Is it just me, or is Bond better off without Daniel Craig? - murrayblince1953

Is it sporting me, or is Bond better off without Daniel Craig?

Daniel Craig in new James Bond movie No Time to Die

(Project credit: MGM)

"Nothing in his living became him like the departure it," remarks a supporting part in Macbeth, a play Daniel Craig will shortly star in connected Broadway. And something twin might be aforesaid of Craig himself, whose departure from the Bond series had a Shakespearean splendour of which the Bard would surely possess been braggart.

But now that the dust has settled, this critic can't help feeling the series will benefit from no more being so inextricably tied to ace leading man. From Casino Royale through to Atomic number 102 Time to Die, the Craig ERA has been atomic number 3 a good deal about his portraying of Ian Fleming's intelligence officer as it has been about what he got busy – a psychological dissection of the man behind the number and the past behind the present.

Thanks to Casino's slating-cleaning, Skyfall's childhood-exhuming and Spectre's divisive ret-conning, we've seen more of 007's interior workings in fetters 21 to 25 than we ever did in the tally that came before them. We as wel saw him take intestine-punch after gut-puncher, from battered testes and cranial intrusions to the slayer double-whammy of losing both veracious dear Vesper Lynd and Diamond State facto mother M.

The inescapable consequence of this was that the actual secret-agent stuff tended to embody an afterthought: a contractual obligation that rarely gave Craig a compelling mission or worthy antagonist. More than that, though, the sleuth games seemed to beryllium less about saving the world and more to do with resolution some long-interred hurt: revisiting his family rest home, for example, or reaching a closure of sorts with a resentful sort-of-sib.

By the time NTTD came around, Bond wasn't even a spy any more, having in the end made good along the resignation he written at the end of Royale. Wherever the series goes from here, it'd be refreshing to have a Bond who actually enjoys his job and has a half-decent work ethic.

Craig's Bond has been many things: emotional, dramatic, intense. Only it hasn't been much fun. Now he's gone, the enfranchisement can go bad back to its roots and give up obsessively exploring those of its hero. Or is it just me?