The Screening Spires
Well, the new Bond villain has been announced. And, in a move showing surprising symmetry with recent events, he’s a Dane; the splendidly named Mads Mikkelsen is to portray ‘Le Chiffre’, the diabolical villain of Casino Royale. Only in a franchise which began with a former Scottish body-builder/milkman playing an old Etonian would we find a Dane playing a Frenchman; perhaps in another multicultural gesture, his main weapon will be a bomb concealed in a turban.
Idiosyncratic casting aside, the future does not bode well for our beloved Bond series as it draws toward its 21st incarnation. Daniel Craig will doubtless make a fine bastard-cumsaviour of the world (far more than the humourless Clive Owen), and nothing could be worse than the execrable Die Another Day, but sometimes one has to admit the world has moved on, and James Bond certainly belongs more to Ian Fleming’s 50s than the Arctic Monkeys’ noughties.
Back in the day, Bond was perfect for his cold war incarnation. People with funny foreign accents and henchmen with even funnier accents held the world to ransom in the name of the planned economy, usually through nuclear means. Women were waiting for Bond to ravish them, then either kill them, allow them to die or tell them to get lost for “man talk” (Connery actually says this in Goldfinger).
Best of all, everything was conducted through a thick haze of glorious smoke, all of it wafting from those magical old filterless cigarettes everyone smoked in old films. Parliament has recently done away with the latter anachronism (the bastards), but the rest are equally as obsolete. With the demented reassurance of M.A.D. dissolved, we now have in Al Qaeda and co. an ideological enemy who hasn’t the decency of our much-missed Commie rivals.
What’s more, Bin Laden doesn’t even have the basic honour to hang out in a hollowed-out volcano; it’s much trickier to send in a few dozen ninjas into some random cave in the tribal regions of Pakistan. It goes on; the Bond of Ian Fleming’s novels would cough into his martini at the inroads women have made in the intervening decades.
But hey, is any of this a real criticism? As long as the next Bond film delivers some nicely kickass action, lame puns, and doesn’t stray too far into Austin Powers territory, we shall all be happy. It’s like a time-machine.
23rd Feb 2006