Over the last 54 years, we’ve had short Bonds and tall Bonds, British Bonds, Scottish Bonds, and even an Asian Bond, for one ill-advised scene at least. But the only Bond that matters (besides your word and I guess the kind issued by the Treasury) is a recent addition to the canon—Daniel Craig in Casino Royale. This movie is literally all about a card game, and it still rules.
“But, but Goldfinger,” you sputter! A fine movie, for idiots who believe you could really suffocate that way. From Russia With Love, you comment below this article, though I will never see it, for I studiously ignore bad opinions. Does Sean Connery slapping a woman spy in the face hold up? “I don’t think there is anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman,” he later explained to Playboy. “An openhanded slap is justified–if all other alternatives fail and there has been plenty of warning. If a woman is a bitch, or hysterical, or bloody-minded continually, then I’d do it. I think a man has to be slightly advanced, ahead of the woman.”
That being said, and boy did he say it, I liked the movie he did with Catherine Zeta Jones with the lasers. That was a good movie, but it wasn’t a good Bond movie.
There are 26 Bond movies, and they run the spectrum from okay to fine to Jesus Christ, that was racist.
You know what will still hold up in 54 years? Casino Royale. Daniel Craig tenderly consoling woman spy Eva Green under a running shower. They’re both dressed in black tie and seconds after getting out, her hair is perfect.
But guess what—she doesn’t need consoling. She’s a fully-developed badass lady spy who’s just as smart and just as funny as Bond. Obviously she dies for it, ensuring the next Craig movie could never top the first. A shrewd decision by the filmmakers to protect the integrity of the piece, I presume.
I don’t profess to know the future, but my friends, I’ll tell you this—no matter what happens in Trump’s America, he can pry my two-disc widescreen edition Casino Royale DVD out of my cold, dead, normal-sized hands.