“The one thing my honorable mother taught me long ago was never to get into a car with a strange girl. But you, I'm afraid, will get into anything. With any girl.”
-You Only Live Twice

James Bond is the greatest Englishman of the twentieth century. He has John Cleese’s wit, Paul McCartney’s good looks, and Churchill’s piss-and-vinegar demeanor. He is a man’s man and a ladies’ man. He is at once an avatar of the Id and the Superego. He has bedded more women than Wilt Chamberlain (and the rest of the ’72 Lakers combined); he can discern the year of a host’s Château Lafite Rothschild by taste; he can outmaneuver any henchman, outhustle any hustler, outsmart any evil genius.

James Bond, like the shark, is the perfect killer. And, also like the shark, he is so well suited to his environment that he does not need to evolve. Unfortunately, the members of the Broccoli family, the longtime stewards of the franchise, do not realize this…

The Broccolis think James Bond needs a makeover. This November, Casino Royale, the 21st installment of the Bond franchise, will be released. The most notable change since previous flicks is in the actor playing Bond. Bond-emeritus Pierce Brosnan’s heir is Daniel Craig, who is most famous on this side of the Pond for his work in Munich . The announcement, last fall, that Craig would be issued the license (to kill, that is) was met by near-universal disapproval among Bond traditionalists. A series of internet sites (danielcraigisnotbond.com, craignotbond.com, etc) popped up in protest. The first issues were physical. Daniel Craig does not look much like James Bond. He is blond, where all previous James Bonds were brunettes, and is about four inches shorter than the Bond mean.

Then word got out that Craig French-kissed a man in a previous film. Then Craig showed up at the press conference wearing a life-vest. Then word got out that he hated guns, that he hates violence, and that he doesn’t even like the James Bond series. And when he lost two teeth in a stunt fight—it was more hair on the pussy cat. It was like they got Oscar Wilde to play James Bond.

And then there are changes to the sacred Bond framework. Neither Q nor Moneypenny will make appearances. Bond orders vodka but it’s not shaken. Dumbledore dies at the end. But these are nothing compared to the changes in store for Bond 22 (working title).

When I tell my friends that the next James Bond, according to Tinseltown insiders, is going to have an affair with a man (CIA agent Felix Leiter), they refuse to believe it. Their amazement is understandable considering James Bond has been forking women exclusively for four decades and 21 films. One too many awkward next-morning blitzes for Reply-To: Agent007? No—apparently, James Bond, like the Marlboro cowboy, has a large following in the gay community. Apparently, the Broccoli family is hoping to capitalize on this following. And apparently they don’t realize that seeing James Bond Frenching another guy is not the sort of thing that will appeal to their traditional target audience (straight young men of ages 15-35). There is nothing intrinsically wrong with a gay, bisexual, or questioning action hero, but the canonical James Bond is as straight as a laser.

With Casino Royale, the Broccolis want to do for the Bond franchise what Batman: Begins did for Batman: make it grittier and darker. The villain is supposedly based on Aleister Crowley, the Victorian Satanist called “the wickedest man in the world.” That they will succeed in this goal is unlikely. I don’t think this is going to be the first James Bond to feature gang rape and torture with Punji sticks. For one thing, I don’t think the producers have the yarbles. For another, I’m sure they wouldn’t want to risk an R rating.

It is easy to understand where the producers are coming from. The credibility of franchise has taken a beating from parodies, such as Austin Powers, and a series of generic, by-the-numbers Bond movies that were derided by critics, e.g. those with the Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan Bonds. What they ought to remember, though, is that the critics aren’t representative of the film-going public at large. Some film critics have more in common with postcolonial-lit professors at Middlebury than the average theatergoer.

What the Bond franchise needs is not a reformation but a renaissance. It needs to focus on what made the old movies so popular back in the Connery days, and what continues to make them popular. In the old days, the Bond films were the most exciting movies around. The first time my mom watched Thunderball, she wasn’t able to catch her breath: The stunts were more audacious and dynamic than anything she had ever seen. The directors of the past decade just haven’t been up to snuff. The stunts have been grandiose but soulless, lacking the frenetic energy of the best action movies in recent memory like The Matrix, the Blade series, Kill Bill vol. 1, and even The Incredibles . Part of the reason for this is that Bond movies since the Roger Moore era (post-1973) have always been done on the cheap. The Bond actors are chosen when they are still relatively unknown, the Bond girls are generally just random pretty faces (the exception being A-lister Halle Berry and B+-lister Denise Richards), and the directors are nobodies. Would it be great to have an auteur like Quentin Tarentino direct? Yes, but the producers would never pay for it. (Tarentino actually wrote a Bond script set to feature Uma Thurman, but the production deal fell through).

The producers should not try to reinvent the wheel with the new movies, but rather focus on what made Bond great, what made original audiences thrilled and what makes old Bond movies so charming today. Fans of the old James Bond movies don’t watch them for the action, they watch them for their naïve charm of a simpler time. The James Bond movies are in many ways a throwback to the Victorian era. One can taste Orientalism in the earlier movies, where the influence of the Crown still weighs heavily on India and Egypt, and turbaned waiters serve cocktails to gentlemen in monocles and seersucker. Before the Internet, the Bond movies were a window to the world beyond the suburbs. Recent Bond locales—the former Soviet Union, Azerbaijan, North Korea—are just depressing.

Bond’s treatment of women is fascinating to a modern viewer. It is an exercise in the sort of cheerful chauvinism that—in the world of full of OPALs and sensitivity training—is all but extinct today. Women are damsels in distress with little between their ears, but a lot between their legs (Pussy Galore…). Tucker Max hearkened back to this sort of zeitgeist when he smacked Ms. Vermont on the ass and said “...run along now. Man talk.” James Bond, in his complete sexual empowerment, holds the fascination for young men than Samantha Jones has for young women.

In the larger scheme of things, James Bond is the personification of sex and violence that every culture and every time has needed. James Bond is a modern-day Odysseus. Can’t we leave him as that?