If you thought Daniel Craig shouldn't play 007... have you changed your mind?

Cafe Society
1

Earlier thread:

I was willing to give him a chance, and I’m glad I did - I thought he was great in Casino Royale, and the movie itself was terrific. The best Bond movie in a looooooooooong time. But if you opposed Craig’s casting and have since seen the movie, did it change your mind? In looking over this earlier thread, those opposed were Argent Towers, kawaiitentaclebeast, Excalibre, romansperson and sneeze5660. What say you now?

I’m not trying to be argumentative (well, maybe a little). I just want to know if your thinking has changed, and why or why not.

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As one of his few bad press reviews said, he looks not like a suave spy in a tux, but more like a sparring partner or soccer hooligan, with big ears and broken face bones.

3

I still don’t think his look was right for Bond, but he did a good job playing the character.

4

Craig’s Bond is sort of like the real-life person whom the other Bonds were loosely based on. He exists on a different layer of reality.

5

I thought he would be too much of a thug, ut his steely coolness quickly won me over. He somehow seems to be more “real” than any other bond I’ve seen.

(Granted his role was written with more of a primal humanity, than other gadget-clever Bonds).

6

I talked to one of my (female high school) students today. She’d seen the movie the other day and when I asked what she thought about the movie, she said she didn’t know. She was too caught up in the hotness of Craig, panting all through the movie:
“And I don’t even fall for blond blue eyed guys”
“For the first time since I was 11, I was contemplating getting a poster for my wall, preferably of him coming out of the water”
“There’s a cruelty *and * vulnerabilty to him… He’s the hottest thing to hit the screen ever.”

Said this jaded 6’, 18 year old blonde, who crushes young men’s hearts on a daily basis, without even knowing it.
Craig might not be handsome enough to play Bond (according to some), but this het middle aged man, realíze that for a lot of women, he’s the hottest thing to hit the big screen ever. And Bond was never about being handsome. It was about sex. And Craig’s got it.

7

I was still unsatisfied with the movie. Some of my complaints were about the character of Bond, and some were about the movie’s plot. I realize that this is a matter of personal preference so I’m going to start off by saying: Craig fans, you are not going to convince me, and I’m not going to try to convince you. Agree to disagree.

Alright: Daniel Craig’s initial action scene in the African construction site was amazing. His physical prowess and grittiness were showcased well. He looks good with cuts and sweat all over his body - he makes a great thug/brawler/muscle or whatever.

The problems start, for me, when Craig gets dressed up and tries to be elegant. Simply put, he doesn’t pull it off. In a suit, he still looks like a thug/brawler/muscle that happens to be dressed up in a suit. He doesn’t look like he belongs in the suit. All the other Bonds did. That includes Connery, whom everyone compares Craig to and claims was “not handsome.” Nonsense. Connery had great dark eyes, curved eyebrows, thick dark hair, a sly smile, and a look of trickery in his eyes that is to this day unmatched. Craig’s eyes are dead and lifeless, his lower lip in a perpetual pout, his block-like face devoid of animation and vigor.

So, people will say, he’s supposed to be like that. He’s supposed to be a killer. He’s supposed to be cold, a brute, a sledgehammer, whatever. If you think that Craig’s Bond is more true to the novels, which I’m sure he is, then of course you will like him. But I am a fan of the Bond movies. There has been a cinematic Bond archetype that has developed seperate from the book Bond, and that cinematic Bond is suave, debonair, and elegant. I don’t see why people are insisting that he be replaced by a brute. See, this is what people don’t understand when I get into discussions about Craig with them: there are already a million serious action movies where the hero is a stone cold killer. Why isn’t there room for ONE series of movies where the hero is more than just a killer? What I like about the Bond movies is that they’re a little bit silly, that the character of Bond is impossibly charming, and that he is a quirky and even somewhat campy character. This is what Bond is to me. This is the Bond that I grew up with when I used to watch Roger Moore movies at sleepovers with my friends. When, in 1997, I worked outside in the yard all day for my mom with the promise that she would buy me Goldeneye for N64 when I was done. I remember when I first got that game, I got up 2 hours early on school days just so I could play it before I had to go to school. I also had Goldeneye on VHS and I must have watched it a thousand times. Pierce Brosnan was my idol: he was equal parts tough guy and player.

