All the world's a movie, and young men have their favorite characters in it. At first the infant, amidst his mewling and puking, finds time for admiring a DC superhero--Batman, Superman or another. Then, the whining schoolboy serves his apprenticeship to a star athlete. Only in adolescence, however, do maturing young men, be they lovers or soldiers, recognize the virtues of British secret agents.

For those in the latter set (this writer included), the release of a new James Bond film is met with eager anticipation, followed by boyish glee. It is almost like Christmas, but rarer. And Bond's latest, The World Is Not Enough, is no exception.

In it, Bond (Pierce Brosnan) faces Russian terrorists bent on destroying Istanbul with hijacked plutonium so that they can wipe out three oil pipelines. This would allow for a fourth pipeline, running from Russia to the West, that would bear all of the oil, turning a tidy profit and endangering the United States' oil supply. In the end--sorry to ruin it--Bond kills the bad guys and sleeps with the heroine.

James Bond films--the first of which, Dr. No, premiered in 1962--were well-suited to the Cold War's ideological fervor. It must have been great fun to watch Bond outwit and outclass hapless Commies. World is the third Bond film since the end of the Cold War and, while its Russophobia is still pronounced, the conflict has lost most of its prior urgency. Avarice and vainglory have replaced zealous patriotism as the cardinal passions of Bond's adversaries.

Fortunately, Bond's passions remain. Just as birds fly and fish swim, James Bond beds beautiful women and kills Russians--it comes naturally to him.

A graduate of Oxford college and a loyal patriot, Bond is the paragon of thoughtful manliness, which is not always an oxymoron. He is intelligent but not reflective, independent (the "00" in "007" represents a license to kill) but not reckless, reliable but not predictable. Consider, by contrast, the brutish strength of professional athletes, or the thoughtless braggadocio of action heroes like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and the like. Bond is a caricature of manliness, to be sure, but not an altogether unflattering one.

Nevertheless, feminists and misandrist critics often paint Bond as a heartless womanizer. This may be true, but it doesn't give Bond girls nearly enough credit. While most women in Bond films are, so to speak, "charmed" at least once by Bond, they are by no means undiscriminating. For instance, upon Bond's arrival at an Afghanistan construction site in World, a foreman, terse with unrequited affection, tells him that Christmas Jones (Denise Richards), a shapely airhead-cum-nuclear physicist, is a lesbian. Suffice to say, Bond proves the unlucky foreman wrong.

Also, most Bond girls pursue challenging careers in traditionally male-dominated fields. Pussy Galore was a pilot; Holly Goodhead, an astrophysicist; Xenia Onatopp, a world-class terrorist.