I think Jonathan Pryce is a very good actor but I really dislike his performance on this film, even if I agree that the concept of the character as villain is a very good one.
Yeah Pryce is a little too hammy, even for Bond. It's really too bad EON couldn't snag Hopkins. And why would you ever hire Ricky Jay and then cut out his card throwing?
I don't get that being cut, either. It's the one chance Gupta has to be a badass and it was left on the cutting room floor.
I just could never digest the logic of it. You hire the guy because he's known all over the world because he can do one very specific thing. You film a scene of him doing that one thing. And then you cut it. WTF?
I know many Bond films have deleted scenes that rightfully belonged in the final edit of the movie but that is a standout for so many reasons, not the least of which is that Ricky Jay was hired BECAUSE he can do cool things with a deck of cards.
So I just had a 1968 episode of Green Acres on in the background, about a runaway kid at the Douglas farm, and I had the feeling that I'd seen the kid someplace before. I never would have placed him in a million years, but browsing his IMDb credits, I discovered where I knew him from:
"The stiff... umm, the deceased back there. Your brother, Mr. Franks?" "Yes it was." "I got a brudder." "Small world."
In a serious vein, can we all sit back and appreciate how Telly Savalas owned the role of Ernst Stavro Blofeld in this film? He may be the only film Blofeld without a European accent but it somehow works for him and Savalas has the gravitas and physical menace to be more than a match for James Bond, something he wasn't in YOLT and would never again be in any Bond cinematic timeline.