A few days ago I snickered about James Bond fans who are upset that someone who can actually act has been cast in Casino Royale. But if this story is true � and it's from The Sun, so that's a big if � I'm ready to join the boycott.
"Agent 007, usually seen in an Aston Martin loaded with gadgets, will drive the Ford in new movie Casino Royale... Daniel Craig will test his licence to kill in a �22,000 Mondeo, popular with salesmen � not spies."
For the non-British among us, the Ford Mondeo is known here as the Contour or the Mercury Mystique. It's like Bond ordering a Amstel Light instead of a martini. Naturally this is all driven by product placement, the trend that, as Jake noted in the earlier comments thread, has done as much as anything to ruin the series. Ford is shelling out some $25 million to put Bond in the driver's seat of a Mondeo, but it's money wasted, thanks to the law of diminishing returns. Maybe there was a time when the Bond image was strong enough to single-handedly shift the reputation of the car, but now that 007 has already sold out so much of his style to the highest bidder, each progressively more lame accessory only serves to diminish Bond's rep, doing less than nothing for the product.
