ROBERT COTTON I hate everything about Carver. He's badly written, horribly trapped in his time, and completely ineffectual. The actor literally gives the character all of the character he has. Awful. Mr. Stamper is the illegitimate son of Hans and Helga from YOLT. Ecch. BILL KOENIG Pretty much the same as GoldenEye -- good actors without much to work with, only the end result isn´t as good. JAMES McMAHON Elliot Carver - Jonathan Pryce tries, and succeeds at times, but ultimately there's just not much here for him to work with.  Carver comes off as a minor entry among Bond villains. Stamper - A perfectly decent, workman-like hench-person, trying to be in the mold of Oddjob, but no one ever really is.  Nothing wrong here, but nothing to get excited about, either.  Capable window dressing. DEBORAH LIPP Once again, the best villains in TND are neither the main bad guy nor his aide de badness, but secondary villains. Here Ricky Jay and especially the late Vincent Schiavelli are the standouts. Dr. Kauffman has some of my favorite dialogue ever uttered by a Bond villain. Stamper is just a Red Grant wannabe (yawn). TOM ZIELINSKI Elliott Carver - Jonathon Pryce is one of my favorite actors, but his Carver does not resonate.  I laughed out loud when he mocked Michelle Yeoh's kung fu moves and commented "Pathetic."  Yes it was Elliott, but not in the way you meant.  Carver's plot to steal a GPS encoder and use his media empire to facilitate war between China and the UK is OK I guess, but the Nehru-jacket wearing, bespectacled Carver is more than forgettable.  Too bad too, a wasted opportunity.  (See Christophers Lee and Walken.) Stamper - Very forgettable.  I seem to recall that Dr. Kaufmann was his mentor and that Stamper took exception when Bond killed him, but really, Stamper is simply Hans with a weird obsession of torture tools.

ED WERNER The one thing that always stuck in my mind about Elliot Carver, was his juvenile mocking of Wai Lin's martial arts. It seemed below the character the first time I saw it and it still does. However, during the rest of the film, Jonathan Pryce acquits himself admirably. As the worldwide media mogul of CMG (Carver Media Group), he can topple governments or powerful people with a single broadcast and Pryce plays the part quite convincingly. The main plot of inaugurating a war between Britain and China so he can then install a sympathetic government in China that will grant him exclusive satellite rights for 100 years strains credibility, but its not that big of a deal. Carver's undoing by Bond via a Sea-Vac drill is one of the more memorable deaths of the series. PAUL BAACK I'm in the minority of Bond fans in my liking of Jonathan Pryce's Elliott Carver character. Most people find him weak and ineffectual, or over-the-top and silly. I've always viewed him as a classic, old-school Bond villain, right down to his peculiar manner of dress and brush-cut silver hair. His scheme seems a little goofy, but it holds together logically in the course of the film's plot. He's got a lot of great lines -- "there's no news like bad news;" "never get into a fight with a man who buys ink by the ton" -- and, for the first married Bond villain, has a marked lack of connection to his spouse. His faux kung-fu demonstration notwithstanding (he was, after all, trying to mock Wai Lin), he goes down in my book as a pretty cool and menacing bad guy. I've never been a big proponent of The Villain having to be a physical match for 007. That's what henchmen are for, and Carver has... Stamper. Another of the central-casting Aryan brutes that (over)populate the series; Gotz Otto gives this particular lunk a glimmer of intelligence which, I suppose, makes him a little more dangerous than the average turtleneck-sweater model. Nothing classic here, but he's not a distraction or an irritation, and that's always a plus.

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