Proceeding from an old-school title pun – yes, the heroine goes by the name Ros Knight – the latest from resourceful microbudget producer Jonathan Sothcott surely has one optimistic eye on filling the void left by the withdrawal of 007 from public life. Here is the gender-flipped Bond some have been seeking: the adventures of a no-nonsense, tough-talking security operative (Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott) who is tasked with recovering a lethal bioweapon pilfered from a scaled-down Porton Down during the prologue. Everything, in truth, proves a bit reined-in.
This austerity actioner spends less on its set pieces than the Broccolis typically did on keeping one Aston Martin refuelled; the Sothcotts’ car of choice, emblematically, is the dinkiest of Minis. In essence, it’s Bond without the attendant glamour, hanging around drizzly marinas and parky-looking country lanes, in dim light that hopefully obscures some of the more obvious budget limitations. What money there is here has wisely been spent on human resources, faces who might still look good on the promotional material: a cameoing Michael Paré as a shady Felix Leiter type, Roger Moore’s son Geoffrey as our gal’s understandably worried-looking lover, Nick Moran giving cut-price Colin Firth as a meddling bureaucrat.
The pick of the players is a spry, characterful Ian Ogilvy as Ros’s estranged father, helpfully identifying where the real power lies on a chessboard and generally steadying scenes whenever matters get a bit too threadbare. Despite the brassy parps of Logan Jones’s score, there’s nothing much here to give Eon sleepless nights. Director Ben Fortune keeps his careworn world-domination plot moving and just this side of coherent, but the action scenes don’t build tension so much as deconstruct the very idea of it, setting Sothcott and Ogilvy plodding around the garden in the dead of night, taking out the gunmen behind the polytunnel; the grand finale involves a Mexican standoff in someone’s front room.
What would already have seemed antiquated circa Bourne risks redundancy in the Slow Horses era, where the tattiness is fully costed and integrated. Still, Knightfall holds a certain nostalgic charm; a bizarro-world vision of Bond in severely straitened circumstances, armed only with a licence to kill time.
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