Filmsane

Well, that day has come. The official line-up for the upcoming Bond 25 movie was released. Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, the movie will be co-written by him and Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Yay.

Led by Daniel Craig, the movie will also feature some old and new faces, but let’s break it down piece by piece.  Why is Bond 25 a mixed bag of good and bad decisions? Judging from a fan’s perspective, the decision to hire Cary Joji Fukunaga is probably one of the best that the producers could possibly make.  Fukunaga is extremely talented, innovative and passionate director and you just know that he will transfer all his raw talent in this movie. He’s been previously known for creating fantastic TV projects (True Detective, Maniac…) and his imprint on the indie film scene was been quite memorable to say the least.

But this is a whole another beast. This is a film that has a blockbuster style budget (easily over 150 million dollars) so you can bet your ass that Fukunaga will have some big battles to win. Producers breathing in his neck, divas all around him (yeah I’m talking to you Daniel) and plenty of egos to handle on a daily basis. But hey, he signed up for this.

The addition of the Academy Award winner Rami Malek in the villain role is another great decision for the Bond 25. Not that having an Oscar winner is any guarantee of success. I mean even the previous bond movie (Spectre) had a double Oscar winner in Christoph Waltz but the character and the movie sucked hard.  However, I’m more optimistic now. Let’s put out fingers crossed and hope that the producers learned a good lesson from Spectre.

Another great addition (behind the camera of course) is the presence of Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Fleabag’s creator was hired to polish the script so yeah, I’m hoping to see great characters, a little bit of humor and some fantastic plot.

What I consider to be a terrible decision on the producer’s part is not having the balls to part ways with Daniel Craig. Look, the man is tired. He’s old(er). He clearly doesn’t give a shit about anything related to the character (aside from the money of course) and you can see it in his eyes that just want to be done with this franchise. He’s unmotivated and aside from the millions that he’ll receive, he’s looking for someone to put him out of his misery.

I’m really impressed with the acquisition of Ana de Armas and Lashana Lynch, I also have a feeling that they’ll have a rather minor roles here. They’ll be like Monica Bellucci’s character in Spectre. Less than 10 minutes on screen but with way too much unnecessary hype prior to that.

And speaking of the hype… Wanna bet that every single Twitter post, every single trailer and every single interview will feature the sentence… „It’s Daniel Craig’s last appearance as James Bond“. It will become the PR/media obsession. It will become the Bond equivalent of Boyhood’s – „It took 12 years to make the movie“ reference. It will become a nightmare.

So you can understand why it’s a mixed bag for me. Bond 25 has some good starting points, some new fresh faces on camera and off, but the producer’s complacency and indecisiveness to replace Craig is going to be the movie’s biggest flaw. Let’s just hope the other good decisions work, so we can ignore the bad ones.