By To give Daniel Craig a proper send-off in No Time To Die – likely his last mission as James Bond – producer Barbara Broccoli says the Bond crew has "thrown the book at him on this one". 'The book', in this case, is the human man Rami Malek, who's playing Bond's opposite number Safin.
"He is really the supervillain," Broccoli told Empire. "He's the one that really gets under Bond's skin. He's a nasty piece of work."
That sounds very, very promising. Safin is not your common-or-garden villain, baddie or wrong'un. He's a supervillain. To qualify as a supervillain, you need to be operatically malevolent, caring not for anything as prosaic as whether a convoluted and spectacular plan involving a space laser is strictly necessary. Malek could be exactly the man to do it justice, too. He didn't win his Oscar for playing Freddie Mercury as a wallflower, after all.
Proper cinematic evil is rare. The Simpsons' Mr Burns, for instance, nailed it. "Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun," he says as he tells Smithers the final stage of a masterplan to put Springfield in perpetual darkness. "I shall do the next best thing: block it out."
That's a clear goal, well explained, within which you'll find what wins any normal villain that coveted 'super' prefix: ambition. And recently, Bond films have suffered from antagonists who never really tested themselves. His most regular foe, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, always went big. His plots included extortion by nuclear missile, space capsule theft, using beautiful women to disseminate a deadly virus to destroy crops, and firing a laser from space at nuclear missile stockpiles.
And he wasn't alone. Auric Goldfinger wanted to irradiate the gold in Fort Knox so his share would go up in value. Karl Stromberg from The Spy Who Loved Me wanted to destroy the world in a nuclear holocaust and have humanity start again at the bottom of the ocean. (There'd be no radiation, just friendly crustaceans – under the seeeeaaaaa).
Granted, the plans were frequently so unhinged that you wondered quite how this guy rose to prominence without an underling furtively Slacking HR. But they were at least genuine world-enders.
Since that plan to start a war on the Korean peninsula with a solar laser in Die Another Day, no Bond villain's attempted anything properly apocalyptic. Le Chiffre just wanted his money back. Raoul Silva was very good at hacking. Quantum of Solace threatened a coup d'etat in Bolivia. That – and I say this with the greatest of respect to Bolivia – is Bolivia's problem, not mine. Franz Oberhauser harvested data – admittedly while organising terror plots – and really should have had a set-to with the Information Commissioner's Office, the staff of which do not need a licence to kill.
Craig's adversaries haven't been straight-up villains. They've all been somewhere on a spectrum of deviousness between 'what if Elon Musk but French' and 'misunderstood patsy with eye problem'. They're all representative of things which you know you should definitely be worried about, but which you either can't really be bothered to be worried about or which are too real to be purely thrilling. The villains themselves were brilliantly played, but you do yearn for someone, at some point, to suggest moving the office to a hollowed-out volcano.
You might think the post-Bourne reboot of Bond precludes a return to the plots of yore, and you might have had a point if we were talking just after Casino Royale. In Spectre, though, we saw Bond force a helicopter to crash into Westminster Bridge by firing a handgun at it from somewhere near Fulham. It's not an insignificant jump from there to spicier plots to take over the world by, I don't know, replacing world leaders with computer-controlled clones, but an audience's suspension of disbelief is more necessary now than it was when Craig first took on the role. Plus, Christoph Waltz's Blofeld had an actual lair.
Now, nobody really wants a return to jetpacks and amphibious Lotus Esprits, fun as they were. But for Craig to go out with the bang this time – as his Bond surely deserves – he needs an adversary who'll go big, or go back to his Alpine mountaintop ski resort-cum-military base and think again.
Like this article? Sign up to our newsletter to get more articles like this delivered straight to your inbox
