Learning Day: Night Watch (Patreon)

Night Watch a.k.a. Detonator II is the most bizarre movie in James Bond-Adjacent history. It is also a 1995 TV movie, starring Pierce Brosnan. Starring THIS Pierce Brosnan:

Look at that hair. Look at that mustache. You’re welcome. We’re welcome. It’s as if all of us received a Hot Dog Appreciation Day prize photo. And the prizes don’t stop coming. This movie gave the world an endless trove of Pierce Flowsnan…

Yanking!

Hunking!

And squirting!

As grateful as I am to the Gallery section of “pbfiles.net”, I’m more grateful to you. You lovely Hotdoggers reminded me of a promise I once made. A promise to continue the Death Train saga. This was once impossible. When I covered Death Train AKA Detonator, its sequel Detonator II was not available. I lamented this. I wandered the Earth, bereft. I whiled away the lonely hours making radio skits or whatever. And then one day, a YouTuber changed my life. A YouTuber named “Jesus wept. Movies”.

When there was just one set of footprints in the sand, it was then that @JesusweptMoviesChannel carried me. And promised to never ever monetize their channel. While linking three different revenue streams to every stolen movie.

“Jesus wept” is right. Those words mean so much more to me now. Previously they meant "trivia answer about the shortest Bible verse". Now? That and Brosnan!

Night Watch is the sequel to Death Train. Both films were TV movies on the USA Network, re-titled as a Detonator franchise for VHS. Both films star Pierce Brosnan as “Mike Graham”. Both movies are embarrassing scams, in two layered ways. I don’t know if there’s a more cursed scam in cinema history than either of the ploys behind Detonator Two.

Scam number one: Pierce Brosnan scammed the producers, and also himself, by making this movie. He and his employers scammed and counter-scammed each other for half a decade. Here’s the timeline: after trying to get cast as James Bond, but bonking into Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan spent the whole early 1990s playing Bond-shaped action roles. He did this to re-audition for Bond in public and also get paychecks. That’s unironically one of my favorite Pierce Brosnan things. It’s better than his Japanese cigarette ads. It’s even better than his cryptidphile wig-king. And Pierce’s 007 thirst peaked with Detonator Two. This movie is a second attempt at the exact same Detonator scam after the scam worked. Why did Pierce prolong his secret Bond audition? It turns out it takes, like, several days to make a movie. There’s the planning, and the camera-learning, and at least two other steps. Within that time period, one casting director can say “you there” while pointing. This fate befell Pierce Brosnan. In between signing a contract to make Detonator Two, and the release of Detonator Two, Pierce Brosnan got cast as James Bond. Pierce Brosnan made Detonator Two anyway. It’s as if he pulled an all-nighter, endlessly three-card-ing his target’s Monte, long after his target was wearing a comedy barrel for clothes.

Detonator Two’s producers exploited this trap. GoldenEye hit theaters in November 1995. De2ona2or premiered just six weeks earlier. People noticed the similarities. “Pierce Brosnan plays a different international agent.”, anti-raved The New York Times.

Boy that period lands with a thud. You could foley the sound with wet meat. Anyhow, The Times did wonderful journalism, for frickin’ once. That article’s writer checked into why Pierce Brosnan played a shaggy weird secret agent on an obscure TV channel, on Bondsmas Eve. This revealed a behind-the-scenes power struggle. Detonator Two almost scuttled Pierce’s 007 dreams. And if its producers had their way, Detonator Two would’ve premiered the same damn day as GoldenEye.

This is beautiful, to me. Almost as beautiful as Detonator Two repeating their first production’s deadliest budgeting. They saved a buck by filming both Detonators in the former Yugoslavia, mid-civil war.

How much can a movie’s star and a movie’s producers exploit each other? Detonator Two explores that question’s limits. Pierce got himself paid to make a Bond audition tape. The producers filmed that tape amidst Balkan explosions. Pierce tricked them into doing it all over again in a sequel. The producers took him up on it. Pierce got Bond. Suddenly the producers had The New James Bond trapped in their B-movie…but right before they could start filming, and put soul in box, The New James Bond grew a Bee-Gees Head. Pierce’s hair is the coup de grace. I understand “coup de grace” to be French for “cup of gotcha.” He got the producers’ goat. As far as I can tell, Pierce Brosnan realized his contract required him to make Detonator Two, but did not bar him from growing a disguise. His mustache in this movie is basically the mustache part of Groucho Marx Glasses. I’m sure the producers saw him on that first filming day and felt horror. The call was coming from inside the hair. Pierce won the scam battle. All my guy’s dreams came true, before he got to star in the best N64 game. What a win. What a thrill. If I was Pierce, I’d be squirting too.

