Bond films are boring because there’s no authentic jeopardy in them. Bond’s bullets never miss their target, the technology supplied to him by the British government always works (lol) and he can travel to any point on the planet and always get there bang on time for the next plot segment.
Nothing ever goes wrong, unless it’s an atrocity committed by the villain in order to justify Bond killing waves of henchmen and eventually, with dramatic pedantry as dull as any high ceremonial, slaying the villain himself. They couldn’t even make Bond’s own death interesting in the last one: it was basically some moping followed by a big explosion.
When the Bond films began in the early 1960s, almost nobody in the world had been on a plane or stayed in an international hotel, so whatever Sean Connery did was thrilling and sexy even if he privately thought of Bond as a “dull, prosaic English policeman.”
And when all that stuff stopped being thrilling and sexy, they brought in Roger Moore to play it for laughs. Those films were crass and chauvinistic, to the point that they’re hard to watch now, but they did have a bit of vim: pirate ships that swallow up entire submarines, lasers in space, a giant assassin with metal teeth.
As with all long-lasting entertainment franchises, rigor mortis began to set in. Does anyone even remember Timothy Dalton’s Bond with his pudding-bowl haircut? Or poor Pierce Brosnan having to act with an invisible car?
Then Daniel Craig came along and perked up the franchise by the simple expedient of taking the drama seriously. Inspired by the success of the grittier and more worldly Jason Bourne films, Casino Royale was the first genuinely exciting Bond film in donkey’s years.
Well, the middle third of Casino Royale, to be exact, which concentrated time, place and action in a single location (the casino) instead of diffusing dramatic energy across the tourist spots of the world in the usual way. The rest of it was the usual jetlagged, high-gloss stuff which could have been cut and pasted from any other Bond film.
Craig succeeded in keeping the show on the road for a long while but the films got more and more boring, like Roger Moore-era spectaculars but more self-important and without the jokes. The dead weight of franchise history and fans’ expectations seems to have squashed any attempt at authentic danger or surprise.
To cover up the gap, the film-makers would add more and more of the ingredients they had stockpiled already – fancier devices, more air travel, more dramatic fights. And a bit more emoting from Bond himself which, thanks to Craig’s acting skills, was like opening a packet of Haribos and finding a champagne truffle tucked inside.
By the end even the stoical Craig was bored by the films, as evidenced by the pointedly varied and colourful roles that he’s taken on since.
So now the new controllers of Bond – ironically, a ruthless corporation controlled by a man who not only looks like Blofeld but appears to share much of his worldview – have a challenge on their hands which is how to make Bond interesting again.
It looks as if they are having a serious go at it, appointing Dune director Denis Villeneuve and Peaky Blinders writer Steven Knight.
Villeneuve has shown in the Dune films that he can create something which the Bond franchise has always lacked and might be helped by in the current zeitgeist: a portentous sense that history is pressing on the personal dramas. (You don’t have to like those films to be impressed by the scenes of massive spaceships landing in the desert). And Knight is famously good at writing epic drama and the nitty-gritty of personal tensions.
The latest gossip, at time of writing, was that Robert Pattinson is in the lead to be cast as Bond. That would be a great shame, since he’s an actor who seems drawn to interesting roles and he’s already a blockbuster star (which Craig wasn’t when he started). He might well be wasted in a two-dimensional role like Bond.
But there does seems to be something restless inside him which prevents him from being boring on screen (take Good Time or The Lighthouse: they’re wildly different films and way over the top for many people’s tastes, but he absolutely fizzes in both of them).
So maybe, maybe this crew can conjure a spirit of genuine surprise and danger from the dusty bones and dessicated skin of the Bond franchise.
More likely, alas, is that they’ll make a good fist of the first one, be showered in critical praise and then get gradually sucked back into the cliches of the franchise, just as Craig-era Bond was; gadgets hidden in watches, timers that always stop at one and love interests who are too thinly-written to remember even an hour after the film has ended.
But you know, so what? People who like that kind of thing will go and see it. For people who don’t, there will always be new stories, fresh and exciting and challenging stories. If Hollywood won’t give us them, we can make them up for ourselves.
