James Bond has a problem. James Bond can’t die again. You can only kill James Bond and make his death relevant once. Just one. You only get one chance. That’s why the ending was so important. James Bond: No Time To Die. And since you’ve already been torturing him for 25 movies, you have to do something new with him now to keep the character relevant. When you’ve had such a palette of villains (we’re very clear about who the best James Bond villains are), you have to break the deck, hit the table. It is not enough to have a great criminal mind behind a criminal organization that wants to commit a crime of the 21st century. Do you need anything else. He can be rejuvenated, yes; You can give him the prequel treatment, yes, but seriously, to be relevant he has to surprise. Because if not, he will happen to you as has happened to the The Batman of Robert Pattinson, which has come as new something that has been done over and over again when the character had fallen in popularity with the general public. James Bond shares with Batman, and already with Spider-Man, who has the great fortune that his adventures are restarted every time he changes actors. With Tom Holland the void of the young and naive Spider-Man was filled, with Robert Pattinson the detective from the comics has been recovered for the cinema (yes, that is the great virtue of the new character, although Jeffrey Wright’s Gordon later comes to explain the clues), but which James Bond are we missing?
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Archive Photos
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We have always seen James Bond as James Bond had to be. There has been no gap to fill, no missing attribute in any of the character’s incarnations throughout the franchise. James Bond has always been a super spy with a license to kill. There hasn’t been a movie that forgot that he was a super spy, just as there hasn’t been a movie that forgot that he had a license to kill. None of the portrayals of the character have strayed from there. There have been different shades to the character, but the essentials, the basic package, have always been there. That’s what makes it infinitely more difficult to continue his adventures in a relevant way. Yes, each James Bond movie is an event per se; that yes, that only the mere election of the new James Bond (we have analyzed, analyzed and will analyze the best candidates to become James Bond until the mystery is solved) is going to be enough claim, but that does not guarantee that the character will to continue to be relevant. Playing it safe would be to bet on a Casino Royale approach: it is perfectly possible to recover one of the original novels that, although it has had some kind of version, is sufficiently improvable and add a good actor like Daniel Craig and a good villain and go back to doing more than the same. But that would be a missed opportunity. In Craig’s case it made sense because he was truly resetting the franchise by going back to the origins of the character, when he had just gotten the two leading zeros. But again? Of course there are stories in the novels and stories that have not been used and that could serve as the basis for James Bond 26, but …. And we got to where he wanted to go. There is a model that the James Bond saga can follow that no one had considered.
What if James Bond now becomes an anti-hero? What if instead of rejuvenating it we age it? What if he becomes a free-roaming agent of revenge, but with no fold for him to return to? What if instead of a new actor, like Idris Elba or Sam Heughan, he brought back Pierce Brosnan? Yeah, he’s crazy, I know, but he waits, waits. Because all of this, except for Brosnan, who we now have to see defend Doctor Fate (my Doctor Fate, no less) in Shazam and Black Adam, has already been done. He is in the Mark Millar King of Spies comic book miniseries. The approach that the James Bond franchise can follow from now on is the starting point of this series: a retired spy, Roland King, tries to make amends for a life as a super-spy in which he has killed left and right. He has been a ruthless and evil spy and now wants to use his skills to take on everyday villains. And it turns out that those villains are characters with a more than reasonable resemblance to public figures (I like that less, but, come on, let’s go with it).
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Image Comics
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The series, let’s see, is still a story of revenge, a kind of bloody Bastards, but with the usual action of Mark Millar and with the undeniable appeal of spy stories. Although their names are different, the physical resemblances and the clues they drop make it easy to identify who King’s victims are. For example, in issues 2 and 3 of the series, King assassinates two former British Prime Ministers who, from their appearance and the context of the scene, are Tony Blair and John Major. Then there is the assassination of a former US president who looks like Ronald Reagan, but from the context looks more like George W. Bush. There’s also the royal family member and movie producer who could only be Prince Andrew and Harvey Weinstein. Let’s see, Bond is never going to kill a British prime minister, but an adventure in which he went for a Harvey Weinstein. Basically, you take away the superheroic tone, and you turn it into a kind of Black Widow. And wouldn’t that be a refreshing approach to the character? Bond fans deserve stuff like that. Basically, that they surprise us.
