When I was a kid, there were these things called video rental stores. My family always went to the same one until it closed down because something opened up closer by. One time when we walked in, they had a big display with copies of seemingly every James Bond movie ever made. Looking back on it now, it must have been around when License to Kill was released in theaters in 1989, or when it made it to video.
I had heard of James Bond, and though I was under 10, I realized that these were violent movies I wasn’t allowed to watch, and the covers of the video tapes told me there was something about the scantily-clad women on the covers that I was somehow missing. However, I did think that the title of Octopussy was sort of funny, even if I didn’t really know why.
But even back then, I wondered if James Bond was even a spy in the first place.
The first Bond movie I ever saw was GoldenEye, and though I was a teenager, I was able to appreciate some of the subtle tones of the movie, like Bond struggling to justify his existence in the first movie of the franchise since the fall of the USSR. But I was amazed that the man was so popular everywhere he went.
Here’s a British spy, a double-0, one of MI6’s elite guys, and yet when he’s on assignment, he walks around at cocktail parties given his real name, ordering his regular drinks and generally doing nothing to disguise himself as someone else. People he has run into before know him by name and of course his occupation. For Christ’s sake, his catch phrase is him introducing himself by his real name. There are seemingly endless numbers of people around the world who know Bond, if not his face, by his name. One can only assume there are a lot of spy industry magazines out there, so all the insiders know each other. Maybe he’s just making it easier for the bad guys because he likes a challenge, but generally, people whose identities are well-known don’t do so well undercover.
It’s inevitable that during his mission, Bond encounters a sexy lady and he decides that Queen and Country can wait for a bit while he gets him some. He does this every time. No wonder he likes the dangerous missions, it’s an excuse to bed some hotties every time (except for Quantum of Solace, ug). Eventually these women get captured by the villain, or they end up selling out Bond. They compromise his every single mission, but Bond’s not about to stop his on-the-clock shagging. Seems like a pretty serious flaw in prioritizing when the fate of the free world is at stake.
And then this elite, highly-trained spy with all of the latest imaginary weapons manages to allow himself to get taken alive, often it’s because the villain used his latest piece as bait. Shouldn’t double-0’s all have poison capsules at the ready, so some crazy person with a private army doesn’t get the chance to unlock all the national security secrets in their heads? Then again, Bond is such a rebel, he’d say, “Damn the safety of the world, I’ll figure another way out of this!”
Maybe the intelligence world is a lot more lax on their best practices and such. Still, I feel James Bond isn’t very good at being a spy, he’s more fun to view as a drunken, womanizing wrecking ball.