Something bothered me about Casino Royale, the newest James Bond film, in which Bond is reinvented as a rough-edged professional assassin. I liked the film, thought it was well made, found it more intelligent than most Bonds, and yet ...
Last night I watched the 1999 Bond adventure The World Is Not Enough, an above-average Pierce Brosnan outing. By comparison with Casino Royale, the Brosnan film is pretty silly. There is no serious attempt at characterization. The stunts and action sequences are wildly over the top. Denise Richardson plays a nuclear physicist!
And yet ...
The World Is Not Enough was light, escapist entertainment. There were the usual Bond double entendres, often wince-inducing, but sometimes funny. There was an air of goodnaturedness about the movie - it took itself only semi-seriously, and invited us in on the joke. It wasn't overtly campy like the Roger Moore movies (the nadir of Bond, in my opinion), but it wasn't trying too hard to be "realistic," either.
It was fun.
And Casino Royale? I don't know if "fun" is the word I'd use to describe a movie in which Bond is strapped naked to a chair and has his testicles beaten until he starts crying ... a movie in which Bond's first kill involves drowning a man in a sink in a public restroom ... a movie so "gritty" and "dark" and "realistic" that the few lighter touches seem woefully out of place.
Yes, Casino Royale is, objectively, the better movie of the two. I think there's no doubt of that. But the Bond franchise was the last action-adventure series that had not yielded to the "grim and gritty" school of filmmaking, preferring to remain anchored in the colorful, exotic, half-serious, half-sardonic world of early Bond films like Dr. No, Goldfinger, and Thunderball.
Now that world is gone, and we have yet another Bourne Supremacy-style franchise, another reminder of how tough and violent and amoral our modern life can be. But do we need another reminder?
In The World Is Not Enough, Bond brings Moneypenny a present - a cigar in a metal holder, which looks suspicipusly like a dildo. "I know just where I'll put it," Moneypenny says provocatively, then tosses it in a wastebasket. "Ah, Moneypenny," Bond sighs, "that's the story of our relationship. Close, but no cigar."
Silly? Sure. But it made me smile.
I have a feeling I won't be smiling much at the new, "improved" James Bond.
Not with you on this one my friend. I thought Casino Royale was the best Bond movie ever made. For too long, watching a Bond movie was like finding a copy of Playboy's Cocktail Party Humor from the 1960s. Give me more Daniel Craig!
Posted by: Tony M | April 01, 2007 at 05:32 PM
Michael,
Why do you still read LGF anyway. . . ;-)
Posted by: Matthew C | April 03, 2007 at 02:13 PM
Sorry, that was obviously meant for the LGF thread, not Bond.
I haven't seen it yet, will likely wait for Netflix. . .
Posted by: Matthew C | April 03, 2007 at 02:43 PM
>Why do you still read LGF anyway. . . ;-)
They report stories that the mainstream media somehow "overlook."
I just try to ignore the hysteria and mean-spiritedness bracketing these stories.
Posted by: Michael Prescott | April 03, 2007 at 04:06 PM
Oh, and the new Bond is available on Netflix. That's how I saw it. It's how I see almost everything - the last film I saw in a movie theater was Peter Jackson's King Kong.
Posted by: Michael Prescott | April 03, 2007 at 04:08 PM