My Two Cents on: Bond Girls Rivaling Bond By Jordan Petrie (Fraternal) March 15, 2004 Discuss

Gone are the years of the not-so smart blonde bombshell of a Bond girl. I for one am not too pleased with the new Bond girl image as of late. I believe that the Bond girl should in no way, shape or form, look as dominant as Bond in any Bond movie.

While Stacey Sutton is not a well-liked character, I’d say the common fan doesn’t realize how good and how needed she actually is. Yes, she is very annoying, and the whole geologist gimmick is more unbelievable then Denise Richards being a nuclear physicist (although in both scenarios it was needed for the story’s advancement), but she was really the last female to fit the “traditional” Bond girl profile. A Bond girl should only be put in a movie for the sex story and as eye candy, nothing else! A recent showing of A View To A Kill on network television here in Australia had promos running, and when it came to saying the stars, this is what it had: [picture of Stacey Sutton] and starring…ah, who cares, she’s a bombshell. That is how it is meant to be!

The less said about the Jinx spin-off the better. Let’s just say I could find 50 Bond fans and I guarantee that at least 90% would say that it would ruin the Bond Series. The whole spin-off idea kind of started of where the failed Wai Lin production kicked off. Who can remember the rumours of Wai Lin getting her own franchise; those rumours lasted for about a year. They finally stopped when they realised the same thing that they now see with the proposed Jinx movie: no one wants to see it. No one wants to see Bond making a stupid cameo in a movie that is paying production costs with money that could be spent on making Bond 21 the greatest Bond movie of all time.

Of course, this is not what the producers will have you believe. Production on the Jinx film has recently drawn to a halt, with the producers claiming that recent flops of films with the same basic premise (good-looking girls kicking butt) has them thinking that it is a bit of a risk right now. I am quite surprised they didn’t throw in the old “conflicting schedules” line that they spoke about with the Wai Lin movie. Producers must have finally cottoned on to the fact that no true Bond fan wants to see Jinx ever again. It’s about time!

The recent Bond movies are portraying the classic Bond girl as something she is obviously not: a threat to Bond. Who can honestly tell me that they like the Jinx character or the fact that Bond has “met his match” and should be “watching out for the new girl on the block?” I doubt anyone can. The idea of Bond meeting his female match is ridiculous. Halle Berry wouldn’t have a chance in hell of beating Bond in anything, which is why the new age Bond girl is a bad representation. I am sick of the fact that there has to be at least one Bond girl in the movie that is dangerous, sexy and overpowering. Such a thing in the 60s, 70s and early 80s didn’t exist. There is no way that the movies are going to go back to the old style, but I just hope that in Bond 21 the only Bond girl is an exact match of Stacey Suttons characteristics.

The growing trend of dominant Bond girls seemed to start all the way back in A View To A Kill with May Day. Since then, there has been Pam Bouvier in Licence To Kill, Xenia Onatopp in GoldenEye, Wai Lin in Tomorrow Never Dies and Jinx in Die Another Day. And of course, the biggest one of all is that M has turned into an authoritative female. You could also count Elektra King in The World Is Not Enough, but she isn‘t really as much of a rival as the others. It all seems that the movies are headed in one direction; in about 20 years, Bond will be a woman. Now, I am not sexist, but this whole thing of Bond girls been able to dominate Bond as of late, which has only been seen before in Goldfinger and The Spy Who Loved Me, even in which, the Bond girls could only rival, not dominate Bond, has to end, or else the movies will keep going off the deep-end. I say we need more Stacey Suttons and less Jinxes (pardon the pun) for the future of the Bond series!

And that’s my two cents.


Article written by Jordan Petrie (Fraternal)