Ive been wondering how Craig, and other so called "contenders" have been thinking about the role, if they get it. The media frenzy that will follow them everywhere, the exposure and promotion work that they will have to do.
From the Empire Online page Daltonfan links to (a caption on one of the photos):
Of his relationship with Kate Moss, Craig says: "In the end, it was a relief because I never chased that kind of celebrity, and it was confirmation that I didn't want it"Hmmm.... if dating Kate Moss turns out to be a bit too "celeb" for Craig's liking, heaven knows how he'd cope with the exposure Bond would bring.
Anyway, I've now seen LAYER CAKE, and have mixed reactions to both the film and to Craig as a potential Bond.
First, the film: it's okay. I've seen worse. I've also seen better, but not from the British film industry in recent years (this is because British films are nearly always awful). This is better than anything I've seen by director Matthew Vaughn's buddy Guy Ritchie (although on reflection "better than anything by Guy Ritchie" seems faint praise indeed). But it's the old pop promo school of whizkid debut directing: terrific visuals, and lashings and lashings of (contrived) style, but absolutely hopeless storytelling. Completely soulless, heartless and ultimately unengaging and forgettable. Could have done with being
a lot less aggressively trendy (and, considering how old the whole Britpop aesthetic actually is now, it's a good 10 years out of date, really), or at least with more effort to somehow squeeze a coherent and interesting story into the flashiness, ****-you coolness (so-called) and ultraviolence (yeah, I'm a demanding old so-and-so, I know).
But Vaughn has a pretty good visual eye and knows how to build suspense, which means that, while the narrative is all over the place (and the dialogue often drowned out by the "hip" soundtrack), individual sequences work very well. There are a couple of shocking (and shockingly brutal) moments: Duran Duran's "Ordinary World" will never sound quite the same again.
It's perhaps a bit of a pity that Vaughn won't be directing CASINO ROYALE. There's a lot wrong with LAYER CAKE (which I can't be bothered to go into), but there are good things about it, too, and Vaughn
does show genuine talent - his X-MEN 3 should be worth watching. Leastways, I can't believe Martin Campbell is
truly anyone's idea of a more exciting and interesting director. Eon has evidently decided to go with a competent but really rather dull and mediocre hack (c'mon, GOLDENEYE fans, ignore his Bond film and try to defend Campbell's body of work - I dare you, I double dare you; it's really pretty uninteresting stuff for the most part) instead of an up-and-coming
enfant terrible. A shame they're playing it safe.
Anyway, Craig: well, for the first half or so of the film, I felt he'd be a
PHENOMENAL Bond. I'm serious. But I began to find him a little one-note and boring towards the end (just a little, though - he commands attention whenever he's onscreen, and thankfully he's onscreen for pretty much all of the running time), although that may very well be the fault of the script, or something like that. Frankly, the whole movie gets one-note and boring towards the end. Craig's performance, BTW, is
easily the best thing about it.
Watching LAYER CAKE, I totally understood why Barbara Broccoli/Sony/whoever it is who supposedly wants him wants Craig for Bond. He reminded me very much of Dalton, right down to the way he delivered his lines. Honestly, I could have closed my eyes and found it easy to imagine I was watching THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS. I don't mean Craig has the same accent as Dalton - he doesn't - but the delivery is very similar. A confidence, a classiness about the phrasing. A lot posher than I thought he'd be. He could do brilliantly the English public school man Bond (with more than a few dashes of English public school sadism) that Moore specıalısed in, with Dalton's intensity
but also (and this is where I think spynovelfan believes Dalton's Bond falls short) the hedonism, the love of the sensual pleasures in life. A
slight touch of Connery circa FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (crikey, this is sounding pretentious, innit?
), while the confident walk and cockiness are pure Brozzers. And he moves very well in action scenes.
Which covers all bases, I guess (except for Laz fans), but I must keep coming back to Dalton, definitely the Bond actor I found myself thinking about most when watching Craig.
That said, Craig would make the Bond role very much his own - and, swipe me, how the flippin' heck could he
fail to do so when he looks so incredibly unlike any of the previous Bonds? And now we're back to that pretty big problem: Craig ain't pretty - at all. Granted, he looks a lot better on film than he seems to in photos (for some odd reason), but I'm far from convinced he'd really "do" in the fizzog dept (the same problem as with Sam Neill, says I). He has very few close ups in LAYER CAKE, which seems rather telling. Of course, the Bond people could (and presumably
would) give him a wig or radical new haircut and some visible eyebrows, and use sympathetic lighting and pots of makeup, but, really, that would quite possibly invite ridicule. And I'm not saying he's Prince, but his height seems if anything an even bigger problem than his lack of dazzlingly beautiful features.
On balance, though, I think he could be a quite brilliant choice, assuming they're planning on reinventing the Bonds as a serious of gritty, Bourne-style spy thrillers with plenty of strong doses of undiluted Fleming; if they're going to go down that path (and remember Martin Campbell's interview comments) then Craig might be an even better choice than Owen.
Craig may not be the most gorgeous guy on the block, but I think he's got that Steve McQueen kind of coolness about him, that alpha male oomph or whatever (doing a quick net search, I see others have compared Craig to McQueen). Sign him up, I say.
Oh, and one more thing: if he
is being looked at as a villain in CR (although if that's the case, query why he's claiming to have been considered as and offered Bond), they'd darn well better get someone absolutely
awesome as 007, otherwise Bond 6 will be simply blown out of the water by Craig. He has an awful lot of screen presence.
