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That's why I loved the Craig Bond of QoS: ruthless, efficient, and wastes no time. The way he so quickly dispatches Slate, takes his clothes and equipment, and flees the Hotel Dessalines is brilliance.
I'm all for longer combat sequences though if they're done well.
It's a great fight and kill. Bond uses a vase and a photo frame lol
Like a boxing glove. Wonder who thought of that choreo.
There's wrist locks, arm blocks, a straight-foot lock. He is a Karate man.
Indeed! He was the most stereotypical and cartoonish example of 'handsome man', and he had fun with that.
Yes, absolutely. Tongue firmly planted in cheek. And his heart was in the right place as his work with Unicef would indicate. Obviously children were his main soft spot.
I tend not to trust authors in interviews about their work (the "defecating wizards" rule). Only in Casino Royale does Bond come off as unlikeable (and it lands in his face in the end), and in the rest he is too charming to his friends and ladies to every come across that way. But Fleming especially has said many things on Bond. He has also said that Bond is a normal bloke: "uninteresing man to who things happened." The latter certainly comes through more in any media Bond is in.
That was me. What volumes would that be? Simple description to get the point across. "Last rat standing" and all that. After all, Bond is more of a Casino Rat than being a Gym Rat. This is Bond we are talking about.
Craig has set a new standard. It is laughable when some say that he was too bulked up in Casino Royale and looked like a bodybuilder; that’s ridiculous. He looked exactly how he should have looked, like someone who had just come from a special forces background.
The only scene where he looks bigger is when he comes out of the water in the Bahamas ; that is more a result of lighting and framing than actual bulk . The Bahamas scenes were all filmed at the same time period; when he arrives at the Ocean Club he looks far from bulky. He looks athletic and lean. The same is true when he’s sitting at his computer in his room.
Yessir. He's lean and strong looking, but he's far from some gym-bro juice monkey. That's a physique that would respond when called into action.
I really am confused by what the problem is??
Well in the "Honey Bond" scene it looks like he is quite the bodybuilder. He looks quite good in Quantum, but also a bit smaller.
Anyway, there's a strong spectrum involved in doing these things: there's Bond regularly goes to a fitness centre to use machines/weights, Bond regularly does weighted training at home, or Bond does unweighted exercise at home and regular sports. Or Bond does nothing on the regular and just works to get ready for job
I mean I personally could never see Bond going to a public fitness centre and paying for a membership. It feels overly normal and also the sort of thing that's impractical for his job.
All that matters is that he's fit for the job though. How doesn't really matter
Again, the lighting and framing have a great deal to do with his looking bulkier in that sequence. In all of the other scenes filmed in the same timeframe he does not look bulky.
The next actor will have a physique that looks closer to Craig’s than any of the other actors who preceded him.
Oh I don’t see Bond going to a fitness center. Just as there is a shooting range in the basement of Mi6, there must be regular unarmed combat training, functional strength with instructors and so on.
It’s a daily requirement (three days weights/swimming/sprints with ruck sacks, two days of MMA and functional training (gymnastic style training, combined with flipping tires, sledgehammers, sled pushes and pulls etc (VO2 max work that is better than “cardio”). Weekends are left for Bond to go to private gambling saloons and sleeping with one of his married lady friends…
I was thinking the same! A group of alphas ? There'd be a few bloody noses and bruised egos at the end of each week!
Also, there are a lot of great looking women who are also interested in physical fitness; Bond would not be unaware…
I actually think Moore's natural physique benefited him onscreen. I don't think he was naturally as athletic as the other Bonds (he seemed to have various health issues his whole life, although for what it's worth I think he worked out a bit for the role) but the wide shoulders and broad chest in his earlier films especially make him look quite lean. Helps when you have closer shots which don't show his small legs I guess! And he likely gained weight when he was older which pronounced it.
As for fight scenes, I think when his films leaned into a more gritty/'realistic' aesthetic it worked best. The club fight in TMWTGG is genuinely one of my favourite Bond fights (the part when Bond starts smashing the guy's head against the wall affected me so much when I was younger. It's probably in part the sound effects/screams, but it's such a startling moment). I actually find it more gripping than some of Craig's later fight scenes as it genuinely looks less rehearsed/choreographed.
Yeah, @talos7 , you're definitely someone I admire. You've reaped and amassed all the benefits of fitness and training; you look a good fifteen to twenty years younger. That's dedication and hard work, and countless hours.
I started training for real by age twenty and have never stopped. Climbing to almost 30 years later, I eyeball that prize of slowing down aging that you've succeeded at accomplishing (I've shown a couple ppl on here my deadlift is at 330 lbs at the moment, after rehabbing a nasty case of patella tendinitis).
As for Mr. Bond, in real life, yep, I can see almost everyone of various backgrounds being a member of a gym.
But in this fictitious world of British spies with a license to kill, I love the exclusive secrecy and mystique of a state of the art training facility in the basement of MI6 HQ. Double-0s training and competing at the start of each day before they go up to their offices to await their next mission. I could even see a few scenes down here ... Similar to SKYFALL, but higher end and more state of the art, more functional, with instructors and cameras watching and grading and analyzing...
A real life gym, no matter how beautiful could never be cinematic enough for Mr. Bond (or at least in my imagination, 😂)!!
A general comment about Bond not smoking or behaving in certain ways.
Yeah, we've even seen Bond working out in Skyfall, and it didn't seem out of place at all to me- he was training in a way which looked suitable to how a proper military superfit guy would. (And NSNA I guess, but it was slightly less convincing there!)
Yeah I think that's Roger's best fight, maybe the one in Octopussy's bedroom comes a close second as he actually seems a bit pissed off and yet professional in that one. They give him a nice little combo where he guards against multiple blows from a guy and uses it against him, that's quite sweet.
I see Bond as a private investigator for Britain with an added licence to kill, so I while I obviously see why he should be "buff," I'd prefer a build more like Sean Connery's early films, or even Dalton in LTK.
And of course there's running and swimming that he'd do.
A propos to Bond going to a fitness centre, I don't see him doing it because it is the sort of fad that I believe Fleming would have disliked (maybe because he was so unhealthy). Bond disliking it feels similar to Bond disliking tea.
It also feels like too much of a community. Even though you could go with earbuds in and not speak to anybody, it feels too uniting for Bond.
I suppose the movie world is different from the literary one, so this musing might not work well on screen
It doesn't really matter regardless - I don't think we're going to see Bond going to the gym in a film anytime soon, and I agree beyond training/swimming and perhaps running alone I don't think the character in his fictional world would bother with it.
Fitness centers and gyms are in no way a fad; they are an intrinsic part of contemporary culture.
In my head, I imagined it as similar to being in the Reserve Forces. One weekend per month, the 00s would be sent off to some remote military-style training camp, like Dartmoor, but with more of an emphasis on spycraft, and be put through their paces.
But I think I like @peter's suggestion more.
Bond is not exactly part of real world culture. And as stated above Fleming would have probably eschewed the idea of Bond going to a gym had they been popular during his time in the same way he did tea.
I find some I’ve the views so detached from reality and, to be blunt, so pompous, that to continue would simply be an exercise in frustration.