Originally posted by Triton
A villain who is a brute and is also capable of love and tenderness? The Bond villains have always been so one dimensional. They always seem to be brutes and thugs with no redeeming qualities. They seem so incapable of love or tenderness. Almost like they spend their days killing their own henchman and then come home in the evening to beat their mistresses, wives, pets, and children.
Exactly. It's all black and white in the Bond films: the baddies are all very, very bad (the main villains, anyway - some of the henchpeople are less than 100% evil, such as Jaws, May Day, Boris, Vlad....), and the goodies are all very, very good (look at DIE ANOTHER DAY: Bond, Jinx, M, Moneypenny and Robinson are a bunch of such nauseating goody-two-shoeses that you want to slap them). The same is true in the novels.
Off the top of my head, I can think of only one main villain who has good qualities: Sanchez, since he always keeps his word and rewards loyalty (maybe a case could also be made for Scaramanga, who, like Bond, is a professional who only kills professionals [although he kills Andrea]). Still, Sanchez is never remotely sympathetic.
But you're quite right, Triton: the Bond villains are always one-dimensional.
Originally posted by Triton
Would a villain capable of love and tenderness be too tragic a character when Bond finally kills him and he would get sympathy from the audience?
Probably. And I think that's why we never saw Bond's son turn up as a bad guy in THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH, as it was rumoured he did in early versions of the script. Would audiences have cheered 007 as he blew away his own flesh and blood, no matter what he'd done? Better to have a billionaire megalomaniac and a generic Eastern European terrorist than a coldblooded young assassin nursing a violent grudge against the secret agent father he never knew.
I think this is also why villains in Bond films are virtually never married or have loving relationships, or have children. Would we applaud Bond if we knew he was turning wives into widows and taking fathers away from children by killing the baddies? Better to give them trophy wives or girlfriends to whom they're abusive and who cannot wait to get free of them, and to make them childless.
Originally posted by Triton
It would be nice to see more realistic and multi-dimensional villains in James Bond films, but I don't think that Purvis & Wade or Eon would ever write a multi-dimensional villain for a Bond film. They almost need to be totally bad in a comic book sense.
Agreed. And perhaps someone of Kitano's stature wouldn't wish to do a totally cardboard role.
