Review Roundup: Author of 'Bond' in FLEMING: THE MAN WHO WOULD BE BOND Miniseries

Mat Whitecross's Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond follows the WWII adventures of Ian Fleming, the future creator of James Bond. The four-part miniseries premiered Wednesday on BBC America.

Let's see what the critics had to say:

David Hinckley of the Daily News says: Ian Fleming (Dominic Cooper) was another of those charming but superfluous members of the lower-level Brit aristocracy when World War II broke out. His people skills, heretofore used for seducing countless women and conning almost as many men, were redirected to finding things the Germans did not want the British to know. At around the same time, he took up with Ann O'Neill (Lara Pulver), a woman of equal intellectual skill who shared his passion for adventure...With fine supporting players like Anna Chancellor as Fleming's wartime superior, Second Officer Monday, and Rupert Evans as Ian's brother Peter, this four-part series makes us care about people whose fate neither we nor they can easily summarize.

Jim Vejvoda of IGN says: But BBC America's miniseries Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond, debuting this Wednesday, is the first one to truly delve into the author's raunchiness, the dark and sadistic sexual side of him that was as much a part of who the literary James Bond was as Fleming's wartime exploits. Captain America's Dominic Cooper plays Fleming, although he looks nothing at all like the man.

Tim Goodman of the Hollywood Reporter writes: You could spend a lot of time talking about how Ian Fleming really wasn't James Bond -- that the book and screen hero who has endured all these years and remains, affirmatively, legend rather than myth, had to be invented from the dreams of the author and that nobody could ever be as riveting as Bond...Well, yes, that is in some ways the point of BBC America's miniseries, Fleming; The Man Who Would Be Bond. But some will no doubt struggle with the juxtaposition and advocate for reading one of the books or watching one of the movies and forgetting the boring backstory.

Neil Genzlinger of the NY Times writes: The mini-series carries a disclaimer ("Some names, places and incidents are fictitious and have been changed for dramatic effect"), so it's impossible to gauge the accuracy of the portrait. But if it's even somewhat true to life, the comparison is really a contrast. Bond, at least the one of the movies, calls to mind words like "suave" and "rakish." Fleming, who died in 1964, may have had Bond-like experiences, but he's no one you can root for.

David Wiegand of SFGate says: A lot of knowledge can be a dangerous thing when crafting a miniseries about the most famous spy novelist of all time...That is one of the reasons that "Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond," a four-part miniseries premiering Wednesday on BBC America, is only sporadically entertaining. Too much effort is made foreshadowing what Ian Fleming would achieve with the James Bondbooks, and too little effort is expended making a consistently interesting story about it.

Alison Willmore of IndieWire says: Written by John Brownlow ("Sylvia") and Don MacPherson ("The Avengers") and directed by Mat Whitecross ("The Road to Guantanamo"), "Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond" stars Dominic Cooper in its title role, one that's best served by his weightless appeal -- he's more convincingly roguish than dangerous, which is part of the point. The series begins with Ian as the black sheep of his well-to-do family, a ladies' man putting minimal effort into being, as his lone client puts it before dumping him, "quite easily the worst stockbroker in London."

Hannah Shaw-Williams of Screen Rant says: Fleming did work as an intelligence officer prior to becoming a successful author, and many of the details in his spy novels were based on knowledge he garnered throughout his career. Fleming mainly worked in planning and directing intelligence operations rather than fighting on the front lines or going undercover himself, so the shots of him firing machine guns in an army uniform and making out with Charteris in an exploding building indicate that this might be a rather embellished account of his life.

Liane Bonin Starr of HitFix says: Of course, it would all be a lot more fun if Fleming was, like the character he created, suave and debonaire. Instead, it seems Fleming was a grade-A wanker. While we're told repeatedly that Fleming (Dominic Cooper) is the most handsome man in the room, that's hardly indisputable, and Cooper comes across as pompous and sneering instead of witty and mischievous. But even if Cooper had nailed the character, it wouldn't matter much. On the page, it's impossible to understand why Fleming was catnip for the ladies, unless the ones he bedded suffered from criminally low self-esteem.

Brian Lowry of variety.com says: Shaken but not particularly stirring, "Fleming: The Man Who Would be Bond" is a better title than a miniseries - a fact-based story (albeit fudged, as the disclaimer notes) that never quite takes flight despite nifty touches, first-rate leads and its World War II backdrop. Granted, getting to know more about Ian Fleming, the man who created James Bond, inevitably wasn't going to rival 007's fantastic exploits, but the author's wartime work in Naval intelligence almost takes a back seat to his prolonged romancing of his eventual bride, complete with plenty of rough (if that's the word for it) sex.

Alan Jones of Slant Magazine writes: Fleming is a sub-Bond, an incomplete version of the masculine hero archetype embodied by Sean Connery. Or perhaps James Bond can be seen as an ur-Fleming, a version of the author in which all insecurities are eliminated, resulting in a highly trained, irreverent, womanizing automaton, serving imperialist and patriarchal interests with pretenses of sexy anti-authoritarianism. While these layers of potential meta-commentary might be seen as a chance to deconstruct the embedded conservatism of the 007 movies, Whitecross limits any intentional self-reflexivity to a series of in-jokes for fans of the franchise. Before 30 minutes pass in this four-hour miniseries, the director has already cut from a tropical villa to a ski resort, visually referencing Thunderball and On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

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