Face-palm for 007: new Bond title gives Daniel Craig flimsy send-off

If reports are to be believed, the next James Bond film – and the last to star Daniel Craig – will be called Shatterhand. Please allow me to be the first to suggest that its plot will involve 007 injuring himself in a botched DIY job.

It’s a bold choice for a title. It feels nice to say out loud, arguably the closest that a James Bond film will ever come to being called Frangipane or Looney Tunes, which will be a comfort to anyone still stung by the red-hot shame of having to walk into a cinema and ask for a Quantum of Solace.

But it isn’t entirely without meaning. It probably doesn’t count as a spoiler to tell you that Dr Guntram Shatterhand is a known alias of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, cropping up in You Only Live Twice. Although Blofeld escapes justice in that film, he dies at the end of the book on which it’s based. Bond strangles him, and then blows up his castle for good measure.

From this we can infer that Shatterhand could well see the return of Christoph Waltz’s moodily underplayed Blofeld. It’ll be a man-on-man fight to the death, like Holmes and Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. It will be an epic, satisfying conclusion that draws on decades of character knowledge. It will be everything any Bond fan has ever wanted.

Then again, Shatterhand was also the name of a 1991 Nintendo game about a robot policeman who goes around punching stuff until it explodes, so maybe it will be about that. The title also borrows from the Old Shatterhand series of German cowboy novels from the 1800s. So, putting everything together, it would seem to suggest that Shatterhand will be about James Bond lassoing Blofeld with a lederhosen and punching him until he pops. Which would make it a thousand times better than Spectre.

Even if that isn’t the exact plot – in which case, more fool you, Sony – it’ll still be better than Spectre. Ever since GoldenEye in 1995, the Bond series has only been able to make one good film every two attempts. This has never been more pronounced than with Daniel Craig in tow; of his four outings as Bond, the first and third were tremendous but the second and fourth might qualify as some of the series’ very worst. So Shatterhand could feature Craig rollerskating downhill with a bucketload of glass hands and still rank in the top half of his output.

Better yet, we know that Eon, the production company behind the series, sticks to a winning formula when it comes to titles. Two decades ago, for example, it found some success with Bond films whose titles were bizarre death-fixated gibberish: Die Another Day and Tomorrow Never Dies. In the 80s it went similarly murder-mad with A View to a Kill and Licence to Kill.

So if Shatterhand is a success, then we know what the next few Bond films will be; they’ll be named after a synonym for destruction and a part of the body. Perhaps next it’ll be Trashtoe, or Crackback, or Smashmouth. If this is the case, may I humbly suggest Batterbum.