I am thrilled to report a grimmer scam beyond that scam. Detonator Two’s B-side scam involves its Ian Fleming-esque book author. These movies are the creepiest author reputation trick I’ve ever come across. First the movie’s producers exploit Bond creator Ian Fleming, by pitching Mike Graham as the next big movie super-spy with literary pedigree. After all, Mike Graham was created by Alistair MacLean. MacLean was the smash hit author of The Guns Of Navarone and Ice Station Zebra and Where Eagles Dare and other titles that improve blood flow to your dad’s groin. Those hit books became hit movies. So it’s kind of amazing nobody adapted the Mike Graham books into movies before this. Right? Wrong. Nobody adapted Alistair MacLean’s Mike Graham books… because he never wrote any.

No joke, here is the origin of “Mike Graham”: toward the end of Alistair MacLean’s life, somebody asked him for the gist of a James Bond type story. MacLean thought up “UNACO”, a United Nations Anti-Crime Organization. The UNACO team is a James Bond, a Boss, a Black Friend, and a Love Interest. The sentences I typed are about as far as Alistair MacLean took this. It’s wild that his name is on Night Watch and Death Train’s movie posters. It’s one of the more exploitative uses of an author name I’ve ever seen. The producers might as well have puppeted MacLean’s skeleton to give a thumbs-up from the premiere’s balcony, like some kind of Weekend At Bernie’s And Statler’s And Waldorf’s.

We’re not done yet. Book publishers exploited MacLean before movie producers. Pierce’s movies come from a series of ten UNACO action thriller books, all written with Alistair MacLean’s name on the cover, plus a ghostwriter name printed in the minimum size and location allowed by law. Here are those ghostwriter names. Note who wrote Death Train and Night Watch:

Oh god. Oh no. Alastair MacNeill got hired because of his name. Right? Because a busy Waldenbooks shopper would think the cover says “Alistair MacLean” twice? That’s gotta be why. And I’m too terrified to check if this is how airport book brands turn immortal. When your golden goose goes to the writer’s retreat in the sky, you replace him with “James Platterston.” When tragedy threatens the O’Hare/LaGuardia business model, you train up an A.I. and name her “Colleem Hoobler.”

Anyway, that was life in 1995. I was too young to know. When Pierce Brosnan walked the glitzy GoldenEye red carpet, American cable executives probably tried to sneak a Detonator 2 bus bench ad in the background. I even think they could’ve gotten away with it, if their promo featured the classy actual meaning of the title Night Watch. Did you know “Night Watch” is the most famous Rembrandt painting? It is. This movie is very smart. Its smart heroes investigate the smart villain who stole Rembrandt’s “Night Watch” and swapped it for a fake. We learn that in an early scene where experts examine the fake “Night Watch”. This scene is fun because the movie’s “Night Watch” is a too-shiny low-res movie prop, which experts describe like it’s an uncanny copy.

This “Night Watch” scene is not the beginning of the movie Night Watch. Why? Because this movie is accidentally three or four different movies. Oops! In the very first scene, Pierce tries to save a fleeing refugee family by putting them on one raft, under a hail of gunfire, from four faraway extras.

This Tragedy Beat never matters. They put a bow on it in Pierce’s next scene, where he is a jerk to a therapist, in the U.N.’s most secluded Radisson conference room.

In between Action Pierce and Therapy Pierce, we get one scene narrated by a British woman. It is the only narrated scene of the movie. In the scene, two villains glower in Hong Kong. Glowering, they celebrate their magic satellite that can listen to any telecommunications on Earth, and also explode any telecom device on Earth. They prove this by shooting sparks out of a landline phone at the Hong Kong stock exchange.

Something something something this one death crashes the global economy. Then comes the fake Rembrandt chatter. Then Pierce is wistful at a different Radisson window…

…followed by a tone-yoink of Pierce yukking it up with his boss (one of the presidents from 24), and Pierce talking down to Pierce’s love interest (the lady from Detonator One). Pierce’s love interest appears to have swapped hair lengths with him.

I can barely explain the rest of the plot, because the movie can’t. It turns out both villains are working at cross purposes. The racially white villain is an art thief, who stole most of the famous paintings on Earth and put fakes in their place. He did those art thefts/swaps before the events of this movie. The white villain is also in league with an Asian villain, who is a North Korean operative bent on weaponizing world telecommunications. For some reason the white villain leads their demo of this telecom weapon. He introduces it with the funniest possible description of an Office 95 “WordArt” preset.

