In the mediocre yet fun James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever, series archvillain Ernst Stavro Blofeld auctions a laser weapon to the major superpowers by threatening them with devastation. He’s actually disappointed when Bond (Sean Connery) shows up at his lair. “Surely you haven’t come to negotiate, Mr. Bond,” he says. “Your pitiful little island hasn’t even been threatened.” The insult to England always made me laugh. Unfortunately, it’s no longer a gag line. Britain has indeed become a pitiful little island, a decline accelerated by the current Labour government. And last week, it even lost James Bond.
The odds are against James Bond, not only for artistic reasons but political ones as well.
Amazon MGM Studios on Thursday officially took over the durable, lucrative 007 franchise long controlled by Barbara Broccoli, the daughter of initial co-producer Albert Broccoli. While many people are bemoaning the corporate seizure of the family-cultivated Intellectual Property, I’m not one of them. I’d been watching James Bond die the death of a thousand laser cuts under the auspices of Ms. Broccoli for the entire 21st century. Until her team finally, literally killed him off.
The reason Bond even survived into the 21st century was greatly due to the skill of one man, director Martin Campbell, who twice resurrected the icon from utter dredge. Campbell helmed the first Pierce Brosnan 007 film, the smart, sexy, lively GoldenEye. Though Brosnan’s predecessor, Timothy Dalton, was the best Bond since Sean Connery, his two formulaic movies in the role (The Living Daylights, License to Kill) hadn’t done him justice. Campbell brought back the energy to Bond, and his famous sexual proclivity, as stated in a speech by M (Judi Dench). “You’re a sexist, misogynist dinosaur. A relic of the Cold War.” And we loved him for it.
When the Brosnan Bond pictures sank into mundanity, culminating in the insipid Die Another Day (2002), Campbell came back in 2006 and did it again with Casino Royale. The film, a mostly faithful adaptation of the Fleming novel that introduced 007, managed to turn dour unprepossessing Daniel Craig into a suitable James Bond. But the prolonged last act — where Bond quits Her Majesty’s Secret Service to moon around Venice like a lovelorn schoolboy with average Bond Girl Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) — totally contradicted Fleming’s conception of the character, adding the poison pill that ultimately killed Craig’s Bond.
Craig does speak the most memorable, powerful line from the book upon learning Vesper betrayed him — “The bitch is dead.” Only he means it ironically whereas Fleming’s Bond just meant it. The novel Bond’s callous acceptance of the dark vicissitudes of his profession is what separated him from all the previous gentlemanly British heroes, and made him the Anglican heir to Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, and Mickey Spillane.
And this is what drove the Broccoli team off the deep end. What to do with a character they owned, beloved by hundreds of millions but that represented everything they loathed — a tough, sophisticated, patriotic (to Britain), womanizing white male. The answer became obvious. Go woke. They turned Bond into an asexual mope desolated by Vesper’s death for over four films. This attitude sort of worked in the overrated third Craig picture, Skyfall (2012), where Bond tries, and fails, to save M from an assassin, but it became increasingly tedious.
By the fifth and last movie, the atrocious No Time to Die (2021), Bond is absolutely cringeworthy, with no trace of the panache that made him popular. He awkwardly attempts to pick up a homely black woman by riding on the back of her scooter before learning she’s his replacement, the new 007. He doesn’t even try to hit on the younger, hotter pseudo-Bond Girl played by Ana de Armas. The Critical Drinker nailed the downfall in a funny review.
The actors, writers, and directors started saying some really dumb things about their upcoming movie, calling it Bond for the Me Too Generation,” scoffed the Drinker. “And implying that it was high time 007 was recast as someone more DIVERSE. Then you had that disastrous first trailer that seemed to confirm everyone’s worst fears. That Bond was going to spend the bulk of his own movie being berated and humiliated by an obnoxious feminist para-fantasy by people who clearly despised everything that Bond represents.
The movie confirmed most people’s worst fears, but not mine. My James Bond died a long time ago before his onscreen demise, when Sean Connery said, “Never again,” to the role. Maybe Amazon MGM can resurrect him for me, maybe not. But if the next film’s a disaster, it will just be one more nail in Bond’s coffin, added to the many Barbara Broccoli put there.
Bond’s Britain No More
The odds are against James Bond, not only for artistic reasons but political ones as well. The England he represented for almost 80 years is today a sad joke, a funhouse mirror version of the “evil empire” he fictionally helped defeat. British police now harass citizens for speaking out against anti-Western immigrants and ideologies, even praying for unborn babies. And British Intelligence agents reportedly worked on sabotaging Trump’s reelection, a far cry from foiling a plot to rob Fort Knox.
Perhaps they feared the light of truth the Trump Administration would shed on them, as Vice-President J. D. Vance did two weeks ago in his Munich speech. “Most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons, in particular, in the crosshairs.”
Maybe, if they do the right thing, James Bond will return. Martin Campbell wants to give it a third go. “I love Bond,” Campbell told Screen Rant. “Way back to Doctor No, when I took my mother to see it.” If he’s in, I’m in, but with one foreboding thought. You only live twice, Mr. Bond.
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