I was absolutely in love with the cinematic James Bond. I loved the silly names for the girls, I loved the goofy gadgets, and I loved the idea that James Bond is not just a killer, that he gets by on his charm and confidence too. And that he’s handsome. Not “unconventionally handsome” - straight up handsome.

For me, Craig represents the changing around and turning upside down of everything that I had come to love about the James Bond movies. So I could not enjoy watching Casino Royale, and I am quite depressed to know that Craig will be portraying Bond in more movies to come.

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I want to add something else too. In discussions about Brosnan, someone inevitably brings up that The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day sucked. Well, it’s true. But that’s not Pierce Brosnan’s fault, it’s the fault of the directors and writers - they were the ones that should have been replaced. At the very least, if Brosnan’s time was up, they should have had another dark-haired, clasically-handsome guy fill the role. At least in my view.

9

Brosnan totally sleepwalked through Die Another Day. (Not that an Oscar-worthy performance could have redeemed that film, but Broz wasn’t even going through the motions, just collecting a paycheck.)

I think whether you accept Craig in the role or not depends upon your expectations; if what you want is more of the same cartoonish, gadget-laden dandy, then Craig and Casino Royale was totally wrong. It wasted too much time with character development, a pointless card game that was (in terms of advancing the plot) a known outcome, and a Bond girl with too much depth and intelligence to fit into a bikini or put up with an arrogant punter. Craig certainly isn’t the kind of prettyboy that Moore or Brosnan were (FWIW, I think Brosnan would make an excellent Simon Templar, far better than Val Kilmer in that massacre of a film, and he’s great as the anti-Bond in The Tailor of Panama.)

But Casino Royale is the kind of Bond movie I’ve been waiting for for decades; it harkens back to From Russia With Love, with an ambling, never-know-where-it’s-going-to-go-next plot, and a vulnerable, prone-to-error agent whose arrogance is only exceeded by his craftiness and luck. Whereas the last, oh, ten or so Bond movies (with spare exceptions) have all been strict formula–such that you can actually plot down to the minute what’s going to happen and who’s going to die–this one was designed to challenge expectations. I mean, you know Bond is going to survive (just as you know Indiana Jones will) but damned if there weren’t the edge of the seat action sequences that have totally been lacking in anything starting Pierce Brosnan or Roger Moore. At the end of the fuel truck sequence, where Craig stumbles out of the cab and falls to the ground, exhausted (rather than making some clever quip), you can share in his feeling. The opening sequence–half German Expressionalist, half French New Wave noir–was inspired, and the trick “ending” (before Bond discovers Vesper’s duplicity) was brilliant. It’s not formula, and if that’s what you want then it was certainly disappointing, but it was excellent storytelling. And the interludes–particularly the shower scene–were so different than anything previous films have done that it made the film so much more satisfying; more fillet Mignon and less junk food. This is the kind of Bond movie John Frankenheimer would have made.

Anyway, I thought Craig was at least a good–perhaps excellent–choice for Bond, and nothing I saw in the film caused me to doubt it. And both of the ladies in my party (and another one who went with me to a different showing) pronounced Craig as “the hottest Bond ever.” The guy may not be a Moondoggie, but he has what the chicks dig. My biggest worry is that they won’t be able to follow this up with a story of the same caliber.

Stranger

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There are other actors I would have preferred in the role, but my beef with Casino Royale is with the writing, not the casting.

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If EON is smart, they’ll start doing remakes of the old stories. IT’s been long enough and I think TMWTGG would be a perfect vehicle. Nolan is busy with Batman, but think what he could do with Craig and a remake.

