Bond v. Borat

I managed to miss both Casino Royale and the Borat film at the cinema on their release last year but have recently seen them both on DVD. And whilst I was pleasantly surprised by the former, the latter was puerile, unimaginative and utterly pointless crap.

There are spoilers ahead, by the way.

I never had a problem with Daniel Craig as James Bond - his selection comes from what I would call the Christopher Eccleston school of casting*. But he was more impressive than even I thought he would be in lead role. The character of Bond is also very different to the way he has been placed by Craig's predecessors - even Dalton's more hard-edged incarnation. Craig's Bond was arrogant, petulant and almost a bit spoilt - Lynd got it right when she described this Bond as having a chip on his shoulder. You believe that Craig's Bond is a trained, ruthless killer. But Craig also convinces that he is naive, and just starting as a Double O agent. There is an edge of youthful arrogance to any secret agenct who would invade a foreign embassy on foreign soil by himself, and then kill a man before blowing the embassy up. But not take into account that the entire moment might be recorded on CCTV.

However it was more than just Craig's performance that made the film good - the action sequences were more believable than in the previous instalments. Above all else, they seemed to hurt and whilst seeing Bond battered and bruised got tiresome after a while, the casual brutality of the film is very much in keeping with the voyeuristic sadism of the original Bond novels. And it was nice to see not only Bond not kill the Bond villian but also not end the film with the Bond girl - whilst the suicide of Lynd was straight out of the novel, the line from Craig ("The job's done and the bitch is dead") was far more convincing and interesting than the normal innuendo that has ended almost every other film before (such as "who says Christmas only comes once a year").

The Borat film, however, was a massive disappointment. In fact, I would go to say it was a bag of shite. The original Borat segments in Da Ali G Show were very entertaining, not just because Cohen managed to get people to say outrageous things using the Borat persona, but also because of the patronising attitudes displayed by almost everyone he interviewed. The first major problem with the film was the decision of the film makers to also patronise the Borat character. Talk of the village rapist and how his sister was the fourth best prosititute in the country may be mildly shocking, but it is nothing more than a cheap shot. The borderline racism on display in the film is so outrageous that if cannot be taken seriously, but I was left wishing that they had tried to come up with something a little more subtle than the joke about a cow living in the bedroom.

The interviews with Americans in the film were also disappointing. For a start, they made up much less of the film's already short running time than I thought they would. And also they failed to convince me that the Americans were the ignorant racists that they are so often painted to be by the European media. It was not for a lack of stupid or moronic comments from the Americans - there were quite a few of them on display. It was more the fact that the they were clearly staged - especially the interview with the students. The original sketches worked well because they got people's real thoughts and real personalities - it all becomes a bit pointless if you have to get people to act.

And finally, as mentioned above, the humour on display in the film left a lot to be desired. It was not just the casual racism - the jokes in the film were about as subtle and understated as full blown nuclear warfare. Maybe I am being snobby, but I need something more than two men (one of whom is so fat that he has clear man-boobs) wrestling naked and then chasing each other through a hotel to make me laugh. Watching the film made me wonder what their target demographic was, and made me conclude that it was teenage boys aged between fourteen and a half and fifteen who still find fart jokes to be the very pinnacle of humour.

I'm glad I missed Borat at the cinema - to shell out £10 on a ticket to see that pile of wank would have really, really irritated me...

*In tribute to the casting of Eccleston - with close cropped hair and in a leather jacket - as the Doctor. A controversial decision at the time but vindicated when the end results were seen and proving that casting an actor to play a lead role gets a better performance than casting someone the public feels should be playing the lead role.