Batman and James Bond, working together.

Cafe Society
1

Inspired by this.

So, what would happen if James Bond found himself in Gotham City after ruffling too many feathers in MI5, and he stumbles upon Batman while fighting crime? (Say he’s too valuable to simply dismiss, but he’s also not cut out for working as a traditional field agent.) How would the personalities and styles match up?

Batman is a boy scout compared to Bond. He’s averse to killing to the point of moral perversion, a strange obsessive trait that is a part of his larger personality disorder. He splits himself in two to do his job while having a chance at a normal life, but he’s never been completely comfortable doing either: He can’t simply relax as a multi-billionare, but he’s too pacifistic to fully let himself go as a crimefighter. He’s dark, he’s brooding, and he’s very close to being Hamlet in latex.

James Bond is a sociopath. He’s witty, disarmingly charming, highly intelligent, and completely at peace with doing anything to further his own goals. He kills like it’s going out of style, and he never looks back. His regret is fleeting, if it exists at all, and his introspection is nonexistent. He’s British, so it’s difficult to tell if his affect is shallow or simply polite, but in all other ways he’s the perfect candidate for someone who, had things been different, would have become an extremely dangerous criminal.

Come to think of it, Batman could have become a criminal just as easily. In the strictest sense, he is a criminal: He assaults with deadly weapons, breaks and enters, steals, and owns gobs and gobs of (presumably unlicensable) weapons. He’s not too keen on following traffic laws, neither. It’s only through the grace of his crimefighting actions and the actions of the Mayor of Gotham City that he isn’t a wanted man.

So, Bond and Batman: Good pairing?

2

Here’s how it would work.

One would see the other doing their job. For this case I’ll say Batman sees Bond killing a badguy. Batman misunderstands and attacks Bond. They duke it out. The battle is a draw and they are separated somehow (probably a big smokey explosion) Batman then learns of a big plot against the city and bumps into Bond trying to infiltrate the same building.

The two distrust and dislike each other but team up to thwart the threat. They overcome it but both are disgusted by the other’s methods. They separate in the end. And if they ever meet again they will act like they’ve never seen the other before. :stuck_out_tongue:

3

Darkhold: That last bit is too true! :stuck_out_tongue:

Anyway, yes, they would hate each other. Bond would hate Batman’s brooding introspection and his aversion to killing truly evil motherfuckers, and Batman would see Bond as truly no different from the likes of The Joker or The Penguin. However, war makes strange allies, and in Gotham the war on crime is as real a war as it gets. I think they’d team up long-term, with Bond more-or-less ditching MI5 to go where the action is and Batman reluctantly holding down his bile to accept Bond’s personality, if not his methods. Batman would almost get killed by coming between Bond and a perp, and Bond would almost get killed by Batman for using too much force. (Well, that and being an insufferable asshole.)

I think it could be done well. I think it could be done almost comedically without losing the dark edge of Batman or the flair of Bond. I think Hollywood is capable of making good movies. (Obviously, I think a lot of crazy shit. But this idea just feels good on many levels.)

4

If you don’t mind my saying so I think it’s a really terrible idea.

click fizz “Damn you, Q!” “Here, James, try mine” - boioioioioinngggg fweee “Nice! Where did you get that, Batman?” “Oh, just a little something I had lying around my castle.”

Let’s just make The Dark Knight, as is, and be done with it.

5

RTA, I think every Batman movie except the one they made in 1989 was a really terrible idea. I don’t think it would sink to the depths of buddy movie if put in the hands of competent writers, but I know the odds of finding competent writers in Hollywood are worse than the odds of winning Powerball.

(Plus, I think the confluence of gadgetry would be really interesting to see, assuming it was done with some imagination.)

6

I have to point out that in the '89 Batman, and it’s sequel (Hey, I liked Batman Returns!), Batman didn’t have an aversion to killing. He didn’t kill people all the time, but when push came to shove, he’d do it.

It’d be nice to see Bond making some snide verbal jabs at Batman, though.

“I assure you, I’m committed to bringing down our friend the Joker as much as you are…it just escapes me how you think I could be foolhardy enough to just ‘let it go.’ That kind of thinking just cuts the legs out from under me.”

Only, y’know, a lot more cleverly written than that.

7

Bond would clean up at the gaming tables at those Wayne Manor parties, any maybe bed the women Bruce Wayne was interested in (B.W. flirts a lot, but Bond always closes the deal). After one or two such evenings, I imagine Bruce Wayne would ask Alfred to deny Bond entry. Whether Alfred would survive such an encounter is another story…

8

Isn’t Alfred himself ex-MI5? There’s your plot hook right there.

9

I completely disagree with your characterization of Bond as a sociopath. I don’t think you understand his motivations or his personality at all.
:frowning:

10

Non-malevolent sociopath, maybe? Selective sociopath? Chivalrous sociopath?

Just plain old “pragmatic-if-stylish hardass”?

:smiley:

11

Dr. Rieux: I judged Bond based on the movies and my educated layman’s understanding of the relevant diagnostic materials. I’m very open to reassessing him, however: He’s an interesting character, and I think a discussion of how he has been written and portrayed would be a worthy side-thread to this topic.

As I see Bond, he is very fast on the trigger. His gadgets are geared towards killing, not incapacitating, and he has no problem using them as such. I understand he doesn’t have a direct hand in designing his tools, but he is granted great leeway in how he uses them and in how he approaches problems in general. In every Bond movie I’ve seen, he’s racked up a considerable body count by the second act, and he tends to knock off henchmen like he’s swatting flies. Not just the high-level henchmen like Oddjob, either, who presumably wouldn’t give up: He’s killing low-grade men-in-bad-uniforms, the Rent-a-Cops of the international espionage biz. Would they have changed sides, or at least acquiesced to rolling into a fetal position? I’d think so, but Bond doesn’t care. He kills them and he doesn’t look back.

