The Name Is Suck. James Suck.



WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED, JAMES?!?



After taking a brief hiatus for a few years from another beloved childhood franchise, that being the James Bond movies, I finally took the plunge and decided to rent Die Another Day and see what ol’ 007′s been up to.



I was, to put it mildly, less than impressed.



I am realistic about these things, and I am well acquainted with that curious phenomenon we know as Change, or the Passage Of Time, but it is still something of a shock to see someone who so suave, so debonair, so damn CLASSY be reduced to this.



I’m a traditionalist. For me, it’s all about Goldfinger, Thunderball and all the other original works based off the previously written novels by Mister Fleming, so perhaps it’s just me being a stodgy old codger, but I mean COME ON…



I understand the need to keep a franchise “fresh” and “relevant” to the changing tastes of the audience, but I also think that an audience likes a particular thing/franchise for certain fundamental characteristics it possesses that no other intellectual property possesses. Or perhaps it’s more fair to say that it possessed these characteristics first. So to go and completely overhaul something to the point where aside from the name it’s almost unrecognizable to its ancestors is perhaps not the best way to go about “updating” a property for today’s audience.



Case in point:



James Bond Is Not A Surfer Dude



The opening action sequence already gave me a bad feeling about this. James Bond belongs to a sophisticated world of intrigue, danger and international conflict. He does not sit around thinking, “That is a MOST bodacious wave! EXCELLEEEENT!” and grab his board to go hang ten or suspend 8, or tie 5 to a ceiling or whatever it is that surfers do. And yet here, witness! 007 is riding the crest of a gnarly wave before hitting the sands of a North Korean beach!



The James Bond I knew was an incredibly dangerous yet intelligent and cultured man. He played in casinos and exchanged witty repartee with friends and foes alike. This James Bond would have been better off as an instructor in some catch-all extreme sports center, shouting out phrases like “Dude, I’ve got, like, a license to surf!”





James Bond Is Not A Tehm-In-Ay-Tah



Why, James, WHY?!?



Why are you subjecting me to the same insipid and ultimately insulting one-liners after someone’s demise that I can get in a dozen other randomly selected “high octane” action films?



After explosively decompressing a jetliner and causing 3/4 of the bad guys to get sucked out of holes in the hull:



“Your friends bailed.”



When his side kick, Halle Barry is fighting another bad ass spy girl:



Spy Girl: I can read your every move.



Halle takes a book on the floor and throws it at said girl, distracting her long enough to stab a knife through the book and Spy Girl’s chest.



Halle: Read THIS, bitch!



James Bond nearly goes off the edge of a waterfall but manages to grab onto an ancient Korean bell as his hovercraft topples over:



Bond: Saved by the bell!





James Bond Is Not Directed By The Brothers Wachowski



It’s probably just me, but I’ve always thought that every shot, every cut, every angle selected in a film should have a purpose to it. Throwing in gratuitous editing and shooting techniques for the cool factor is just not enough. While the Brothers Wachowsiki in their amazing first Matrix film introduced the concepts of bullet time, interesting editing, camera angles and camera speeds, it was all done in the service of the story, to illustrate how the freedom fighters acutally had powers that went beyond the limitations the Matrix imposed on them. Not only were these fight sequences and editing techniques incredibly cool to look at, they also pushed the story forward and entertained the audiences.



This same crazy post-modern editing seems horribly out of context within the James Bond franchise, with crash track shots through environments, slow motion combat that is entirely too reminiscent of other action/fighting pictures that have come out recently, and an incredibly insulting assumption that all the audience wants is good action. We’re pickier than that, we want good action that propels a good story with good characters. I can appreciate the amount of technical perfection that went into crafting these sequences, but it’s lost on me if I don’t give a damn what happens in the first place and provides a viewing experience that will amuse me for the whole of five minutes until I move back to something more memorable, like Lord of the Rings or the original Star Wars trilogy. Or Thunderball.



James Bond Is Bond. James Bond



Where is the wit? Where’s the intelligence? Where’s that suave sophistication?



While I understand that movies are all about escape, there is a different kind of escape unique to each film. Lord of the Rings is an escape to a fantastic, mythical past that never was, the original Star Wars trilogy is an escape to a future we all want to live in, and James Bond is an escape into a high stakes, classy world of urbane intrigue and intelligent covert operations. James Bond is a man with CLASS. His one liners have a peculiar quality of being clever rather than “punny”. What I witnessed was some good looking clown firing guns like Rambo and shouting out stupid lines after death without an Austrian accent. James Bond relied on his wits and intellect as much as he did on sheer brute force and expertise in combat. This Bond, as with so many action heroes of late, relied mostly on ammunition and coincidence to get him out of tight scrapes.



In short. WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH THE *REAL* BOND, JAMES BOND?!?