Bond is now the most successful movie franchise in the world. Considering that half the world's population has seen a Bond flick, every now and then the people behind Bond update the super spy. This time around the change-over so mesmerizing that no one remembers the change Pierce Brosnan got to Bond. While Casino Royale was a truly phenomenal makeover for the famed agent, I can't help but think that Quantum of Solace (read review) kind of loses the plot somewhere. This is the first time in my Bond experience that I couldn't get the story. I know…you are going what the hell…Bond and story. Who gives a fish about things like plot, narrative, screenplay and other such cinematic terminology when you view something like a James Bond film?
That's exactly the thing the producers changed with Casino Royale. They really worked their gray cells and came up with a structure that doesn't follow the norm. They worked on a story and other things like characters and arc and what have you. After all here was a Bond who showed his softer side when he just hugged the girl under a shower after a bloody battle. He was so, for the lack of any other semi-worthy word, metrosexual. He fell in love with a woman who could match up to him and he wasn't going to let the villains get away when they eliminated the love of his life. So much so that he comes back in Quantum of Solace and parades a parallel plot wherein his search for Vesper's assassins doesn't stop till he avenges. It's a different story that he looks lost as a schoolboy while pursuing his tormentor but hey this is more than what one would ever expect from a Bond.
Daniel Craig is a strange choice to portray Bond. He isn't like Sean Connery or Roger Moore or even Brosnan but it wouldn't be totally incorrect to say that he dons a little of all his predecessors. He is mega physical and doesn't miss Q's zany inventions; he'd rather jump across the screen chasing the bad guys. Every ten minutes he gets into a fistfight with someone and every ten minutes you see a shot of him bleeding. I don't recall any Bond with blood on him besides Brosnan being tortured by the North Koreans in Die Another Day.
Has the effort of the Bond producers to rework Bond since Casino Royale gone a little too far? Casino Royale had no suggestion of him being a charmer. Maybe they were setting up the man for a newer, different world and with so much happening Bond never really gave a darn about charm. You think that by the time Quantum of Solace hit the screen he'd cultivate some charm. No go. This time around he's not even interested in the opposite sex. He is forever looking for a scuffle, a fight, an argument some bang, bang, some boom, boom.
This would also be the very first Bond flick wherein the famed Bond gals are missing. Bond isn’t interested in even seducing the first one. She meets him at some airport and commands him to stay put at some hotel rather than go looking for trouble. It’s not even like he suggests that they get cozy; the woman is more than eager to get it done with. It seems like she was briefed about the older Bond and she’d find it insulting if the things she heard weren’t true. The other woman is some secret agent who is on a mission of her own and is really busy standing up for herself rather than Bond. Even at the very end of the film she coyly suggests that she wishes she could take away his pain and all our man does is awkwardly kiss her. That kiss was so forced, so uncomfortable that I forgot all about it. It was only when a friend came up with her analysis of James Bond/ Daniel Craig that I was forced to think about it.
This is a changing world. We’ve had a white man rapping the blacks out and a black golfer acing the records. We now have a black
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