I remember the day precisely. I was mowing the lawn when my father ran out of the house screaming at the top of his lungs: “Nooooooooo! The bastards have only gone and done it! Why? WHY!!??”
He tore at his clothing, crying and incoherent with grief. He ground his face into the dirt and tore lumps of soil from the ground and scattered it on his head. The day was October 14, 2005: the new James Bond had been announced, and he had big ears.
My father was not a demonstrative man normally but as Twitter and Facebook weren’t around in those days, this was the only way he had of expressing his disapproval. He wasn’t the only one to be distressed.
The Daily Mirror ran a front-page story, headlined: “The Name’s Bland, James Bland.” Another headline punned James Blonde, hilariously. And some cock registered a website titled: “DanielCraigisnotJamesBond!” or something.
Craig’s first outing Casino Royale finally screened a year later, in November 2006. That’s 20 years ago now. Back then I – like many in the packed Leicester Square cinema – cheered on the pumped-up Bash Street Kid as he took on the mantle of the only British superhero.
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The very first scene set it up as Bond earned his 00-status offing some black-and-white head of station in Prague. This was a reboot; a prequel of sorts – Batman Begins had come out the year before.
An adaptation of the first Ian Fleming novel, Casino Royale also resembled the book more than any of the previous films since Thunderball in 1965. Like Fleming’s creation, Craig wasn’t a suave, winking smoothie like Pierce Brosnan and Roger Moore.
Instead, he was… how can I put this?… a bit of a twat. Like someone who actually knew how to kill you. There was a bit of psycho in there.
Timothy Dalton had famously tried to bring depth to the role, but he was stuck in Bond films directed by John Glen, who had cut his teeth in Moore’s later quip-packed tenure. It didn’t help that Dalton mistook grumpiness for gravitas, and though he does have his defenders, they are the kind of people who like the taste of their own chewed saliva and punching kittens.
In Casino Royale, the film was attuned to the character. We first meet Bond as a young sharp blade, and he increasingly becomes blunted and bruised, more deadly, less precise.
By the end of the film, he has visibly aged, retired and retracted his retirement, fallen in love and fallen out of love, invents his own overly complicated cocktail and then snaps at a barman that he doesn’t give a damn if his martini is shaken or stirred or shoved up his arse. Well, he doesn’t say the last, but you can tell he wanted to.
Craig’s films are unfairly accused of humourlessness, but that martini line got a huge laugh. It was better than anything from the Moore dad-joke Bonds. And anyway, the job of comedy Bond had now been taken by Austin Powers.
Casino Royale, on the other hand, has some genuinely funny moments. There’s wit in the action – that amazing opening parkour chase is gags galore – as well as the waspish banter between Bond and Vesper Lynd, played by the defibrillatingly gorgeous Eva Green.
Craig himself is not above a bit of self-parody. When he tries on the tailored dinner jacket Lynd gifts him, he regards his reflection in the mirror like a man a squirt of skin lotion away from doing himself thoroughly.
“You know my name,” Chris Cornell sings in the theme song, and he’s right. We’ve been convinced. Daniel Craig is James Bond. As if to rub it in, Craig pronounces the most famous diacope in film right at the end.
The whole film is an argument to justify that conclusion. It couldn’t have been more direct if he’d shot a Daily Mirror journalist at the end, muttering about “the bland leading the bland.”
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Many will be waiting now with their counterarguments locked and loaded. Yes, they’ll say, but what about Quantum of Bollocks? What about Sphincter?
First, neither of those films is as bad as Die Another Day or Octopussy. And I’ll go further and say Quantum of Solace is actually vastly underrated. It’s a punk b-side to Casino Royale. Ninety minutes long, a direct sequel, practically non-stop action.
Plus there’s the sequence in the opera, and there’s Olga Kurylenko. And the Jack White/Alicia Keys theme song? As Jurgen Klopp would say: “Wow! Just wow!”
Aside from Goldfinger and From Russia with Love, no Bond film is perfect. Casino Royale has way too much Texas Hold’em poker, with poor Giancarlo Giannini playing Captain Exposition, before getting tasered and dragged off. For every Javier Bardem villain, there’s a Rami Malek ready to muck it all up.
But Craig’s Bonds, more than anyone else’s tenure, demand to be seen as a saga: a continuous story with his character changing and developing. He is born, grows and learns, declines and ultimately must die.
The question now, of course, is who will replace him? By the time you’ve read this, the decision might already be made, but I suspect that the next direction Bond takes won’t be marked so much by the new actor as by the new ownership. The previous Bonds from Dr. No to No Time to Die were all produced by someone with the surname Broccoli, Cubby to Barbara, and that continuity was vital to an enduring identity throughout.
With the takeover of the franchise by Amazon, there are new producers, Amy Pascal and David Heyman, a new director in Denis Villeneuve, and a new writer, Stephen Knight. It’s unlikely they’ll be any holdovers from the ensemble that surrounded Craig – Ralph Fiennes’s M, Naomie Harris’ Moneypenny and Ben Wishshaw’s Q.
Whoever is chosen to play Bond will be key, obviously, but previously the new actor has slotted in – or not in the case of George Lazenby – to a family that was already practiced at making the formula work. Here the formula itself is going to be totally different. You’ll still have the branding – the gun barrel, the theme, the lines, but not the recipe. The Coke bottle but not the Coke.
Unfortunately, my dad is no longer around to overreact to every casting decision made when it comes to our favourite secret agent. But when the news does finally drop, in his memory, I’ll be sure and type some frenzied words expressing perplexity and fury, anything to hide the apathy that now ravages my soul.
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