Unusual Bond

A Quantum Of Solace, the new Bond film, releases next week, and I can8217;t wait to see it.

A Quantum Of Solace, the new Bond film, releases next week, and I can8217;t wait to see it. Casino Royale was the most dramatic re-invention of a major character in the history of cinema, and perhaps the most audacious risk taken in repositioning a brand since Marlboro was transformed from a women8217;s cigarette to a smoke for tough men. Casino Royale restarted the more-than-four-decades-old franchise with a Bond who hadn8217;t yet discovered the vodka martini, had no gadgets, and could fall in love.

Whatever advance reports I have read indicate the following: The film begins an hour after Casino Royale ends, with the love of Bond8217;s life Vesper Lynd dead and Bond having capped the sinister Mr White in the knee. He figures out that Mr White is a small cog in a massive global operation with world domination plans that Spectre used to harbour when Sean Connery had hair. So Bond goes for revenge on his own. The producers have promised double the action of Casino Royale, and the most realistic violence ever. Bond bleeds, Bond gets hurt, Bond pants a lot. And there are unconfirmed rumours that this will be the first Bond film where 007 doesn8217;t sleep with the leading lady, because he8217;s still grieving over Vesper. Are these guys mad? Why are they trying to create a character? It8217;s only James Bond for god8217;s sake, the guy with the smart one-liners as he casually bumped off mad nasties! But I can8217;t wait to see how this experiment of Bond-with-tormented-soul works out.

The method is not new. It started with the Spiderman series, in which Peter Parker-Spiderman was ridden with guilt over his uncle8217;s death and afraid to confess his love to Mary-Jane. It reached its apotheosis in The Dark Knight, with Batman a brooding angry schizophreniac fighting a losing battle against the system. And all this about a millionaire who dresses up like a bat at night and lives in a cave! Frankly, I did not like The Dark Knight. Hey, lighten up, guys. It8217;s only comic books. Yes, yes, I know all the existential angst poured into Batman periodically by writers like Frank Miller, but isn8217;t this taking your task a bit too seriously?

But Casino Royale was different. It was a magnificent film with stunning-but believable-action no invisible cars and triphibian vehicles, and an actor who could be dangerous, insubordinate and in love equally believably. But more than these, it was the impressive thinking that had gone into the film. The producers had wiped their history clean, gone back to the drawing board, and selected Daniel Craig completely out of the left field; after all, Craig8217;s most well-known acting stint till then was as a brutal gangster in The Road To Perdition. But the gamble paid off. From the black-and-white opening sequence to the blistering chase involving free-running right up to the climax in Venice, it was a wild ride. It was so different from all the other Bond films in tone that it cancelled out our memories of all the other 20 films that had come before. One reason could have been that the producers felt they needed to compete with another giant franchise that had been created over the past decade, the Bourne series which combined Bond-like action with human feelings and human confusion. If that was so, then they and Craig met Bourne8217;s challenge effectively. Nostalgia still makes most people say Connery was the best Bond. But for many, it8217;s a toss-up now between him and Craig.

As I write, the first reviews of the film are trickling in. Writes The Daily Mirror: 8220;Quantum of Solace is a leaner, meaner animal, rammed with shoot-outs, a boat chase and even an aerial dogfight. And our hero is an angry, embittered man out for blood. Mostly it doesn8217;t feel like a Bond film at all.8221; We have one week to go before we test that out for ourselves. In The Spy Who Loved Me, Carly Simon sang: 8220;Nobody does it better.8221; Let8217;s hope she was right.

Sandipan Deb is the editor of RPG Enterprises8217; forthcoming weekly features and current affairs magazine, Talk