was a reality show. But the last thing is what we get in 007: Road to a Million (Amazon Prime Video; all episodes available), a dire hodgepodge of Race Across the World, Treasure Hunt, Who wants to Be a Millionaire and I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! There’s even a bit of Deal or No Deal thrown in.
007: Race to a Million clearly cost a lot more than a million to make. It was filmed in a variety of locations, including the Scottish Highlands, Italy, Spain, Jamaica, Brazil and the Caribbean. Yet, the above average production values can’t conceal the shabbiness of the whole enterprise.
Nine pairs of contestants – there are siblings, married couples, best friends, a father and son – undertake different challenges to locate a suitcase containing a multiple-choice question.
They choose their answer by selecting one of three canisters. Get it right and the canister emits green smoke; they win some money and move on to the next challenge and the next location.
Get it wrong (red smoke) and they head home empty-handed. The pairs who make it all the way to the end will each pocket a million quid. The longer it goes on, the more physically demanding the tasks and the harder the questions.
The contestants are supposedly being instructed by a shadowy figure called “the Controller”, played by Brian Cox. In the manner of a classic Bond villain, he sits in front of a bank of screens in his lair, watching their progress, making wry little quips, and communicating by phone and recorded messages – which is actually more Mission: Impossible than James Bond.
Then again, the Bond connection is tenuous anyway. Take away the movie-style opening titles and regular blasts of David Arnold’s rearranged version of Monty Norman’s iconic Bond theme and this is just another reality show, and an extremely tedious and repetitive one at that.
This is hardly a surprise. 007: Race to a Million wasn’t originally conceived as a Bond tie-in show. The idea for the format came first; the decision to slap the Bond branding on it came later.
I have a sneaking suspicion some parts had already been filmed before that decision was made. Why? Well, for one thing, there are two contestants with the initials JB – Joe Bone and his younger brother James – yet nobody thought to throw in the line: “The name’s Bone, James Bone.” How do you miss an open goal like that?
Later, the brothers come across a vintage yellow and black Rolls-Royce, just like the one that belonged to Auric Goldfinger. Does either of them say: “Look, that’s just like the Roller from Goldfinger!” Did they even know at that point that they were taking part in a Bond-themed show?
The Bone brothers, who dominate the first episode and are cut from the same nice-but-dim reality show cloth as Joey Essex, struggle for 10 minutes over whether the Scottish king in the Shakespeare play is Hamlet, Richard III or Macbeth, yet manage to bumble their way to round three.
Brian Cox, who can be gloriously indiscreet, told Jimmy Fallon last week he’d signed on for the show in the mistaken belief he was being offered the role of the villain in the next Bond movie.
This, plus his admission that all his bits were tacked on in post-production when filming was over, compounds the feeling that 007: Road to a Million is nothing more than an empty, cynical exercise in brand marketing.
All it does is cheapen cinema’s most popular and enduring franchise.
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