New James Bond Gadgets a Big Bore

I saw the new Bond movie recently. I waited until it had been in theaters awhile, so there'd be at least a 75 percent chance that I wouldn't be seated behind a teenager named Tammy who spends the entire movie on her cell phone breaking up with her boyfriend, calling her best friend for support, and arranging a gathering of peers at Cinnabon.

As it turns out, I was seated three seats down from a mumbly guy who apparently had strong opinions on the subject of cocktails, but I couldn't make out most of what he had to say, and that makes it the best theater experience I've had in a while.

The movie was OK. I'm pleased to see less-attractive guys in dramatic roles again; maybe we'll see the Humphrey Bogarts of the world getting more work. Although, to be fair, Daniel Craig could fit a Humphrey Bogart in each bicep.

If I was participating in the nation's Texas Hold 'Em craze, no doubt I would have enjoyed the two hours devoted to scenes in which people show their cards and the dealer announces that someone has something full of something else. As it is, though, I was sorely disappointed by the lack of Q, or anything sufficiently Q-ish, in the film. It's not that there were no gadgets, it's just that they were nearly all gadgets that actually exist and can be purchased, which is boring. I'm sure it makes for great product placement that all evil plots now involve text messaging, but I wouldn't call it great cinema.

There weren't even things disguised as other things, unless you count a manila envelope as a disguise. No pen phones, or shoe guns, or cigarette cars. Seeing as this was sort of a Bond origin story, I'm hoping Q will make it into the next one, but just in case they're out of ideas, here are a few of my own:

Getting your double-oh status is not an easy task. Many an aspiring spy has learned marksmanship, hand-to-hand combat, seduction and smug indifference to physical threats, only to be thwarted by the requirement that they be able to come up with an appropriate pun every time they kill someone. If you stab your opponent with an antique whale-hunting harpoon and the best you can come up with is, "Ha ha, you suck," you'll never be taken seriously as a spy. This device allows you to enter in the weapon, gruesomeness, irony level and other aspects of your kill and spits out a lighthearted joke suitable to the situation.

This is the turducken of spy gadgetry: a gun, disguised as a pen, disguised as a phone, disguised as a laptop, disguised as a much larger gun. Fully usable in any of its capacities; you can shoot someone a postcard, shoot the breeze with someone, shoot someone an e-mail, or shoot someone in the sense of actually shooting them.

Bond has slept with any number of women whose alliances are slippery. Villainesses are seduced into saving the world, ingénues fall in with a bad crowd, women who claim to eat their ramen with a fork end up being spoon-eaters in disguise. The evil-detecting condom protects the spy from all sorts of sexually transmitted diseases, including post-coital knives in the back.

Think about it. How many times have you been in a situation where you want to take pictures, but you don't want to arouse suspicion? Well, nobody's going to suspect you of taking photos when you pull out this detailed replica of a homemade bomb! Just nonchalantly hold on to the dynamite sticks at either end, look into the countdown display (actually a viewfinder), and click the thumb trigger and you've got a high-resolution photo with nobody the wiser!

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