Cinefantastique Online

Daniel Craig as James Bond

Over at MotherJones.com, political analyst Kevin Drum makes one of his occasional forays into the world of film commentary, and as is often the case, it leaves you wishing that he would keep his lens focused on politics (a subject he knows better than I could ever hope to). Responding to this post at Ain’t It Cool News in favor of the Daniel Craig version of James Bond as seen in the current QUANTUM OF SOLACE, Drum asks:

[...] what is it that makes James Bond James Bond? At a minimum, two things. The first is the background: he works for MI6, his boss is named M, he gets cool gadgets from Q, etc. The second is his personality: he’s dashing, debonair, fatally attractive to women, and never has a hair out of place. The problem with the Daniel Craig version of James Bond is that these things are mostly gone. And with those things gone, he’s just a guy who works for MI6. His name might be James Bond, but he’s not James Bond.

I find it interesting that Drum could be so wrong about the essentials of the Bond character. 007 is a government assassin, a dangerous killer. Yes, he is dashing and attractive, but that is camouflage that allows him to do his job. As for hair never out of place, that might have been true during the Roger Moore era, but it was not true of Connery – and certainly not true of Bond in the Ian Fleming novels.

Certainly, the filmic James Bond has frequently strayed from its literary source, but it’s good that the producers dropped the stale banter, bad one-liners, and other moribund cliches that were dragging the film franchise down in favor of returning to a harder-edged, serious Bond who was not a walking self-parody. As a long-time fan of the films and the books, this is a move that I appreciate. It is highly ironic to hear Drum insist that Craig is not James Bond – when in fact he is much closer to the original conception - a factor for which we should all be grateful.