Clash of the titans
It’s Craig versus Cruise as Bond challenges Mission: Impossible. Jamie Portman breaks it down.
When Daniel Craig injured his ankle on the set of the new James Bond film last month, the accident forced a production shutdown until cinema’s current 007 recovered from surgery.
A few weeks later, an explosion at England’s Pinewood Studios blew the roof off one of the production’s sound stages — forcing further delays. But those aren’t the only troubles afflicting the latest in a series that has earned billions worldwide since the arrival of the first 007 thriller, Dr. No, in 1962 — but that hasn’t been visible on the big screen since the release of Spectre in 2015.
So what’s happening with the most durable franchise in film history? Is the latest Bond film “cursed” — as the British media are now suggesting? Or, as some industry insiders argue, are its producers spooked by Tom Cruise and Mission: Impossible?
The upcoming film wants to be a milestone event — Bond 25. But it says something about the anxiety surrounding it that it still lacks a title.
The warning signals were already sounding last year. Eon Productions, longtime guardian of the Bond franchise, had originally hired Danny Boyle, the director of Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire, to take the helm of the new film. It was a bold choice, not only because of Boyle’s idiosyncratic style but also because of an erratic track record that had led to disasters like The Beach.
But Boyle’s relationship with the Bond franchise ended abruptly last August when he quit, citing “creative differences.” That was a polite way of saying that producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael J. Wilson hated his screenplay.
The producers found a replacement in Cary Joji Fukunaga, but it was scarcely a case of full speed ahead.
Release time was moved to April 2020 from autumn 2019. Some seven writers struggled with the script — among them a rare female, Phoebe WallerBridge, who has made headlines for condemning 007’s chauvinist image and demanding that the series “treat women properly.”
Bond’s macho persona may be part and parcel of the original Ian Fleming novels, but it was already becoming a problem more than 20 years ago when screenwriters decided it was time for Judi Dench’s M to tell Pierce Brosnan’s Bond he was “a sexist, misogynist dinosaur.” Now, there’s the #MeToo movement to contend with.
Anna Smith, chair of the London Film Critics Circle, told Britain’s Guardian newspaper earlier this month that “the challenge will be balancing political correctness with reassuring their core audience that James Bond is still a traditionally ‘masculine’ man.”
But a bigger challenge may be coming from across the water — from Tom Cruise, who showed up last year in Mission: Impossible — Fallout, determined at age 56 to reassert his super action-star status.
One might want to scoff at the preposterousness of a movie that kept trumping itself by making each action scene more exhilaratingly unbelievable than the previous one, were it for the fact that it was fantastic popcorn entertainment.
Indeed its enjoyment factor led Entertainment Weekly to make the type of judgment the keepers of the 007 flame must dread: “It’s time at least to start the conversation whether the M:I films have now eclipsed the Bond movies.”
Several months ago, a key player in the 007 success story told Postmedia in London that the Bond franchise was in serious jeopardy because of Mission: Impossible. In other words, Agent 007 was in danger of being knocked off his pedestal.
The Bond producers have sometimes exhibited a maddening caution in protecting their franchise, but they have also been capable of reinventing it at the 11th hour and fending off trouble. When a grumpy Sean Connery finally exited the role in 1971, there were predictions of disaster.
But when Roger Moore took over, he brought a jokey breeziness to the series and in the process attracted new fans. But because he was a friend, the producers stayed with him too long and allowed the films to degenerate into nonsense.
There was a brief respite when Timothy Dalton took over and gave audiences a darker, more dangerous Bond in two movies, only to exit the role when the series shut down during a lengthy legal tangle with a bankrupt MGM. After a four-year break, 007 was reborn again with Brosnan, whose impish, lightweight charm delivered a succession of hits. But by the time Die Another Day was released in 2002, Wilson was starting to feel uneasy despite that film’s huge profits. He told Postmedia he feared the “big engine” was running out of steam “I thought it was ailing … that creatively we were stuck.”
It was around this time that his company, Eon Productions, managed to secure the rights to the very first Bond novel, Casino Royale, which had previously been unavailable. That faced Wilson and Broccoli with a critical decision: Its storyline is so dark and violent that an actor like Brosnan would have been an uneasy fit for the Bond of that novel.
It took another four years before Casino Royale was released. In place of Brosnan we had a new Bond in craggy Daniel Craig, who returned the franchise to its roots with a darker, grittier, more obsessive 007. That film was a smash success.
But Craig — whom Wilson described as “probably the best actor of his generation in Britain, if not the world” — was increasingly restless. After the release of Spectre in 2015, he vowed he would slit his wrists before playing Bond again.
Now he’s been coaxed back, at 51 more comfortable in his middle age than Cruise, also less of a control freak with his readiness to deliver a conflicted 007.
Cruise is a superbly capable actor with one drawback: In most performances he backs off from giving a character a persuasive inner life. By contrast, Craig is willing to reveal a messed-up darkness of the soul — which is why his work as 007 has been so interesting.
That’s one reason the Bond people wanted him back: With Craig still starring, the Mission: Impossible threat diminishes — or so they hope.
Craig’s reported $85-million paycheque for the new film was obviously a powerful inducement to return. No doubt he sees the ankle injury as just part of the job in the same way that the loss of two teeth were in Casino Royale and the end of a finger in Quantum of Solace.
Meanwhile Cruise, who turns 57 in July, is preparing two more Mission: Impossibles. So let the battle of the titans begin.