The Sound of 007 is a documentary about the songs and scores of the James Bond franchise over the past 60 years. My first instinct was to be above a bunch of navel gazing at the classic Bond theme… but then I actually got a little teary eyed. I mean… that theme has been around longer than I have been alive. There’s never been a time when that cool brassy tune hasn’t been instantly recognizable.

So the movie got me on a technicality… but surely it’s just going to be a non-critical look at each film and their songs. Well… yes and no. They do mainly cover the songs but also spend time, where appropriate, with the instrumental themes, often showing how they weave the classic title tune into each soundtrack.

But I think most people are here for a discussion of the various pop, rock, jazz, etc. songs by artists like Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, Duran Duran, and Billie Eilish. They randomly mention some interesting facts about the production or impact of most of the songs in a random, non-sequential order. Plenty of interviews with various artists, producers, and actors.

This is an Amazon Prime movie and Amazon owns MGM which owns all of the 007 movies and, presumably, music. In theory the doc is free from copyright worries so its able to play the songs as they are introduced. But that’s also a problem since they have a vested interest in not being too critical of their cash cow. They aren’t really going to admit that, for instance, most people aren’t so fond of that Sam Smith song, right? Or Madonna’s contribution?

Well, mostly that’s true but there are occasional moments where they acknowledge a particular song was a mistake. Usually only when they have footage of the artist in question admitting it themselves. There’s archival footage of Shirley Bassey saying one of her songs was terrible… and Jack White admits he took advantage of a problematic production to push out his divisive, not-very-Bond-like song. It’s not an impressive amount of self-criticism but at least it was something.

It’s still mainly self-congratulatory though and that’s no more obvious when it spends an inordinate amount of time praising Billie Eilish and Hans Zimmer for No Time to Die. It’s so blatant that this is promotion for the latest Bond film… the kind of promotion they’d put out before the film releases or as a fuzzy-headed DVD extra. It put a major disingenuous cloud over the film.

Other than the taint of self-promotion, I thought it was a very solid examination of 007 history. Some of the songs could have used more attention but I liked the anecdotes and information provided. And if the 007 theme is running through my head the rest of the day, there could be worse earworms.

Score: 84