Ronald Bond

Rating: 1/10 (4 April 2016)

This movie is somewhat watchable if you manage to convince yourself that the hero is Ronald Bond, brother of the more famous and successful James Bond. Ronald of course, unlike his brother, is not the suave charmer and rascal type, but has more of a polish wrestler look and demeanor. This makes for some light comedy when Ronald is shown to be one of the few men that can't look smart and elegant wearing a suit, which incidentally only make him look more silly and distinctly out of place. Ronald also has to rely on fools luck more than skill and intelligence to save his ill conceived ways of handling things. At the start of the movie for instance, he manages to raze two entire blocks of houses whilst trying to perform the simple task of taking out a bad guy with a snipers rifle. Not only that, but he also manages to miss the intended target.
He then proceeds to chase said villain into a helicopter that takes off and flies around over a huge crowd of people. Unlike his brother James, who would simply have disposed of the bad guy and then asked the pilot to land at some convenient location, Ronald finds it a good idea to also try and take out the pilot at the same time although should he succeed, the heli would undoubtedly crash into the crowd. Fools luck saves him this time though.
We get another show of his ineptness later on when he escapes out of a window. Since the bad guys chasing him would have no option but to follow him the same route, his brother would undoubtedly just turned around, wait for them to exit and them pick them off one by one with his Beretta. Ronald here of course just continues running and tries to speed off in his car resulting in a car chase. Fortunately someone must have called in a bomb threat because the city, Rome, is almost completely devoid of people. I know this, because I have been in Rome, and there's people and cars everywhere.
Later on when a woman he has, like only an idiot can, fallen in love with at first site gets kidnapped by bad guys he proceeds to go after them in an aeroplane. His brother would of course just kept his distance, landed close to where the kidnappers cars stopped, and then snuck over to take care of business. Not so Ronald, he proceeds to attack them with the plane itself, seemingly without a plan. After failing miserably, as predicted, the plane crashes through a wood. Sheer luck however, not skill, eventually makes it so that he ends up at the same place as the baddies, most of them disposing of themselves in a crash, and thus lets him save the girl.
Ronalds plan for the end game has to be seen to be believed. After finding out somehow where the bad guy has his bad guy compound, Ronalds plan is simple; even though the villain knows his name, what he looks like and who he is, he will just go there, waltz right in, hope to be taken to the villain, tell him that he has come to kill him, and then do so. That's it, that's the whole plan. For some reason bringing a girl along also seems like a good idea.
The villain first does the obvious to thwart this "plan": send someone to dispose of this idiot en route. When this fails (on a train, incidentally also most likely bomb threatened, because like Rome before it, it's empty) this villain changes his mind for some reason, and instead of shooting the fool right in the face on sight when he arrives, proceeds to house him, give him a guided tour of his lair and then hit him over the head and torture him for a while whilst revealing some back story so ridiculous it must have had the writers rolling on the floor with laughter. One can't help wonder what Ronalds contingency plan was throughout all this.
The plot on it's whole is incomprehensible and stupid, apparently all the intelligence agencies in the world are about to pool into one giant data base that NONE of all the experts that thus must have been involved, with all their vast resources, have managed to find out is controlled by the bad guy. Incidentally, on the plus side, the bad guy also turns out to be an idiot who makes it only through luck. (watch how he miraculously survives not only the explosion of a hand grenade type watch (don't ask) thrown at him, but also the explosion of his whole bad guy hideout. (no explanation is of course given as to how he managed this) There's a fun sequence near the end that can only work if we assume that said bad guy spent some time printing out Ronald Bonds passport photo, as well as those of various friends and colleagues of his, and spent what must have been a considerable amount of time walking around a building taping these up presumable to unnerve Ronald when he arrives there. He also apparently went out to buy a spray can so the could spray "Bond" and an arrow on the wall. The latter implies that his plan actually hinged on the certainty that Bond would escape from the henchmen that captured him earlier on. There is however nothing that shows that the henchmen were intended to let him go so that he could reach this target, so why anyone would bother with the printing, spraying and taping when the odds of Ronald Bond actually getting there are extremely slim, is any ones guess.
All great fun though but watching James Bonds brother clown and clumsy his way through an adventure like this makes one long for an actual James Bond movie, it has been too long!