Keeping Bond as a straight, Caucasian man is "not about being homophobic or, for that matter, racist - it is simply about being true to the character," he said. "I have heard people talk about how there should be a lady Bond or a gay Bond, but they wouldn’t be Bond for the simple reason that wasn’t what Ian Fleming wrote," Moore, currently the longest-running Bond, told the Daily Mail. The 88-year-old actor, who played 007 in seven films, beginning with "Live and Let Die" in 1973 through "A View to a Kill" in 1985, said a gay twist on the womanizing secret agent would be contradict the way the character was portrayed in Ian Fleming's original novels and short stories. ‘No, don’t save them, Idris, with your cool, quick-thinking and chameleon skills at engaging with people from all walks of life.Add Roger Moore to a growing list of stars who are chiming in on the debate over whether or not a gay James Bond could ever happen. But this is probably counterproductive, because it makes you much less invested in the survival of anyone on board. Can you imagine anyone from another religion being depicted behaving like that?Ī couple of things it does get right: passengers who play video games on their phones with the volume on full and no headphones passengers who think it’s fine for their kids to behave like animals in a zoo because, hey, you try controlling kids on a long flight. Almost immediately he lets slip that he doesn’t believe in the Bible – fair enough, maybe, if he’s C of E – and then later we see him attempting to bribe the cabin crew with a £20 note to try to get an upgrade. Even more grotesquely ludicrous is the characterisation of a passenger wearing a dog collar. We are asked to believe that – spoiler alert – in order to protect the blonde stewardess with whom he is having an affair, the plane’s captain is ready to beat seven shades out of his female co-pilot. Hardly any of the characters are plausible or likeable. The scene in episode two, for example, where someone gets ruthlessly executed for no practical reason just makes you go: ‘Why? In what possible way was that necessary?’Īncient worms and the problem with climate politics What they have in common is that they are much more aggressive and unpleasant than they need to be, in keeping with the general tone of the drama: if you want ugly, mechanical, soulless, then this is the show for you. But mostly they appear to have wandered in from a Sky crime caper: a sadistic, hot-headed young Welshwoman, a hard-as-nails, death-stare English tough guy an old school Costa del Crime Cockney. Sure, one of them looks and sounds like a stereotypical Islamist. Two episodes in, it’s hard to discern the motivation of the hijackers. There’s another clue in the series title Hijack, which must be a novel concept to most of its target audience because when was the last time you can remember getting on a plane and worrying about such a thing happening? It’s about as remote from our experience as, say, trying to decide whether to travel ‘smoking’ and risk being kippered by the person next to you or go ‘non-smoking’ and endure the whole flight without a gasper. Wasn’t all this celebrity meta stuff done more wittily and intelligently 25 years ago in Being John Malkovich?Īnd he’s right. These include being able to walk coolly and slowly through an airport to final boarding at exactly the pace – no more, no less – you need to reach the departure gate at the precise millisecond before it closes and the ability to detect, through subtle clues, that the flight he has boarded may be about to be hijacked. In his latest vehicle, Elba plays high-level negotiator Sam Nelson, an ordinary man yet possessed of a very particular set of skills. But he definitely ought to have been a shoo-in for the horror show that the Bond franchise has become: dour, humourless, pumped up, ponderous, portentous, joyless… Not the James Bond that we knew and loved when he was played by wry, capable Sean Connery or playful, tongue-in-cheek Roger Moore. Idris Elba would have made a perfect James Bond.
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