'007: Road to a Million' review: A tense Bond-themed game show that slowly builds

There were some moments, particularly during the opening episodes of 007: Road to a Million, when I didn’t think I was going to like the series.

Like the James Bond movies that this spinoff game show draws its inspiration from, there's an immediate sense of adventure and mystery. The problem is — also like some Bond movies — the whole think feels clunky. There are nine pairs of contestants, but we only meet a few of them at first. The rules aren't clear. The show is narrated Succession's Brian Cox, but his role in the whole thing is confusing. Is he an M figure, a villain, or neither?

Fortunately, my fears were short-lived. By episode 3, the show had drawn me in like a 007 movie at its best, fusing adventure, mystery, and tension into an irresistibly fun cocktail.

What's 007: Road to a Million about?

Prime Video's official Bond spinoff (Amazon owns MGM, which owns the Bond franchise) follows pairs of people — best friends, brothers, co-workers, etc. — as they complete a series of challenges and answer questions that are worth more and more prize money.

Each "level" takes place in a new location from the Bond universe. The first episode sees contestants trudging through the wind and rain in the Scottish mountains of Skyfall and pulling a briefcase out of a loch, then answering a multiple choice question for £5,000. Soon they're in Italy (seen in multiple Bond movies including Casino Royale and No Time to Die) and the questions are worth £25,000 and £50,000, and then they're off to the deserts of Chile (Quantum of Solace), and the rainforests of Brazil (Moonraker), jumping out of helicopters and climbing mountains while following bleeping trackers and entering secret codes. As soon as they get a question wrong, or fail at a challenge, they're eliminated.

Basically imagine people who aren't secret agents being placed into a Bond film, and you'll have a pretty good idea of what this show's about.

The game show takes a while to find its feet.

Try not to be too put off if you're not immediately sucked in. I wasn't. I quickly warmed to some of the contestants — brothers James and Joey Bone are entertaining, as are married couple Josh and Kamara — but I struggled to get too attached because the show jumps around so much. We get a snippet of a backstory and then we're yanked away to another pair, in another location. It feels frustratingly fragmented.

The challenges, too, get off to a slow start. The Scottish countryside is beautiful (and really worked as the stage for The Traitors) but a hike through it doesn't seem all that Bond-like — Bond himself drove his Aston Martin all the way to Skyfall. The next question in a Scottish hamlet — despite the presence of some cool cars including the Rolls-Royce Phantom III from Goldfinger covered in dust — isn't much better. The whole thing feels a little repetitive, too: Are we really going to just watch nine people traipsing up a mountain and answering a different question at the top? And even if the second task is a little different for each pair, is there really enough variety there to maintain interest?

007: Road to a Million is worth sticking with.

Fortunately, by episodes 3 and 4, these issues have mostly faded away. Suddenly the challenges are a lot more interesting — the Bone brothers scaling Sugarloaf Mountain in Rio, Brazil, then climbing outside of a cable car before being met by a helicopter really does feel straight out of a Bond movie (it pretty much was a sequence from Moonraker, in fact). More importantly, though, by this point we know the people a little better. We want the Bone brothers to succeed because we know more about their backstories, and we've seen the bond they share.

From this point on, the series only improves. There are still some patchy moments — a brief challenge set in a casino that doesn't really feature anything casino-themed feels like a missed opportunity, for instance — but for the most part the tension ramps up. As more pairs are eliminated and our focus narrows to the few surviving contestants, we get to know them all better, and as a result we become more and more invested.

Brian Cox's involvement feels like a missed opportunity.

In a lot of ways, Cox — aka the terrifying Logan Roy — as the mysterious narrator feels like perfect casting. But it's also a missed chance to really capitalise on such a high profile host interacting with the players. Although Cox's voice is constantly being played to the contestants through phone boxes and voice recordings, he spends the majority of his time sitting in a studio with footage of the pairs being played on multiple screens above him — unlike The Traitors host Alan Cumming or The Mole host Alex Wagner, both of whom spend personal time with the competitors.

For Cox, the showrunners were obviously going for the look and feel of an Ernst Stavro Blofeld-meets-Elliot Carver villain vibe in his removed lair, which makes some sense — but it also feels like he's being underused. Aside from one point in the series where he has a real back and forth with one of the pairs, the rest of the time we're left with the sense that he probably recorded his part of the show in a post-production setting — and look, it was probably contracted this way. Cox's comments and expressions are still necessary — but, in my opinion, they could have been so much more.

With all this in mind, 007: Road to a Million is far from perfect. But it's still entertaining. If you can stick with it through the first couple of episodes, and if you don't mind a few things feeling off-kilter, then you'll be rewarded with a fun globe-trotting adventure featuring people you grow to care about.

How to watch: 007: Road to a Million is streaming now on Prime Video.