Having also grown up on Bond - Fleming as well as Eon - I now find it hard to take any of Craig's predecessors seriously.
Craig is certainly a unique case--since he seems to inspire reckess hyperbole from both his champions and detractors. I think he's a fine choice for the role, but my eyes tend to roll when he's either deified or vilified.
He is Fleming's Bond, for me, pure and simple.
This carries the dubious and much-too-convenient assumption that Fleming's Bond was ever pure and simple in the first place--Fleming's version of the character shifted and fluctuated over the years: the Bond of YOLT is a different man from the Bond of CR. "Fleming's Bond" is not a static concept that you can slot an actor into by claiming he's following some mysterious "subtext"--the idea that one actor purely and simply is Fleming's Bond is a generalization. It's more instructive to say that each actor who's played Bond has met certain qualities of the character found in Fleming's novels, but none has ever met all of them--that would be a near-impossibility anyway. Craig matches the cold, indomitable Bond of the early novels, and yet lacks the effortlessly debonair quality that Connery, Moore and Brosnan carried, while Moore often lacked the killing edge of a 00 agent and Connery was perhaps too hedonistic. Lazenby arguably fits Fleming's physical description of the character better than Craig, yet he was perhaps too brash and hearty. Dalton brought to life many of the world-weary qualities of Bond of the later novels but did so with perhaps too heavy a touch, as opposed to Brosnan, who erred toward lightness. All of these actors fit aspects of Bond found throughout the different novels and none could fit all of them. If you merged all of these actors into one you might perhaps have Fleming's Bond, as he was and changed over the course of all the novels and short stories. But no single actor really encapsulates all the aspects of "Fleming's Bond."
He's also - and by some distance - the greatest actor to have played Bond.
More Craig hagiography, and a subjective statement dressed up as an objective one--I don't see much "distance," given how arguable this position is. Connery--one of the greatest living movie stars--arguably has more screen presence than any of the other Bond actors, and this is what counts in movies, though he has also demonstrated how good of an actor he can be in films like
The Offence,
The Man Who Would be King, and
Robin and Marian. Craig has genuine screen presence as well--I wouldn't say as much, but he also has a range as great as Dalton's.
And as though that weren't enough, Craig is also the most human and most interesting of all the 007s
Craig is the most human because he's been
written that way, for movies that are determined to mine Bond's character far more than almost any of the previous films.
and the best-looking Bond of the whole bunch.
Again rather arguable. I don't think he's ugly by any means--nor would I class him as the best-looking, given that Connery was every bit of a sex symbol.
Now, before I sign off I just want to make clear that I don't wish to turn this into a "which Bond is better" debate. I simply wish to add balance to the conversation.
