Bond. Lame Bond

Rating: 1/10 (2 July 2007)

Movies were once an alternative to the dreariness of everyday life. Audiences queued up to escape into better worlds through characters much larger than themselves - individuals for whom they felt admiration because they were up there on the screen going places and doing things that most viewers could only envy. Leading characters were endowed with a mythos formed from the imaginations of writers, directors and actors which thrilled and enchanted viewers. Topmost among the cinematic heroes of that era was James Bond, a handsome, articulate, highly educated and thoroughly unflappable superman who could slug it out without ever being marked, engage in endless gunfights without suffering serious wounds, saunter away from nuclear explosions, make love to countless women without having to report for penicillin shots and never ever become hung up in the banal sort of problems which beset commandos and spies in real life. That was the Bond myth, which was highly successful even though or perhaps because it was, as Bertolt Brecht remarked of art, not a mirror of life but a hammer with which it's beaten into shape. Beginning with the unspeakably tedious "Die Another day," James Bond has been sadly demythologized and, to borrow a line from "Dr. No, reduced to nothing more than a stupid policeman. In this latest incarnation, Bond is further shrunk into what seems to be an even more sullen version of Mickey Spillaine's Mike Hammer and portrayed by an actor who makes us yearn for the superior talents of Ralph Meeker. Hollywood just doesn't seem to understand what we liked about James Bond before. Or perhaps Ian Fleming's World War II-inspired creation has just run out of steam by now. Maybe it's time he were laid to rest beside Harry Palmer, Matt Helm and Derek Flint. Otherwise he may become an even an even greater embarrassment to himself in his dotage.