Bond 23 to feature Great Wall of China chase?

As is the case before every new Bond movie, rumours of possible locations have been sprouting up across the globe. Israel was the first contender following an arrangement being struck for British films to receive tax incentives for shooting in the country. Following that, there were strong claims that India was being considered for the first time since Octopussy, which I’d like to go on record as saying is a much better movie than its reputation and title would suggest. Relatively respectable British rag The Guardian then threw their hat into the ring for Afghanistan – previously visited in The Living Daylights, where Bond opted for a now politically questionable alliance with the Mujahadeen, while the strongest rumours to date have fallen in favour of South Africa, where director Sam Mendes and producer Barbara Broccoli are known to have taken a scouting trip.

As if Bond’s air miles weren’t looking mad enough already, French Bond site Club James Bond is reporting from an exclusive source that one of the movie’s set-pieces will be a chase along the Great Wall of China. This was a sequence originally planned for the excellent Timothy Dalton’s sophomore outing, Licence To Kill, until the Chinese government demanded editing rights over the scene. If true, it wouldn’t be the first time that an abandoned sequence from an older Bond has been resuscitated during Daniel Craig’s tenure: his rooftop chase in Quantum of Solace was heavily inspired by a scene in the early drafts of the On Her Majesty’s Secret Service script, where Bond pursues an observer who is watching him as he breaks into a lawyer’s office, on the trail of SPECTRE supervillain Ernst Stavro Blofeld, who had cunningly evaded capture by chopping his earlobes off – the fiend!

Bond 23 is set for release on November 9th in the US and October 26th in the UK.