Last night, my wife and I finished a long-running project of ours: watching all 25 James Bond movies in order. (We didn’t watch the two non-canon Bond films, which weren’t produced by Eon.) Before I met her, I’d actually never seen a single Bond film, but she’d seen them all, mostly long ago, so we started this as a pandemic project and, with some breaks, finished last night.
Acknowledging that any opinion on the Bond film universe is likely to cause some controversy, I’ve got a few views that I don’t think will be that controversial:
1. The best Bond is Daniel Craig.
2. The best Bond film is the 2006 Casino Royale, the first one starring Craig.
I think I’d have a harder time choosing the best Doctor than the best Bond. (The best Companion, however, is Clara.) Craig is superb in the role, and gives the character actual depth that’s lacking from every previous person’s portrayal, aided by much better writing as well. Roger Moore had his moments but his Bond became more smarmy (and more obviously altered by cosmetic surgery) as his films went on. Timothy Dalton had no chemistry with the women in his films, and my wife has always called his Bond the ‘darkest’ of all. Pierce Brosnan looked the part but his Bond felt the most perfunctory, although on some level it’s hard to separate his performance from a couple of miserable scripts. I’ll give George Lazenby an incomplete, since he appeared in just one film and had the misfortunate of following the original Bond, which meant nobody was going to be happy with him.
The original was, of course, Sean Connery, who defined the role and thus colored our views of every actor who would later hold the Walther. Connery had the charm, and as a former footballer brought a level of athleticism that made the action scenes seem more credible, even when the writing and effects weren’t up to snuff. He made Bond a wit. But he also made Bond a cad rather than just a ladies’ man. You couldn’t watch his films without picking up the character’s disdain for the women he slept with, and in Goldfinger he rapes Pussy Galore. Is that on the script, the actor, or both? I choose the last option: It passes in the film because Connery made it so, and today it’s the low point in Connery’s tenure, one that also saw him slapping women, a practice Connery himself advocated in real life. The character’s enduring popularity is in large part his creation, but the passage of time has exposed his flaws.
The reboot of the series and character for Casino Royale marks the first time anyone seems to have looked at James Bond and thought, hey, what if we actually tried this time? The sixteen films before then all hewed closely to the formula – a preposterous villain has an improbable scheme to take over the world, Bond escapes a bunch of close scrapes in the process of fighting him (often on skis), he seduces one woman who is then killed by the bad guys, then he seduces another woman and they ride off into the sunset after he takes out the Big Foozle. You watched for the action, the one-liners, maybe for Q’s wonderful gadgets, but the plots were just the cheap glue that held the whole thing together. At their best, they were campy fun; at worst, empty calories. (The worst Bond film, in my view? The World Is Not Enough, which has a great theme song and goes straight downhill from there, with Denise Richards giving an absolute howler of a performance as a – wait for it – nuclear scientist. Really.) You were along for the ride and hoped the fights and chases were good and the plot wasn’t too absurd to get in the way of your entertainment. Often it was, as in Moonraker, which looks like a blatant attempt to cash in on the popularity of Star Wars, released two years earlier, by sending Bond into space.
With the Daniel Craig films, however, the plots started to matter, never more so than in Casino Royale, which rewrote his origin story and gave us a real explanation for much of his character, introduced Vesper Lynd as the best Bond girl character in the series, and gave us the best villain in “Le Chiffre,” played by Mads Mikkelsen. (Talk about looking the part.) It set up a story arc that would continue through all four of Craig’s subsequent films, and updated the template for a Bond movie. We still get the fights and the chases – no skis, but plenty of cars and other motorized vehicles on land, sea, and air – and several disposable Bond girls. The villains vary in ambition and absurdity, with things really bottoming out in Quantum of Solace. The stakes are consistently higher in these films, however; nobody is truly safe, so you can no longer just assume that it’ll all work out in the end.
All of these changes mean that Craig gets to inhabit a new skin, and James Bond suddenly has … feelings. I’m sure there are diehards who disliked the change, who think Bond should just be a manly man who cares nothing about the needs of others, who is happy just saving the world and bedding the girl, but that had become quite stale after sixteen films, even with changes of actors and improved special effects. Craig’s Bond has the dry wit, the panache, and the way with women, but he also clearly cares about people – about M, certainly, and Vesper, and later Madeline Swann. He has friends, of a sort, although the Craig films made far too little use of Jeffrey Wright as Felix Leiter, who often served as a partner-in-crime for Bond in the earlier films. The promotion of Eve Moneypenny to field agent from lovelorn secretary (in Skyfall) not only gives Bond a buddy cop, but shows Bond with a functional, platonic relationship with a woman (of color, in fact).
By the time we get to No Time to Die, the character has been fully realized as a three-dimensional person, a lothario but not a rake, an agent dedicated to the mission but with a sense of actual humanity. We even get a completely new subplot: Bond meets a gorgeous agent (Ana de Armas) and they … don’t. They win a firefight together, and she leaves, and that’s that. In Bond’s universe, this is unheard of. Even with a less interesting villain – you know he’s a bad guy, because he has bad skin and an unidentifiable accent – the film succeeds because the previous four films have built up a proper protagonist, and this script makes excellent use of him. The next Bond film, whenever it might come along, may reboot the series and character again, but I hope whatever they do, they learn from what worked in the Craig film. And count me among those who think Henry Golding would be great for the role.