‘Well I understand 00s have a very short life expectancy’. There have been quite a few memorable lines from Daniel Craig as Bond in the past 15 years. The Vodka Martini ‘do I look like I give a damn’ response in Casino Royale; the ‘enjoying death’ line in Skyfall, and a few others. But maybe the best of them was less than 40 minutes into his first Bond film, back in 2006.
Casino Royale had barely begun when Bond made a cheeky reference to the changing faces donning the 007 persona. It was as light-hearted as it was self-aware, very Bond-like. Yet, Daniel Craig has had a quite long shelf-life as the man with the license to kill. In fact, he’s lived the longest, three more than Roger Moore (Connery came back as Bond in Irvin Keschner’s Never Say Never Again in 1983, but that was after an 11-year run when Moore had already replaced him at Eon).
But it’s not just the longevity of Daniel Craig that makes him memorable as Bond. It’s also the relevance. To many, Craig isn’t the best Bond. Sometimes, the one thing Bond fans can agree on, while disagreeing on who’s the best 007, is that it’s not Craig. But he might be its most important.
At the start of the 21st century, being James Bond was something of a dying art, with more emphasis on dying, and less on art. After the debacle that was Die Another Day in 2002, the franchise was, to put it mildly, struggling. It needed to reset itself, not just with story, and character, but also with its style. So, it went back to the roots, rebooted and gave us an origin story with Casino Royale in ’06.
At the centre of that was Daniel Craig, who was arguably the first Bond that wasn’t just really James Bond, but more of an actor playing James Bond. It’s hard to leave the shadow of being James Bond once you play it – and as the Idris Elba debate has shown, it’s hard to shake off the persona even if you don’t play the role. But while Craig is famed for being James Bond, his catalogue still has other acts that are prominent, before, during, and after.
It’s hard to picture Pierce Brosnan as anything other than Bond, it’s even harder to do so with Connery and Moore. But with Craig, such is quality he has and the reputation he has built for himself that you picture the man with stage performances, the spoilt criminal brat in Road to Perdition, the man in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and the southern weird detective in Knives Out, the latter of which he’ll be again.
But back to the James Bond franchise and the 21st century. When the torch passed from Timothy Dalton to Brosnan in the last 20th century, the Bond persona was shifting, but not quickly enough, and convincingly enough. And by the time the 2000s rolled around, the age of action heroes was something else. There was The Matrix, which redefined superhero shtick; then there was Mission Impossible, with Tom Cruise, which changed what an action hero should do. Even Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies were something of a nod to all that.
Suddenly, Bond couldn’t be the hero that says his name twice and drinks champagne. Suddenly, it wasn’t just charm and a suave sense of megalomania anymore. Now a hero had to chase moving trains, engage in beautifully choreographed rooftop battles, and whatnot. Pierce Brosnan tried to do that, but it didn’t quite work with him.
With Daniel Craig, it did. We saw Athletic Bond, Emotional Bond, and Bond with a chip on his shoulder. At times, it felt like a nod to Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, as well as to the other Bonds of the past, and even Batman too.
The Bond films themselves also deserve credit for the evolution of 007. There were even villains that had mirrored James Bond in different ways, and shared a connection with our man (for better or worse). But none of this really works without Daniel Craig.
And so, he prepares to be Bond one last time, being dragged out of fictional retirement and real-life semi-retirement to wield his license to kill in No Time to Die. Daniel Craig recently talked about the issue of the next James Bond and how that would go, but whatever happens next, it would be interesting to see. Despite its evolution, there are still elements in the franchise that are probably obsolete in this age, but still are still woven into the fabric of the Bond. That’ an area MGM will have to navigate going forward.
For the present, though, it’s about Daniel Craig going again, at last, for one last time. The term ‘understood the assignment’ is quite mainstream now, and it applies to Craig as Bond. The man who made being Bond cool and relevant again.
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