At Least Daniel Craig Is Still Hot

In 2006, James Bond was reborn for the first time in the person of Daniel Craig, a slightly dingy hunk whose eyes are the color of blue Otter Pops. Craig—who, I will throw my cards down now, is to my mind the best Bond by far (and no trouble to look at, let's be honest)—was new to the role, but he was also playing a new role. After Pierce Brosnan exhausted every winking reference to the facile character's shopworn charm in four movies from 1995 to 2002, the franchise needed a reboot. It futurized by reaching into the past: 2006's Casino Royale told the story of how Bond became Bond, opening with the two kills that earned him his 007 status. It moved on to one of the best on-foot chases in action-movie history, a geniusly choreographed performance of physically witty parkour between a real parkour star and Craig (content to portray himself by contrast as a doltish fighter who smashes through walls rather than scaling them).
Revolutionarily, the movie then became a love story. Bond fell in love. There was a marvelous scene involving scrotum torture and before long, Bond was e-mailing his resignation to MI6. Bond was getting a life! He was also getting, about 100 years after Freud, a psychology. And none of the cartoonish fun of Bond was lost—the villain wept blood! Bond rocketed into the sky on a construction crane!—even when his soul was first glimpsed (it began not with a kiss but with a hug), and even when this newborn soul was predictably trampled at the end.

Bond immediately set out for vengeance, and the new movie, Quantum of Solace, picks up right where Casino Royale left off. Quantum's plot was hatched and scripted by a team of producers and writers who began their work while Casino Royale was still shooting, and frankly, it is a mess by comparison. (Its title comes from a short story in Ian Fleming's For Your Eyes Only, but the plot is made up from whole cloth.) The psychology is more heavy-handed and simple. (Reportedly, Paul Haggis's idea to complicate it by giving Bond's early girlfriend a child was rejected.) The fun is less fun. (The villain is just a pretend environmentalist.) Also—and don't accuse me of action-mental-midgetry because I understood every move Jason Bourne made—the plot's turns are occasionally confusing, and worse, you don't care why. The end, especially, just hangs there, limp. It's a wishy-washy film, like the word "quantum" is wishy-washy. It can mean "large, significant" or "very small increments": This is not a word; it is an antiword.
Quantum of Solace, the 22nd Bond film, then, has only two built-in audiences: those who follow Daniel Craig, and those who follow James Bond. Those audiences will have to go to this film, and for them there are a few perks. The fact that Bond conducts high-speed chases using a stick shift rather than an automatic transmission appears to great effect at the start. The fact that the contemporary Bond prefers murder to torture provides something to think about. The ravishing staging of Puccini's Tosca as a production-within-a-production—and the use of the opera audience as a United Nations–style gathering place for the global underworld—offers a delicious opening to continue the age-old argument about the supremacy of opera among all art forms.

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