‘No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die’

Nasty ends for pesky enemies
Adolpho Celi as Emilio Largo in “Thunderball” is probably the meanest of the Bond nemeses. His plan is to detonate nuclear weapons in England and America and, failing that, he plans to feed as many people to sharks as he can. And he does. Even better, he wears an eyepatch and his yacht is called the “Disco Volante.” That’s a good life. Until you get shot in the back. Which is what happens to him. Bummer.

Yaphet Kotto is Kananga/Mr. Big in “Live and Let Die.” He’s a drug grower and supplier, two baddies in one, the kingpin to end them all, but even that’s not enough for him. He needs pet alligators to eat people who get in his way and a stereotypical voodoo priest (Geoffrey Holder, doing that “AH-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA…” laugh that he should have had trademarked) to take out the others. Eventually he gets his when Bond shoots him with a compressed air pellet. That’s right, he blows up like Violet Beauregard, only worse.

Triple-nipple threat
When I was a kid, “The Man With the Golden Gun” was the first Bond movie I was allowed to go see. I had no idea that this Bond guy had so much pull with the ladies, that the criminals could be so perverse, or that anyone on the planet, male or female, walked around with three nipples. But as Scaramanga, Christopher Lee does. Three. And then when Roger Moore pretends to be Scaramanga and takes off his shirt and reveals that he even has three nipples, I became a very freaked out 8 year-old.

Aside from the physical anomaly, he’s kind of the most boring of the supervillains because his whole aim is take all the solar power he can. This is not very frightening a doomsday scenario. Like at all. No one is going to believe you if you say, “Look, I’m just going to take control of the sun.” Because you’re just not.

But that nipple? Still very weird, even post-Mark Wahlberg.

Nobody does it better than ... Walken
And then come the ’80s and ’90s and ’00s and, aside from the dastardly Robert Davi in 1989’s “License to Kill,” the bad guys get less interesting. They’re technologically advanced but they’re less flamboyant and, therefore, not as cool.

And, honestly, Davi isn’t much of a bad guy. But he has the bad-guy face down cold, the same one he’d use to masterful effect as the strip-club owner in “Showgirls.”

But Christopher Walken can’t be bad in a movie, and he injects a jolt of his intrinsic strange-itude into Max Zorin, the villain of “A View to A Kill.” He tries to control all the computers — again, kind of like trying to harness the sun to do your bidding from a 2006 standpoint — so his aim is less than terrifying, but he’s bugged-out nuts so he remains entertaining from start to finish. Also, he’s got the best villainess since Rosa Klebb: Grace Jones as a skydiving she-monster named May Day.

Since I haven’t seen it yet, I don’t know the magnitude of the bad guy element that Daniel Craig’s going to battle in the new “Casino Royale,” but I can almost guarantee you they won’t be as fun a couple as Jones and Walken were. With the new emphasis on a thuggish, tough-guy bond, the days of the over-the-top, wacky Bond villain may be over for good. So I’ll miss that. But at least Madonna’s not going to be in it.

Dave White is the author of “Exile in Guyville” and the film critic for Movies.com. Find more of him at http://www.imdavewhite.com/.

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