The movie also suffers from its creators’ sexism and prudishness. It turns out it’s not fair to compare Alistair MacLean to Ian Fleming. Ian Fleming saw women as sex objects. Alistair MacLean shunned harlots altogether.

The producers deserve equal blame for how this movie treats women. Remember: Alistair MacLean did not write this. He wrote “Mike Graham (male, lucrative)” on an inflight napkin while evading Queen Taxes. Then a different Alastair cheated Borders shoppers. And then the producers told this movie’s female lead to do the "Born Sexy Yesterday" trope, in a sexless movie, and also padded out the movie’s middle with sex comedy. While Pierce and Lady battle two different villain plots that don’t fit together, they share a hotel room under the clever aliases of “Mike Graham” and “Mrs Graham”. You have to be married to share a hotel room, you see! Ever the super-spy, Pierce keeps up the ruse by saying loving things in an obvious, on-purpose sarcastic voice, before their bellhop’s even left the room.

Then Pierce hatches a brilliant deception that tricks… someone? He tells Lady they need to act as if they are on their romantic honeymoon, because they’re being surveilled. So he says further loving things with his voice, while rooting around the room to look for listening devices. This is a wise plan if the surveillance is audio-only. In case you’ve forgotten, video surveillance existed in 1995. Later in the movie we’ll see the villains use security cameras. But Pierce is laser-focused on deceiving microphones only. This mindset culminates in a wacky scene where Pierce disrobes to less clothing, by volume, than he has hair.

Then Pierce harasses his colleague to do sex noises with him. She refuses. So Pierce verbally simulates an extremely fast sexual encounter by himself until she kicks him out of the bed.

Then in their next hotel scene, these characters talk about the espionage openly. Anyone listening in would know they’re spies. What was any of the prior deception for? It was not for future romance. These two characters have no spark, to the point that it’s confusing. They ended the first Detonator by wandering into the distance, instead of kissing or shaking hands or talking. It left a hole in the movie. At the end of this Detonator 2 movie, they try COMEDY instead of nothing. After they beat the bad guys, the lead characters do kiss (!!!!!). But then they try to check into a hotel together, and find out their boss booked them into separate rooms and booked himself the room between them. He made himself their high school chaperone for some reason. Or wants to hear them get down, after one of them walks two doors down? Every next theory is worse. Leave yours in the comments!

There’s not a lot more here. There is one other heroic character, who should’ve been the main character. Upon arrival in Hong Kong, our UNACO agents get briefed by the local CIA agent. This makes no jurisdictional sense, but James Bond has a CIA friend and I guess they’re copying that. This movie’s CIA Friend is Myra, a brilliant beautiful genius who is so embedded in Hong Kong, she is fully a celebrity.

The movie treats Myra with all the respect it has for women and for Asian people. This movie’s Asian villain is named “Mao”, by the way. Midway through this picture, Mao kills Myra. But in a greater sense, the heroes do. Myra gets splattered by a car after repeatedly helping and saving her dimwit superiors.

No. Myra is dead. You heard her super die! And thanks to Myra’s help, the heroes… do not stop the villains. Here’s how this movie resolves: the Asian villain double-crosses the white villain, and places Looney Tunes TNT on his chest while rigging every famous painting to catch on fire. This doublecross lacks setup and makes both their plans harder to achieve.

Then the heroes get to catch both villains in this same location. They defuse a white villain bomb by taking it off of a painting frame, and self-destruct a North Korean rocket by pressing all three flashing buttons on a boat’s console.

That might lead you to think the movie is dumb. But did you know the final scene involves a painting, and is therefore smart? We finish with the painting “Night Watch”. A painting named that because Rembrandt is describing yuppie businessmen with melee weapons. In the last scene of Night Watch, both lead characters wonder if the museum has the real “Night Watch” now. Because somebody stole it, before! Before this movie started! Again, we’re told the white villain became more successful than all of history’s art thieves put together, offscreen. Unclear how. Wish I knew! This movie is like if Tomorrow Never Dies and The Thomas Crown Affair made the dumbest baby in the world, and then that baby almost derailed Pierce Brosnan’s career, preventing him from starring in both those movies. It’s a singular Brosnan mind game, and flop, in a career full of them. And Pierce spends its entire run time sporting weirder hair than he has in 1800s dramas or on-purpose comedies. I’m so mad that I’ve watched this and I’m so glad it exists. Here’s to you all for joining me on this journey. And here’s to Unpopular Title For A TV Movie AKA Detonator III.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Harvey Penguini, who has a plan to collapse all of western civilization by hooking up firebombs to every copy of Pierce Brosnan Playfully Squirts Water (With Mustache).

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