Spies like us

I wouldn't wish a Bond movie on anybody. Locked in the very early 60s the character and stories have been preserved in aspic. Each element of the branded franchise must be ticked off in the movies like a nursery rhyme we all dimly remember. The Bond movies are panto: look out behind you.

Having said that, my pick for Bond has always been Wesley Snipes by the simple math that of all the younger male movie stars who shared a bill with Sean Connery in the 90s (Costner, Gere, Baldwin, Cage, Lambert etc) Snipes was the only one who held his own. In Rising Sun Snipes could do action, comedy, be vulnerable, be seduced, mess up, shoot straight and look cool as fuck in a suit -- but most of all stop your gaze sliding towards Sean if he so much as coughed. Connery like Michael Caine and Anthony Hopkins is a scene-stealer, but Snipes steals it right back. Idris Elba? Also good. But Snipes should shoot first.

This will not happen. Bond does not need to be updated because the form has been absorbed into a broader matrix, like jazz, westerns and literary novels. But were the character to be retrofitted, steampunk style, with the accoutrements that would enable him to do his job in the syntax of Fleming's original -- a cruel, racist loner who is terrible with women -- a quick mind would cut and paste Peter Quinn from season four of Homeland.

As Quinn Rupert Friend has been a prick from the start, knifing that nice Damien Lewis, killing children, having terrible relationships and not blinking when he shoots a gun. By season four he's the star of the show. The limits of a TV budget makes him more realistic than Matt Damon's Bourne, although again the opening of the third movie of that revived series -- the chase in a London train station observed from all quarters which can be escaped only by use of a cellphone -- is Bond redux: everything that Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang ought to be but can't.