His not looking back is, to me, the clincher. He has never, to my knowledge, expressed sadness or regret for anything he’s done in the line of duty. Normal people aren’t like that in the least. To posit a Bond-like character is to posit someone with a pathological disinterest in the social consequences of his actions. In other words, a sociopath.

Ranchoth: Yes, Batman does kill. I know that. But unlike Bond, Batman only kills when he needs to. He tried to save Jack Napier/The Joker twice, despite his history with the loser. He didn’t quite succeed either time, but there it is.

(On a complete tangent, I think the movie’s reworking of The Joker into The Punk Who Killed Mr. and Mrs. Wayne was a huge mistake. The whole point of Batman is that his parents were robbed from him by a random loser who presumably died soon thereafter, so Batman can never have final closure by finding the guy. Once his parents’ deaths have been avenged, what’s his reason for becoming Batman? I don’t know if the movies should be canon, but I don’t read comics.)

12

Apparantly not. The (pre-Crisis) canon background on the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents was that Lew Moxon, a mobster who’d had a dustup with Thomas Wayne years earlier, hired thug Joe Chill to shoot Thomas and make it look like a robbery gone wrong. Both Chill and Moxon died through indirect action of Batman (i.e. he shows up and the crooks are sufficiently scared into running in front of trucks and whatnot, thus they die and it isn’t Batman’s actual fault).

13

This thread has me asking, has James Bond ever appeared in comic book form? Has there ever been a comic book adaption of one of the James Bond movies? Has there ever been a James Bond story done specifically for a comic book? I’ve seen all the movies myself, but have only read one of the novels (The Man With The Golden Gun - decent book, terrible movie, great Alice Cooper song :slight_smile: ).

That said, I think a comic book crossover between Bond and Batman could work, and would definitely be easier to implement that a film (considering studio and distribution rights and all that - and all the terrible writers studios hire). Batman has been in a lot of crossovers with a relatively wide variety of character types - Aliens, Predators, Judge Dredd, Grendel - and to relatively good success…

Anyhoo…

14

I’d say that the “clincher” is that he kills in the line of duty. Like any number of soldiers, in any army in the world. Would you call some buck private a sociopath, for killing scores of people in combat? Most of the guys he’s fighting aren’t even knowingly working for a supervillain, or guarding a doomsday weapon on it’s final countdown.

Add to that that Bond is usually fighting by himself, against hordes of minions, overpowered henchmen, and advanced superweaponry, often in situations (high speed chases-slash-gunbattles, self-destructing secret lairs, etc.) unlike any that most men will ever encounter in their entire lives. Condemning Bond and questioning his sanity for using lethal force to achieve victory in such situations is a little much, I think.

And, of course, Bond doesn’t really fit the other criteria for a sociopath, I don’t think. He’s felt love, and grief, for his late wife. When Bond’s friend Felix Leiter was crippled and his wife murdered by a villain, Bond was so consumed by rage that he went rogue from MI5 to pursue revenge, putting his own career and personal safety in great peril. (Not exactly what you’d expect from someone who only cares about himself, and to whom the lives of others are meaningless.) And Bond doesn’t kill for the hell of it, or for pleasure. He’s just doing a job. And he’s saved the lives of millions by doing it.

15

I’m certain I had a comic book version of a Bond movie - the one where he and the girl are tied together and dragged behind a speedboat (can’t remember which film this was).

16

If this crossover were to occur (note the use of the subjunctive tense), the ideal villain for it would be Ras al Ghul. He’s already very much like a Bond villain and operates internationally, which would simplify Bond’s involvement. Alternatively, if they hadn’t all been killed off in the story “Gotterdammerung”, the Council of Evil Old Guys who cloned the original Manhunter would also make great antagonists for Bond and Batman.

17

Most men can bring themselves to kill, if necessary. And people do kill in the line of duty. What separates Bond is that he kills without remorse. A sane individual who kills, even if legitimately in the line of duty, will suffer shell shock, or will have nightmares about it, or will resolve that war is Hell and seek to avoid it, or at the very least stay up some nights wondering if what he did was really right. Bond does none of that, and that’s what labels him as a psychopath.

As for the OP’s pairing, I would suspect that Batman would wind up subconsciously using Bond to do the jobs he can’t do himself, thus letting him reassure himself that he had nothing to do with the Joker’s (or the Penguin’s, or Two-Face’s, or whomever’s) death, that it wasn’t his fault, even while he fully aided and even encouraged Bond to do it.

18

Chronos, precisely. I don’t get why Ranchoth had a problem with that idea: For normal, sane people, killing another human being is the hardest thing they’ll ever have to do. And as for Batman using Bond to finally clear out the recurrent problems, that’s an interesting idea. It’s also not one I thought of, so it’s even more interesting to me.

Ranchoth, was his grief and rage expressed in the movies? I don’t recall, but my memory is flawed. I’ve never read the novels, so if the original Fleming fiction is canon, I’ll be more-or-less crippled on any discussion of Bond’s nature.

And as for the odds against him: His weapons are usually a lot better than what the henchmen field. Even if he is outnumbered, the technology he has access to could just as easily be used to achieve covert entry or mass incapacitation. As I’ve said, he’s never once asked the Q Division for anything other than lethal tools.

19

Throw in Jack Bauer and you’ve got yourself a movie…

20

Which Batman? Which Bond?

Its been brought up…on this board and others…that only the Sean Connery Bond has a chance against the Adam West Batman; all other combos has Bond getting his ass handed to him.

Even though Bond is a soldier, who kills other soldiers, he is a sociopath.

In that case, Batman must be a psychopath…go ahead, argue how he isn’t. :wink: