Mathieu Amalric as Dominic Greene in Quantum of Solace
How unsettling to hear the news over the weekend that Daniel Craig's nemesis in the upcoming 007 yarn Quantum of Solace will not bear any distinguishing physical features. Mathieu Amalric, who as the fictitious businessman Dominic Greene will go head to unblemished head with Britain's super spy this autumn, spilt the beans during a break in filming in Chile: "I only have my face, I don't have scars or an eye that bleeds or anything to help the villain."
The French actor, whose face ironically enough was about as far from ordinary as you can get in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, appeared to bask in his character's anonymity. "It's so difficult to know who are the villains today. They look like wallpaper," he said. "Maybe they're in banks, maybe they are the insurance companies, maybe they're in labs, even in the subprime crisis."
Well don't stop there, Monsieur Amalric. Maybe today's Bond villain is a corpse, bored to death by his own inability to stand out from the crowd and rendered extinct by his dreary lack of showmanship and individuality.
For without these two elements - assuming of course that the boxes for brutality, homicide and megalomania have all been ticked off - what is the point of a Bond villain? Ever since Dr No flapped his prosthetic arm in anger 46 years ago and Blofeld's scared visage hovered creepily over his pet feline fluffball, the James Bond baddie has gifted us some of our most beloved pantomime characters.
Indeed without showmanship and individuality what is the point of any villain? Would Star Wars hold a fraction of its appeal if Darth Vader's buffed up exoskeleton and iconic baritone were replaced by ordinary human form and a mid-range, neutral inflection? I'm willing to bet Cruella De Vil wouldn't have turned me wide-eyed with fear as a child if she'd sported a bob-cut and track suit and ditched the eye-liner.
Amalric's miscreant is cut from a different cloth, the product of a less-is-more zeitgeist that has canonised bland Jason Bourne as the coolest thing since sliced bread and forgotten that action cinema has a duty to entertain and is entitled to go over the top at times.
From the sounds of it Bond's next adversary has little in common with the super-sized villains of 007's past, although I understand that his surname - Greene - at least, is a return to the punning convention for naming the suave superspy's opponents: apparently, Amalric's character is a fake environmentalist who sets up an "eco-hotel" as a front to seize control of part of South America's water supply. But apart from this slight concession to tradition, it sounds as though the new bad guy is a former local authority mandarin who conducted an efficiency review of former Bond villains and concluded that it is best practice to dispense with the pompous diatribe while Bond lies spread-eagled beneath the approaching laser beam and kill him immediately.
Effective, certainly. But where's the sparkle? I say show a little imagination and keep the tradition of the third nipple alive.
