With all of the back-and-forth developments surrounding the latest James Bone movie, it’ll almost be a wonder if it gets made at all. From Daniel Crag’s on-again / off-again commitment to the franchise to the very latest news, that celebrated British director Danny Boyle (perhaps best known for 2002’s 28 Days Later) has left the production owing to creative differences with the film’s producers.
Director’s leaving a project is nothing new for movies. Hell, Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) replaced its directors after most of the movie was shot and I still think that it turned out great. Every new helmsmen brought in to lead to film to completion brings with them a different perspective, set of skills and stylistic preferences to the project. So Boyle no longer being attached to it means that another director, who would naturally bring something entirely new to the table, can come in and leave their stamp on the storied spy franchise.
So who should direct the next Bond movie, if not Danny Boyle? Well, according to the internet it should be Dark Knight helmsman Christopher Nolan. And to some small degree, at least, this makes sense. After all, he cut his teeth making action-packed blockbusters not all that dissimilar from the Bond movies, often set in the same kind of grounded realism that the franchise has espoused since 2006’s Casino Royale.
The Dark Knight (2008) had car chases. Inception (2010) had explosions. Dunkirk (2017) balanced a large cast across what is essentially a movie-length battle scene. Of course he’s perfect for the job!
Only… the thing is, he’s not. Christopher Nolan is a great director — easily one of the very best ones working today — but he is not a great action director. Despite the kinds of movies he makes, and despite how much action he manages to cram into them, his actions scenes are rightly decried as the weakest parts of those movies. The Dark Knight is basically a police procedural where one of the players is dressed up in a bat costume. In it (and the Nolan’s other Batman movies) the action is often hard to follow and more than a bit underwhelming. It’s actually a testament to how well all of the dramatic and crime elements of the film work that they actually do so in spite of Nolan’s subpar action chops. Inception is mostly about the visual spectacle and sci-fi rigmarole at play in the multi-layered screenplay rather than the actual outcome of any particular armed conflict. And Dunkirk is mostly a tensely realized drama set against the backdrop of the Battle of Dunkirk rather than the actual mechanics of the battle itself.
So who’s the better choice, if not Nolan? Some might be tempted to say James Wan, who notably helmed the well-received Furious 7 (2015), but he’s really not an action director. He’s clearly much more comfortable with horror and its related elements, which don’t play as well into this franchise than they would is, say, Aquaman (2018). Neil Marshall, whose career-best Doomsday (2008) is an action showcase in the same vein as Escape from New York (1981), but with him you’d run into many of the same problems as Wan: his wheelhouse is more firmly entrenched in the horror genre and there ultimately are so many better options out there that I don’t think that we need to settle for him quite yet. The same actually holds true for Ben Wheatley to a lesser degree, although Free Fire (2017), which is basically just a 90-minute shootout, comes closer to the specific kind of action we expect from a Bond movie.
For as downright sacrilegious though it might seem, coming in an age dominated by talk of auteurs and rankly disparaging gun-for-hire directors of his ilk, I can’t help but think that Francis Lawrence is the best choice for the franchise right now. Best known for I Am Legend (2007) and the last three Hunger Games movies, Lawrence is a proven technical director: more than capable of working with (not against) a studio in order to produce a crowd-pleasing action blockbuster with A-list stars and show-stopping action set pieces.
I Am Legend‘s climactic showdown between Will Smith and a whole host of post-apocalyptic zombies proves that he can handle one-on-many swarms that often typify these movies (Bond vs a load of armed goons). His work on the Hunger Games movies proves his ability to handle large-scale action scenes that don’t necessarily rely on guns: everything from antiquated weaponry to explosives to all-out-brawling. Tell me that “The Hanging Tree” sequence wasn’t one of the all-time best blockbuster action scenes, nor that something of its ilk wouldn’t work for a Bond movie (terrorist fight on top of a hydroelectric dam with a ticking clock counting down to it blowing up, Anyone?).
There are other options to be sure, but none of them feel as spot-on as Lawrence would be behind the camera. And especially since Boyle left due to his inability to work with the studio heads in charge of the project, Lawrence is just the kind of guy to get the work done while pleasing his higher-ups (but never once sacrificing the movie’s quality in doing so).