On the Best James Bond.

The Best James Bond Movies.

I was watching a YouTube compilation called "daniel craig being the best james bond for 6 minutes straight," and it was as advertised. Daniel Craig, who reminded me so much of my friend from the New Jersey days that I looked up his Wikipedia page seeing if he was Irish (my dad told me as a kid that Irish people were known for being very well-spoken, and my friend was, as well, and to whatever extent I am Irish, it may contribute to whatever extent I am well-spoken—but the Finnish will contribute to my walking out the door), and unsatisfied by my lack of knowledge of what constitutes the United Kingdom, I simply went back to adoring the job that this man did for James Bond.

I don't care. I've seen most or all of the Sean Connery Movies, at least one or two of the others, plus Never Say Never Again, plus some of the Pierce Brosnan ones, and I don't have an exhaustive knowledge, but I own all the Blu-rays and I think Daniel Craig could not be considered other than the best. How could a character who has only now been fully realized have ever been just as good? No, Daniel Craig, whether it's saying "Skewered" on a train car with a beautiful woman in a way that reminded me of my friend, right down to facial expressions, or sort of leaning back and saying, "Considerably," earlier in the movie, when someone is about to tell him the second kill is easier—this guy not only has the chops (check him out in fucking Road to Perdition, that shit echoes from my childhood) to do it, but got the scripts that allowed him to play a fucking serious James Bond.

James Bond is a killer. This is the first time that he hasn't been played as some funny, happy-go-lucky madman who keeps his cool but as a guy who is seriously fucked up, who keeps his cool. Craig, and the Bond that has been written for him (which seems to match the little I've looked into the original Bond novels, where it seemed like he was some kind of Zen meditator, or something, with how aware he was of the scene), goes through this thing like a wounded fucking dog. The way he laughs as a guy slams some kind of flail into his balls in the first movie, laughing through tears and joking about how everyone's gonna know he scratched his balls, is actually kind of heartbreaking. Later in his run as the character, he is in some kind of either actual psychological evaluation or something that feels like it (his whole life, right? Especially in this series), and they ask him, and I think it is another attractive woman who does so (this is the scene from Spectre, savagely underrated as a Bond movie when it may be the most artistic of the whole Craig run), what he does for a living (oh, was it a bank transaction?), and he says he kills people. This is the fucking James Bond that actually might be a real character. He's not joking, he's not skipping around on an asteroid, he is, like another character says in that movie, "A butterfly in a hurricane."

And the movies just match it, for style. He walks through the beginning of Spectre dressed as a pale ghost in a Day of the Dead parade, and he ends the scene by fucking kicking a guy out of a helicopter. He meets the death of his boss in Skyfall with the cinematography over her casket doing all the work, because the rest of the movie actually radiates emotion, as well. Yes, this is David Fincher Bond, but it's also fucking David Fincher Bond, and more so, it's Sam Mendes, who actually directed Road to Perdition.

These Bond movies, even the final one, even Quantum of Solace (or, as Jay Leno hilariously said, "Quantum of Silence"), are what I was always wanting and didn't know it in the Bond character. This is a guy who truly beats the shit out of himself to achieve his goals, he is Miles Teller in Whiplash, walking bloody to the fucking auditorium because he crashed his car, but he's going to damn make it, baby, because you're worthless if you're not absolutely as good as you can be, and with Bond, it's a life imperative. He must be exactly in the center of the cyclone at all times, and Daniel Craig looks out from the center of it with about as haggard an expression as you'd expect.