James Bond is ill.
Well, maybe not ill. Even though current Bond Daniel
Craig has had some unkind things to say about the franchise, to the point where
he turned down $100 million to continue on after the next movie, the movies
still make money and people still go see them.
Still, there does seem to be something a bit off.
First things first: the Bond franchise has always been a bit
uneven. They’ve rarely ever been much more than popcorn movies with lots of
explosions, sexiness (refreshingly for everyone), and flash over substance. The
plots, as they were, were generally secondary to making sure yet another
speedboat chase got crammed in. Still, they tended to be fun movies, dripping
with materialism and eye candy, and even a bad Bond film tended to be fairly
decent.
When the franchise hit a bit of a lull after Pierce Brosnan
and was kind-of sort-of rebooted in Casino Royale, there were high hopes. So
far, Daniel Craig’s Bond has had four movies: Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace,
Skyfall, and Spectre. These “new” Bond films have not only carried on most of
the standard Bond formula—one evil bad guy with an elaborate scheme and a lot
of fistfights and action by Bond—but also shed a lot of the things that had
become almost a parody of itself, like said villain reciting the plan before an
easily-escapable torture device was enabled.
And yet something isn’t quite clicking.
Part of it could be culture—the allure of the playboy-spy is
no longer strong; anyone can look up half-naked people on their phones in a
matter of seconds. It could be history—it’s difficult to mine the Soviets for
plausible nogoodniks, and the movies have to be able to play in Beijing so most
other international masterminds are out. It could be competition from
television—the networks are full of highly popular spies and investigators who
use their minds rather than brawn to get what they want. Watching a spy beat up
international hackers by following one easily decipherable clue to jet from one
pretty locale to another just really isn’t all that exciting or fresh.
And so it is with the new movies. I’ve recently watched all
four. Casino Royale holds up, mostly because it’s the reboot and they’re
establishing characters. But the remaining movies leave something to be
desired. The villains are lame and have vaguely defined evil plans. (I had to
look them up because they were so forgettable, and they’re so forgettable they
aren’t even worth typing up.) The plots are clumsily written, with Bond simply
going from one city to the next following lazy clues; the only variation is how
he gets there. (Will it be a private plane or a jetski? Who cares?) There are
no plot twists to speak of; any unexpected thing is telegraphed in the first
half hour of the movie—well, first half hour after the elongated and obligatory
introductory pre-credits sequence that does nothing for the rest of the movie.
And, hell, the plots are interchangeable—both Skyfall and Spectre are only
minor variations of each other, which boil down to “Bond goes rogue, but only
barely, and uncovers something bigger.”
The entire thins is disappointing, perhaps, in the lens of
what the Marvel Studios have done—taken an existing property, coming up with a
long-range plan, mapping out story arcs that last movies (and decades!), use
people’s vague familiarity with the property to get a head start, write
interesting characters that interact with one another, and make sure that even
with plenty of action there’s a plot that people can follow and discuss
afterwards. None of this has happened with any Bond movie for quite some time.
It’s not all bad, of course. The biggest asset of the new
Bond is the cast of characters—Moneypenny and Q are both well-rounded
characters that add to the movie instead of dragging them down. Both Judi Dench
and Ralph Fiennes portray M exactly as they should. Bond has always been a
loner, but establishing a core group is going to be key to anchoring the
series.
But right now the Bond universe, as it were, is a bit of a
mess. The days in which a movie gets by with just a bunch of car chases and
explosions isn’t going to fly anymore—and the most frustrating things is that
all the pieces are there, ready to be picked up and reassembled and thrown out
to the audience, but it’s all squandered. For example, in the latest movie in
the franchise, Spectre, Christoph Waltz played the villain—an actor people have
been clamoring for as perfect for the role. And yet he’s completely wasted in
the movie, with a few forgettable scenes, a lackluster torture scene that
accomplishes nothing, a reveal that adds nothing to the plot and screws up the
canon, and a third act betrayal that is not much more than an excuse to watch a
building blow up. At best, his introductory scene is kinda cool, but I’d be
surprised if he had more than 15 minutes of screen time in a movie that’s two
and a half hours long. That’s shameful—especially since nothing about the movie
was memorable.
It’s hard to criticize the series too much, of course—they
are solid moneymakers and provide a reliable cash flow. And yet I think it’s
telling when the current star is actively running away from the production.
Since they just rebooted the series, they can’t really do it again, so it’s
hard to say whether it’s salvageable or not. But with today’s media landscape,
it’s not going to be hard to come up with cooler and better spies than the one
they are all held up against, and that’s a little sad.
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