Daniel Craig may be the new James Bond. Sean Hamilton of London’s The Sun has just reported that Bond producer Barbara Broccoli has offered Craig a three-picture 007 deal. Is it me, or am I hearing a big collective “hmmm” emanating from the fan base? Cool as he is on his own terms, Craig in a Bond guise strikes me as a vaguely psychotic Timothy Dalton. He’s obviously smart and talented and a fine riveting actor (superb in Matthew Vaughn’s forthcoming Layer Cake and Roger Michell’s Enduring Love, which Paramount Classics brought out last fall, and the most interesting player by far in Michell’s The Mother) but his gray-blue eyes have an emotionally inert quality that contain a hint of menace, and I suspect it’ll hard for the troops to warm up to a guy who just might strangle or throttle you on a whim. There’s something tucked away and creepy, maybe even a bit sadistic, hiding inside Craig’s chest cavity. Maybe that’s a healthy thing to add to the 007 mystique, and maybe Pierce Brosnan was too fey and quippy and Irish pubbish. Or am I just reacting too strongly to the impression left by Craig’s psychotic son-of-Paul Newman gangster role in Road to Perdition?