Project Bond Review

Having come to the end of the 25 James Bond films that currently exist, it’s time to do a wee review of the project overall.

As someone with virtually no experience of Bond, I already knew a fair amount about the series. I could tell you all the actors who had played the role, the order in which they had done so, the status of the two rogue films, name many of the others, and what the man’s favourite beverage is. This isn’t a huge surprise, though; James Bond is one of the biggest film franchises in the world, and has been parodied and referenced extensively. When you absorb as much pop culture as I do, you’re going to pick up things, whether you want to or not.

I had my expectations for the series, some of which were met, some exceeded, and some were way off. As I’ve mentioned before, I wasn’t expecting the films to be quite as silly as many of them (particularly in the Connery and Moore eras) were. Of the trailers and clips I’d seen previously, most were from Brosnan’s and Craig’s films, due to my being a 90s child, so I found the tone a little hard to get used to. As well as this, I was uncomfortable with the amount of sexism and racism found in the early films. Some of this is down to them being of a certain time, hence the reduction in the more recent outings, but some of it is due to Bond (and, to a lesser extent, the spy/action genres overall) being geared toward the laddy lads of lad culture. It’s fair to say that action films (with the obvious exception of Die Hard) are not generally my thing, so there were large chunks of the Bond films I found dull. They were also (particularly during the 70s and 80s) very formulaic and lacking in terms of plot, which at times made me wish I hadn’t committed to the whole thing. However, this was a big gap in my film knowledge that I am pleased to have addressed, and I don’t do things by half measures.

To mark the end of this very special mission, it is time for me to give out a series of meaningless awards that I have called, for want of a better name, The Bondies!

• Best Bond – Timothy Dalton
  I’d get hate from young people for saying Connery, and I’d get hate from old people from saying Craig, so I’ve chosen to infuriate everybody. Timothy Dalton was a brilliant Bond, dark and dangerous and exciting, and he came along just when he was needed, to wake up everybody who had nodded off while Roger Moore was smoothing the sleeves of his beigest suit. A reign that was much too short-lived.
• Best villain – Elliot Carver
  Honourable mention must go to Woody Allen for his stint as Jimmy Bond in Casino Royale, but let’s get serious now. Blofeld, Scaramanga, Goldfinger, Renard, Le Chiffre, Silva, all fantastic villains in their individual ways, but I’ve gone for a bit of an outsider for this one. Carver is a truly terrifying character, because he has no clear motivation. Money? He already has plenty. Influence? See above. He wants to control how everyone in the world sees the aforementioned world, and this is (in theory) quite possible. If that doesn’t scare you, no evil thing will.
• Best sidekick – Vesper Lynd
  Bond has had many sidekicks to various extents throughout his fifty-year career, but he never had as close a relationship with any as with Vesper. Crucially, none of the others (with the possible exception of Felix Leiter, who may prefer to be called an associate) ever seemed as though they could be Bond’s equal. Very few characters reappear throughout the series, something that had never really bothered me until she came along. There were plenty of options for developing that relationship, but the producers, in their infinite wisdom, opted to leave us wanting more.
• Best other character – M
  There have been at least three Ms throughout the series so far, but I refer of course to the one who was played by Judi Dench. She was brought into the stories far more than her predecessors, and had an actual personality, which was nice. She was an intelligent woman who was not only accepted in a boys’ club, but fought her way to the top of it. The representation of women in the franchise has historically been somewhere between poor and awful, and Judi turned it round, giving the female audience something worth looking at.
• Best film – Casino Royale (2006)
  I’ve given all my reasons for liking this film, but I’m not sure I can explain why it was my favourite. A great villain, a great sidekick, a great mission, and a great new Bond. Bringing it back to the start of Bond’s career opened doors to introductions and a learning curve for the central character. There’s too much rebooting in Hollywood these days, but this one was very worthwhile. Any franchise is going to be stale after 20 instalments, and this was exactly what Bond needed. It was the same, but different; they found a new way to do almost everything, and it worked extremely well.
• Best era – 90s onwards
  For many of the same reasons as given above, Daniel Craig’s reign has been one of the most enjoyable, but I’d like to include Brosnan’s tenure as well. The big gap between Licence To Kill and GoldenEye may well have contributed to the series coming back with a facelift: new Bond, new M, CGI, more ambitious storylines, and more progressive storytelling. The anti-PC brigade will talk wistfully of Sean Connery and Roger Moore tricking women into bed and punching Johnny Foreigner in the face, and how everything was much better then and you can’t do anything nowadays. That’s not to say that these films were bad (although some of them were awful), but that there is no place for them in 2015. (Other things that have no place in 2015 include fluorescent explosions and cardboard sharks.)
• Best film for each Bond
  For obvious reasons, I haven’t bothered with Lazenby and Niven, as this would be an exercise even more pointless than the rest of this post.
  Connery: Diamonds Are Forever
  Moore: The Man With The Golden Gun
  Dalton: The Living Daylights
  Brosnan: Tomorrow Never Dies
  Craig: Casino Royale