[QUOTE=Marley23]
Sure, Bond movies are anachronistic, cartoony and childish, but I have to ask - what’s the point of a realistic James Bond? Without the light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek humor and the gadgets, in what way is it James Bond and not just some other secret agent?
[/QUOTE]
Bond didn’t start out with “light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek humor”; the early Bond movies were (especially for the mores of the day) cold-blooded affairs with an unsentimental, brutal anti-hero of a protagonist. From Dr. No through On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Bond was a ruthless, slightly sadistic, hard-edged agent. Starting with Diamonds Are Forever, Connery’s last canonic and inarguably weakest Bond film, the movies started to take a much lighter hearted tone (perhaps because they couldn’t take Bond past the personal level of angst he suffered in the previous story and still follow the successful formula). Even Roger Moore’s first film, Live And Let Die, while trying (painfully) to tap into the whole blaxipolation phenomena, still managed to be brutal.
Moore, however, brought along the whole lighthearted persona from Charteris’ The Saint (sort of a somewhat comedic forerunner to The Equalizer, not at all like the Val Kilmer film), and while some of the Moore-era movies were kind of fun in a disposable way, they were never really iconic; they all sort of melded together, unsurprisingly since many of the plots were essentially recycled from earlier films. The Brosnan films were more of the same, only even more incoherent than the the worst of Moore’s movies. (I defy anyone to really make sense of Tomorrow Never Dies or Die Another Day.) And such films have been so widely parodied (and recent ones are almost to the point of self-parody) that making yet another is really pretty pointless. They might as well just contract with George Lucas to update the effects in You Only Live Twice and Moonraker and rerelease them.
Personally, I liked Dalton as Bond, especially in The Living Daylights (the The Third Man and Lawrence Of Arabia references made it kind of fun, too), and felt that the over-the-top stunts and lackluster Bond girl were balanced out by the great cinematography and Dalton’s steely delivery. (Okay, the Aston Martin coupe was pretty cool, too, but not essential.) Playing Bond out again as an Inspector Gadget clone is just tiresome. (It does, however, make for a good drinking game. “Hey, one shot for every gadget Bond collects from Q Branch which ends up being utterly essential in his mission.”) There needs to be more to Bond movies than guns, gadgets, and girls: anybody can do that.
I’m looking forward to the new movie as a reboot that gets rid of a lot of the residual chaff but keeps the wheat. (Judi Dench was the best thing that happened during the Brosnan period, and hopefully they’ll keep Samantha Bond as Moneypenny, too.) I’m moderately hopefully about the film. As for Craig not looking the part, he certainly fits the literary description of Bond to a tee (except for the hair color), and he has the sort of intensity that makes the characters he play memorable even in otherwise forgettable films. Bond isn’t pretty; he’s a ruthless (but intelligent) assassin, a hired wetboy working for the elite Double Oh Section of Her Majesty’s Secret Service with a penchant for fast women and strong drink. And my money is on Eva Green to be the best Bond girl since Diana Rigg.
Stranger