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I’m of two minds on the topic; one one hand, it would invite inevitable comparisons with the existing films. On the other hand, there are certainly existing novels/stories that deserve a proper retreatment. They’re probably better off with original stories on the marketing standpoint, but Og I’d love to see Diamonds Are Forever or You Only Live Twice redone as a Craig film, and the short stories like From A View To A Kill could make a the basis of an interesting film.

Stranger

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In still photos, Craig looks kind of creepy and reptilian. But in this film and another I saw recently, Archangel, he exuded an incredible likability. And that chase scene in Uganda was just awesome!

If they ever do a business course using Bond movies to illustrate business principles, Craig (in that chase scene) will represent “working harder,” and Roger Moore, logstepping on crocodiles in Live and Let Die, will illustrate “working smarter.”

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I wasn’t particularly keen on Craig as Bond, but I had read some of the novels as a kid before I ever saw a Bond movie and I have to admit that Daniel Craig and this vision of the Bond story was closer to what I imagined than any earlier version.

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The latest Bond movie was simply a shift of emphasis.

Bond (the cinema version) used to be a guy who was suave, elegant and sophisticated, who when he had to could become a tough, street-brawling fighter.

The Craig version is an alley cat, a street-wise, street-fighting never-say-quit survivor, who when he has to can put on a tux and play the ice-cool sophisticated guy at the cards table.

Moore and Brosnan perfected the first type of Bond. The producers wanted the switch of emphasis to try and inject fresh life into the franchise and because they couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. It called for a change of cast, and they hired Craig to deliver the goods. It was a big gamble, but it worked brilliantly well.

I was a huge fan of the Brosnan movies, and I think he did what he was asked to do superbly well. I had my doubts about Daniel Craig, but he did a great job and forced the ciritics (most of them) to swallow their words.

Question (apologies for mild hijack): why has Hollywood never developed a female Bond equivalent? It seems such an obvious idea with good potential.

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I agree that it is a change in emphasis; still, am not sure my mind is changed.
Daniel Craig has sort of a Blue Steel thing going on.

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I think that sums it up rather well. There are those of us who like the novels, and those who like the movies.

I have the same problem with the various versions of Ivanhoe. Some really cool things occur in the Robert Taylor version that didn’t happen in the novel or the other movies. I wish I could pick and choose, but I enjoy the novel and the three movies. :slight_smile:

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They’ve tried periodically, but it’s never quite come off. I recall that, surrounding the release of the last Brosnan Bond movie, Die Another Day, there was a lot of talk that Halle Berry’s character, Jinx, would be spun off into a film series of her own. Never happened, probably because the character ended up being pretty blah on screen.

The problem with a female Bond, as I see it, is that with James Bond, “women want him, and men want to be him.” So what do you get with Jeanette Bond? Do women, most of them anyway, really want to be gun-toting spies? Do men, most of them anyway, want a woman who’s tougher than they are? In my mind, it just doesn’t work.

19

I thought the writers pointed a finger at that when Vespa got him a tailored tux when he was prepared to walk out the door in an off-the-shelf outfit. He wasn’t actually fooling anyone who mattered anyway. Plus he made up his famous martini drink on the spot, just to intimidate the other players. Apparently he doesn’t normally drink that stuff. Also, he’s an orphan. That’s something I didn’t know but it implies he’s not naturally high class to begin with.

I thought the point was this Bond doesn’t naturally belong in a tux.

20

In the novels, Bond’s parents died in a climbing accident while he was young (tweens, I think) and he attends Cambridge (and Eton?) “on scholarship”, which is kind of shaming. The Vesper cocktail recipe is straight from the novel (you can’t actually get Kina Lillet anymore). I really like the quiet interludes and verbal sparing between Bond and Vesper; it takes the film out of generic action-spy flick and into classic Golden Age drama/Hitchcock thriller territory, putting Vesper on intellectual par with Bond. “I’m the money.” “Every penny of it.” The exchange of analyses; “Take the next one; there isn’t enough room in this car for me and your ego.” “And you are Ms. Stephanie Broadchester…”

The other dialogue is good as well: “I know where you keep your gun. That’s something.” “Don’t worry; the second one is…” shot “Considerably.”

Stranger