Here is a link to an interesting, well written article by the Daily Telegraph’s David Gritten.  He talks of the necessity of rebooting the Bond franchise and some of the changes wrought in the Daniel Craig movies. 

I disagree with him with him on two things.  Firstly that Ian Fleming would have approved of the Daniel Craig Bond.  I do not think he would have, and I suspect that David Gritten knows this.  For Fleming, style was everything, and worldliness was better than athleticism in his book (literally).  Daniel Craig is a great Bond, but he is a downmarket Bond.  Just as Fleming thought that Sean Connery was too lower-class to play Bond, I suspect that he would have thought the same about Daniel Craig.

Secondly, when Casino Royale came out, there were a lot of journalists eager to rubbish Pierce Brosnan’s Bond and David Gritten does not consider Brosnan a good Bond.  However from a fan’s perspective Pierce Brosnan was a great Bond.  We were grateful that he rescued our hero from the unfortunate movies with Timothy Dalton as James Bond.  Brosnan had real class and looked as though he were duplicitious enough to work in an evil world.  There was also a cruelty about Brosnan that was pure Fleming, such as the moment when he shoots his lover and adversary Elektra King (Sophie Marceau, The World is Not Enough) without a moment’s hesitation.  Pure cynicism but real panache.

The article is very good and is here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/10/20/bfbond120.xml