I began plotting this idea out in my head that I would review each of the main villains of the Bond series and then rank them. And then I thought that was too much work because I don't particularly want to sit through Diamonds Are Forever or, God help us, Spectre again. And as much as I love love LOVE The Living Daylights, its villains are the whitest of whitebread.
So then I thought, "hang on, lemme do one on the best villain of each Bond incarnation." Of course, Lazenby only has the one, and Dalton really only has the one (see my comment about TLD above), so those wouldn't be terribly interesting.
But the answers for "who was the best villain of the Connery Era" and "who was the best villain of the Moore Era" are pretty damn obvious - there's really only one candidate and one obvious runner-up for each, and no, Donald Pleasance and Christopher Lee are not on those lists - and I began thinking about them, and how they relate to Bond, and how their qualities are reflected in the Dalton, Brosnan, and Craig eras, and that brings me to the title of this post.
Each Definitive Bond Villain is the Equal and Opposite of Bond.
"Opposite" could be one of two things: literally Bond, But Evil, a dark reflection of the cultured but violent womanizing card shark we all know and love (see Red Grant, Francisco Scaramanga, Franz Sanchez,* Alec Travelyan, Gustav Graves - oh yes I have things to say about him), or it could be the opposite of a mirror image. A character whose appearance, qualities and skill-sets are diametrically opposed to Bond's. Dominic Greene, the criminally-underrated villain of the criminally-underrated Quantum of Solace, qualifies. Here's how I described him years ago:
He's a weak little twerp for a Bond villain. He's also the best/least worst of the three Craig villains so far, mainly because he doesn't have a grotesque deformity and/or psychoses (now's not the time to get into it, but I didn't believe for a second that Silva was ever an MI6 agent). Did the film need a "stronger" villain? The Man With the Golden Gun (supposedly) has a "strong" villain and look how that turned out. More impotently (not a typo), he's great in the sense of "You, blond-haired blue-eyed ape-man, you run around and you do fights and you shag laydees, and meanwhile here I am, poncy weakling, and I rule the world."
Why does Dominic Greene work to a degree that I think that, say, Goldfinger, or Stromberg, or Koskov, or even Evil Steve Jobs Elliot Carver do not?
*I note that the first three villains I listed here all appeared in their respective Bond's second film. I don't think this is a coincidence, and at some point I have to do a post on how the four Brosnans are the first four Craig films out of order. (The short version is, obviously, GoldenEye=Skyfall, Tomorrow Never Dies=Quantum of Solace, TWINE=Casino Royale, and Die Another Day=Spectre.)
The more I think about Greene and his organization and what he is and represents, the more I realize that Greene isn't a shadow Bond; Greene, moreso than any (main) Bond villain before or since, is a shadow M. I have to qualify that previous sentence with the word "main" because, on thinking about this for another moment or two, there are two blatant Shadow Ms from the 1960s Bond Films. No, I'm not talking about Blofeld. No-nonsense characters given charge of one or more horny agents? Rosa Klebb and Irma Bunt. I suppose that's material for another post.
But back to why Greene works, and is the paragon of this sort of villain: there is a weakness, a vulnerability, to him that is not present in any the other examples. None of the other characters in his class - Goldfinger, Stromberg, etc. - are a physical match for Bond, but in their case the script and performance never emphasize this. Goldfinger is from the pre-Blofeld school of Bond Villainy, a school that is best embodied in his immediate successor (and perhaps not coincidentally the last pre-Blofeld villain), Largo. These are characters who, while not to the comedic degree of Jaws or Oddjob, have an imposing physicality. They are large men who usually move slowly, deliberately. There is gravitas in their performance. By the time we get to Stromberg, we are in full-on Blofeld mode; the supervillain who sits in his supervillain lair giving orders and pushing buttons. I think Stromberg is seen standing up twice in the entire film.
Of all of Greene's predecessors, I think Koskov is probably the closest to what Greene embodies. And here is where the casting of Bond starts to come into play. Dalton's Bond is stoic and grouchy; Koskov is energetic and cheery. And Craig is, as I said above, an absolute ape of a physical specimen, whereas Greene is this nervy, kind of twitchy, skinny politician. (The actor evidently based his mannerisms on contemporary politicians Tony Blair and Nicolas Sarkozy.) These villains work because they are so diametrically opposed to the actor playing James Bond.
Which is not of course to say that this is the only way to play a Bond villain - I love Telly Savalas's version of Blofeld, and it's a more physical version to complement George Lazenby's more physical Bond; I will have much to say about Hugo Drax in an upcoming post, but for now let's say that his sardonic wit and bone-dry humor is a perfect complement to the way Roger Moore played Bond, and would have been out of place against Dalton or Brosnan or any of the others. (And perhaps this is why I don't have a particularly high opinion of any of the 80s villains except Sanchez; with Roger Moore renewing his contract on a film-by-film basis, the writers couldn't write the villains to counter or complement Bond, because they didn't know who Bond was going to be.)
But it is the way to play this particular type of villain. A thought experiment: per Wikipedia, Bruno Ganz (yes, that Bruno Ganz) was considered for the part of Greene. Wrap that around your head. Obviously you can't say Ganz couldn't bring a degree of vulnerability to the part - the man brought vulnerability to Adolf Fucking Hitler. But... not the right type of vulnerability. What I mean by that: Quantum of Solace is a film that, more than any other (including the Daltons, and including Casino Royale) presents Bond as an incredibly emotionally flawed human being. We don't need an emotionally-vulnerable enemy, that's not what this film is about. Quantum is about a bull-in-a-china-shop Bond whose murder-every-lead method barely drags him through the plot. The whole gimmick of the film is that Bond's rage-bender doesn't actually let him lay a finger on Greene until the end of the film; there's no question that Bond will come out on top, but there's a question of will Bond ever get there? It works so well because of the kind of film that it's in. An emotionally-vulnerable villain would work if Bond was up to some Count of Monte Christo-type shenanigans, but that's not what this film is.
Anyway, that's a start, I'm gonna go through some more villains in a follow-up post.
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