The new Bond: burly, blue-collar and bespoke for this age

I trekked out to the megaplex this past weekend - along with quite a few of you, I was happy to note - to catch the new blond Bond, Daniel Craig, in Casino Royale. 

Let me digress for a moment to point out that this is the first film in a long while that I was actually really excited to see. This is both a credit to the 'James Bond Marketing Machine', but also a sad commentary on how atomized a society we've become. It used to be that the opening weekend of a 'tent pole' (to use a movie industry term) film like this was a defining moment in our collective calendars, but that was before the iPod, TiVo, My Space and YouTube turned seminal social events into personal, private moments (and vice versa). Today, the mass audience has become so fragmented that it takes a rare convergence of marketing magic, marvellous buzz and a compelling movie to create an event film release. I miss those halcyon days ... 

But back to Bond. Daniel Craig stepped in to some large brogues in taking over the 007 assignment from the most recent (and mostly appreciated) Pierce Brosnan as well as from the most famous Bond of them all, Sean Connery. Not surprisingly, it is through the prism of these two actors that Craig's Bond in particular - and Casino Royale in general - should be viewed. 

This Bond is clearly a break from the recent past. Craig's 007 stands in stark contrast to the suave secret agent of Brosnan's films. Whereas Brosnan was smooth, almost effete in his unruffled portrayal of the gentleman spy, Craig is all rough edges and alpha male. While Brosnan was handsome, dashing and debonair, Craig is pug-nosed, pugilistic and rough-hewn. Whereas you can picture the refined Brosnan picking up a rapier and fencing his way past a villain (as he did in Die Another Day), you can equally imagine the more crass Craig as a bloke who breaks a bottle of Guinness and glasses his opponent in a dingy East End pub. 

In this way, Craig's Bond marks a return to its historical roots and the paterfamilias of the franchise, Sean Connery. Craig brings to the role a raw physicality that's been lacking since the Scotsman last sipped shaken, not stirred, martinis. It might surprise you than Connery was a prize-winning bodybuilder before becoming Bond; it won't surprise you to know that Craig worked out 2 hours a day during filming to bring back 'burly' as an unexpectedly Bondian adjective. This Bond is menacing, physically intimidating, almost feral (as in the opening fight sequences). In an early exchange in the film, MI-6's M characterizes Bond as a 'blunt instrument', reprising the famous description Ian Fleming once gave of the 007 he envisioned in his novels. Craig is clearly more of a shiv in the Connery tradition than a dagger in the Moore | Brosnan mold. 

This Bond is also more blue-collar than his predecessor. Craig's accent is markedly less plummy than Brosnan's smoothed-out Irish brogue, and his closely-cropped sandy mane is diametrically different to the former 007's almost pompadour-like coiffure in The World is not Enough. Craig frequently spits out his lines through clenched teeth and seemingly substitutes blood for hair gel, two stylistic signatures marking him as a considerably less mannerly and metrosexual Bond. 

Clearly, the 2006 007 owes a significant debt to 1963's Dr. No, the film that introduced us to the definitive Bond in Connery. However, Craig's selection as Bond - and the back-to-basics approach taken in Casino Royale - probably owes even more to an unlikely trilogy of recent movies: I would argue that this Bond, and this Bond film, would not have happened without The Bourne Identity, Batman Begins and Layer Cake. 

Director Doug Liman's take on Robert Ludlum's CIA assassin in 2002 gave the entire espionage genre a much needed modern makeover. Liman, who directed the classic Swingers, married brisk camera work, a deftly unspooling plot and everyman Matt Damon into an unexpected spy franchise in the making. Moreover, Damon's Jason Bourne proved to be a younger, edgier and more contemporary secret agent in tune with his time. He was instantly more relevant to the day's Gen X audience, who had grown tired of a Bond made increasingly irrelevant by poor movies (1999's Tomorrow Never Dies and 2002's Die Another Day) as well as all-too-successful parodies (the Austin Powers trilogy). In a nutshell, The Bourne Identity proved that the spy thriller was not dead yet. 

2005 marked the rebirth not of a genre but a fallen hero with Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins. This movie established the precedent (which takes on disproportionate importance in a copy cat town like Hollywood) that fans would flock back to a film series if the central character's origins could be fleshed out for a new generation. Not quite a prequel, Batman Begins rebooted the franchise by pushing aside the excesses of previous sequels and ushering in a fresh, young and relatively unknown lead cast member to take over from his older and more illustrious predecessors. Does this sound familiar? Warner Brothers' gamble paid off handsomely, and you can bet that the Bond films' producers - EON Productions - took notice. 

Finally, though, Daniel Craig would have never caught the eyes of those producers had Matthew Vaughn not cast and directed him in the excellent 2004 British gangster film noir, Layer Cake. Craig's star turn as a smooth, sophisticated and sharply-dressed London drug baron screamed out his suitability to play an edgier, more street-cred Bond. For the relatively few of you who saw this stylish thriller, Craig's casting as the new 007 came as no surprise. 

It is said that over the 5 decades of Bond films society seems to get the 007 it deserves. According to the Bond Canon, Sean Connery gave us a cool, iconic yet dark spy to reflect the JFK shadow and nuclear dread that hovered over the 1960s. Roger Moore was a more upper class, almost comedic Bond, a movie metaphor for the Thatcher | Reagan era of the 1970s and early 80s. After two stillborn Bond films with Timothy Dalton in 1987 and 1989, Pierce Brosnan's 007 was a familiar face to audiences and a reassuringly steady return to form for the franchise - gadgets and product placements galore - during the tech bubble-fuelled roaring 1990s. Finally, Daniel Craig's current Bond holds up a mirror to our considerably more grim contemporary era, beset by both real and potential climactic catastrophe (Hurrricane Katrina, global warming), torture (Abu Ghraib) and terrorism (9/11). 

Seen in this context, how we could have anything else but a more elemental, stripped-down, tightly-coiled 007? Time will tell if Daniel Craig is a Bond for the ages, but his promising debut in Casino Royale marks him, at the very least, as a 007 for this age.