Dangerous Dan points out a This is London story about Daniel Craig, the actor who will be playing James Bond in the upcoming Casino Royale and, presumably, other films in the series. Ironically, it seems that he hates guns:Daniel Craig will have a problem playing the new James Bond — because he hates guns.Craig, as an actor, should be able to immerse himself in the role despite his views. But if history is any guide, the results could be disastrous:
The actor will wield 007's famous Walther PPK in the movie Casino Royale.
But he revealed in OK! magazine: "I hate handguns. Handguns are used to shoot people and as long as they are around, people will shoot each other.
"That's a simple fact. I've seen a bullet wound and it was a mess. It was on a shoot and it scared me. Bullets have a nasty habit of finding their target and that's what's scary about them."
Craig is not the first Bond to reveal a hatred of guns.Moore is widely regarded as the worst Bond ever, and his movies are seen as having nearly wrecked the series. Here's hoping Craig does better.
Roger Moore, who played the superspy from 1973 to 1985, said after quitting the role that he hated "that awful pose" of Bond with his gun which has become an iconic movie image.
I think the real danger, though, is not that Craig will fall short, but that the movie scripts will be toned down to reflect his own personal preferences. That means we could see Bond flicks with titles like:
| • | The Man with the Golden Reputation for Fairness | |
| • | A View to a Peaceful Resolution to the Dispute | |
| • | License to Talk Things Over | |
| • | The World is More Than Enough for Everyone, So Let's Share |
Sadly, Ace's prediction is looking more prescient every day.
As for Daniel Craig being gun-shy, I guess it depends on how good of an actor he really is. Sigourney Weaver is also a "gun-fearing wussy", and she really delivered the goods as Ripley in Aliens.
What I really want to know is, what happened to Pierce Brosnan? The man couldn't be a better Bond if he'd been genetically engineered, and he only made three movies! Timothy Dalton, who was pretty damn good as well, only made two movies, and the second one (Licence to Kill) was a dud. Could the Bond franchise itself be running out of gas?
I agree that Moore's movies were pretty silly even apart from Moore himself, but he didn't exactly raise them up to a higher level. And Dalton and Brosnan were quite good. My favorite recent Bond (say, of the Dalton-Brosnan era) is Tomorrow Never Dies: Simple, straightforward, and effective. TWINE and DAD were just silly by comparison.
If they get back to making the stories and action even a tiny bit believable in the new Casino Royale, my hopes will be restored.
Also, yeah, Sigourney rocked in Aliens.
GaijinBiker said:Mine too. To be honest, what I'd really like to see are some "old-school" Bond movies, staying true to the original novels — maybe even set in the time of the original novels. They don't even have to be big-budget feature productions, a well-made HBO direct-to-cable series would be fine by me. I'd love to see Moonraker or Diamonds are Forever the way God and Ian Fleming intended them; Cubby Broccoli's franchise started diverging badly from the novels after Thunderball.
And setting the new movies in the 50's-60's would be a great idea, as would not using obvious CGI work when old-fashioned effects will do.
I'm always disappointed when a book I liked for years is turned into a movie, and all the technology is updated from "two decades old" to "five years in the future, maybe".
The worst example of this I can think of is Michael Crichton's Congo. In the book, the explorers relied on a horribly inadequate 1970's-era computer device to communicate with headquarters, adding an incredible amount of tension to the plot. Abbreviated cryptic messages like "MST LV NW" would come in on the monochrome screen, and the characters would have to intuit what they meant. It emphasized how helpless they were, wandering around in the middle of the jungle.
Then, you have the recent movie version, with full-color TV-quality streaming video and Star Trek-like graphic displays. Boring.
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