The Rich Mix will be holding a Skyfall opening night event on Friday 26 October.
A man is being down a ski slope by four other men who are shooting at him. Using a variety of tricks and a gun hidden in one of his skis he is forced by his pursuers to ski off the face of a cliff. He plummets down into the abyss as his skis fall away. Seconds pass in silence before a parachute opens and unfolds into the Union Jack, just as that familiar theme rings out. The man is James Bond.
Bond had already become a franchise, and then an icon by the time Roger Moore ‘performed’ that stunt against an amateurishly pasted on background in The Spy Who Loved Me. The facets of Britain’s favourite spy had already been established by then – the gun, the gadgets, the promiscuity and the wisecracks – but the character was allowed to evolve through the years. Each new Bond would take up the mantle of the codename and number after his predecessor retired or was killed (or asked the producers for too much money) off screen, and each embodied their time.
Connery remains the archetypal Bond – smooth with the quips, rough with his fists and always cool under pressure. Lazenby spent most of his sole film looking confused before being replaced by Roger Moore. Moore’s period marked many of the series’ stranger left turns (Space! An Island populated only by women! Christopher Walken’s peroxided hair!), each of which he encountered with a raised eyebrow, communicating either bemusement or disdain. That alone probably makes him the most British Bond.
Timothy Dalton always seemed guilty and anguished, as if he was actually wrestling with the moral implications of killing for the government, though in reality it probably just reflected the worries that he was being made an anachronism by the steroid-boosted violence of Schwarzenegger and Stallone. Pierce Brosnan on the other hand was the corporate side of the character, a showroom dummy programmed to efficiently make puns and display brand name goods without a stray hair getting loose.
And now we have Daniel Craig, the austerity Bond. A man who doesn’t care how his martini is mixed, who will grudgingly sleep with women as long as it’s part of the mission, who spends half the films being nagged and harried by his boss (seriously, who decided these new films needed more scenes where Bond is lectured by M?), and who seems incapable of cracking a grin, let alone a cheesy post-mortem one liner. He spends each minute of each film in a relentlessly grim state of dissatisfaction, which makes him infuriatingly difficult to genuinely root for.
That’s not to say Craig doesn’t have the basics. He kills people excessively, does all right with the ladies and, if the Skyfall trailer is anything to go by he might even deign to use a gadget or two this time. But he isn’t Bond. And he probably never will be.
