By My Estimation, the Best Bond Ever

Rating: 9/10 (20 November 2006)

People have been weird about stressing that perhaps Daniel Craig is the best Bond ever. Since everyone knows that Connery was the best, but thinking back, I never truly rooted for Bond, not under Connery. I liked him, true enough, with the confident swagger, easy smiles, effortless athletic feats, but I never cared what happened to him, because he wasn't human. He was a super hero. Daniel Craig touches Bond with something no one has seen in a 007 movie, he gives him mortality. His brutish, often scary persona is so different from the Bonds before that I believed everything he did and felt. Craig, though not as attractive a man as any of the other incarnations, has a face that is hard to take your eyes from. His electric blue eyes are magnetic and he has the hulking form of a trained fighter, unlike Brosnon's lithe Cat-like physique. Enough about Craig, Martin Campbell, who directed the great last send-up, Goldeneye, comes back and takes the whole franchise the absolute basics. Thankfully, there are no Q's or MoneyPenny's to annoy the more intelligent audience members, and no invisible car! It may take another film for the nay-sayers to felt it proved, but this Bond (is better than any others.) Eat that.