---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. No (1962) — 3/5 Dir. Terence Young | Sean Connery The foundation, and foundations deserve respect without demanding reverence. On a budget that wouldn't cover the wallpaper in Goldfinger's lair, Terence Young builds something genuinely functional: lean, grounded espionage where tension comes from rooms, not explosions. Connery arrives fully formed — tuxedo, Walther, sardonic drawl — and the film just lets him exist. Ken Adam's reactor room earns its iconic status honestly, and the tarantula scene — real spider, visibly terrified Connery who did it anyway — is the franchise's first honest admission the job involves actual danger. The scheme — sabotaging rockets from a Caribbean lair — is modest but coherent, and Dr. No himself is a credible threat: cold, precise, physically formidable in a way his successors rarely bothered to be. Honey Ryder's beach entrance sets the Bond-girl-arrival template — gift to cinema or forty years of diminishing returns, depending how generous you're feeling. Less generous: Professor Dent, out of bullets, begging for clemency he doesn't get. Bond executes him flat, no flinch — a moral clarity the franchise would spend decades pretending it forgot. What holds this back is the visible roughness — pacing drags, budget shows, and Ursula Andress dubbed throughout, the first entry in a long tradition of prioritizing the look over the voice. Still, the correct beginning: grounded, dangerous, made by people who hadn't yet been told what a Bond film was supposed to be. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From Russia with Love (1963) — 3.5/5 Dir. Terence Young | Sean Connery The best Bond film precisely because it's barely a Bond film — made before the formula calcified, by people who thought they were building a spy thriller and accidentally built the template instead. Terence Young understands le Carré-style patience before that was even shorthand for anything: cold, geographically precise, populated by professionals rather than cartoons on both sides. SPECTRE's scheme — pitting British and Soviet intelligence against each other over a Lektor machine, Bond as unwitting pawn — is the franchise's most elegant plot, a double-cross built to reward attention rather than punish it. Tatiana stays genuinely ambiguous longer than strictly necessary, a sophistication the series abandoned almost immediately. Robert Shaw's Grant is the finest henchman the franchise ever produced — cold, terrifying, better at the job than anyone else in the room, until suddenly he isn't. The train compartment fight is the series' best action sequence: cramped, brutal, no score, no glamour, two professionals dismantling each other in a space the size of a wardrobe. Kerim Bey is the best ally the franchise ever wrote — warm, fatalistic, treating lethal business as an interesting inconvenience — and his death actually lands. Rosa Klebb, poison-tipped shoe and all, is the first truly cold villain, played with the bureaucratic malevolence of someone who signs death warrants like expense reports. Connery is at his absolute peak here: physical, sharp, occasionally cruel, not yet performing Bond — just being him. The cage hadn't closed yet. The one Bond film I'd confidently show someone who claims to hate Bond films — and after twenty-one entries, still the one that got away with being genuinely good. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Goldfinger (1964) — 3/5 Dir. Guy Hamilton | Sean Connery Cultural legacy, appreciated. The film itself, not so much — and conflating the two isn't analysis, it's nostalgia with a diploma. Goldfinger codified the formula — pre-title sequence, briefing, gadgets, the villain who explains his scheme and then fails to kill the man he's explaining it to, the DB5, the golden girl dead in bed — and in doing so built the cage the franchise spent decades rattling. The laser table scene is genuine cinema; "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die" earns its immortality; Oddjob's hat is appropriately absurd; Bassey's vocals carry puerile lyrics further than they deserve. That's the full inventory of what works. Everything else: crushing Solo's car and then extracting the gold is sadism cosplaying as strategy. Gert Fröbe dubbed, again, the look prioritized over the voice. Pussy Galore's arc — lesbian aviator "corrected" by Bond in a barn — isn't dated, it's repugnant, and no amount of 1964 context redeems it. The Fort Knox scheme collapses on contact with basic economics. Bond spends most of the second act being passive. And Goldfinger keeps his most dangerous enemy alive because the man said something clever. Didn't like it as a kid, don't like it more now. Historical importance, respected. Mistaken for quality — no. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thunderball (1965) — 3/5 Dir. Terence Young | Sean Connery Peak ambition discovering, the hard way, that ambition and pacing aren't the same thing. The pre-title sequence — French chateau, a SPECTRE agent faking death in drag, a jetpack escape using actual Bell Rocket Belt tech — is the best in the series so far, and completely disconnected from the plot. It earns its place on quality alone. What follows is the biggest Bond production yet, and it shows in all the wrong ways. The underwater sequences are technically extraordinary and cinematically exhausting — every single frogman in Largo's army gets his death choreographed, and the filmmakers were so proud of the achievement they refused to cut any of it, roughly doubling the runtime it needed. The Disco Volante chase is sped up to Hanna-Barbera absurdity; the Vulcan bomber's water landing is spectacular and physically impossible — everyone aboard would've died on impact, but it looks magnificent so nobody cared. Fiona Volpe is the film's best asset — a SPECTRE assassin confident and self-aware enough to mock Bond's seduction-as-conversion routine to his face, the franchise briefly prosecuting its own gender politics before immediately forgetting it did. Domino's beautiful and mostly inert. Largo has an eye patch, a shark pool, and menace deployed adequately but not memorably. The Fulton Skyhook extraction is real operational tech, with G-forces the film conveniently ignores. Connery's starting to show strain — present, capable, but the earlier enthusiasm is fractionally dimmer. Good, not great: the franchise proving it can do spectacular, and discovering spectacular alone isn't enough. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You Only Live Twice (1967) — 2/5 Dir. Lewis Gilbert | Sean Connery By 1967, Connery had stopped pretending to enjoy himself, and this is where the exhaustion becomes the whole personality of the film. Heavier, emotionally absent, wearing a hairpiece that deserves its own production credit — he took the £750,000 and donated it to charity afterward, like he was trying to scrub the stink off. Roald Dahl's screenplay ditches Fleming entirely for a hollowed-out volcano, an army of color-coded ninja cannon fodder helpfully painting bullseyes on their own chests, and the single most baffling casting decision in franchise history: "Bond becomes Japanese," achieved via haircut, eyebrows, and a yukata, as if a six-foot-two Scot can vanish into a fishing village unnoticed. Not malicious — just the franchise's usual lazy indifference to the cultures it raids for set dressing. The scheme is at least ambitious — SPECTRE hijacking spacecraft to provoke nuclear war from a volcano base that cost more than Dr. No's entire budget — and Ken Adam's design is genuinely iconic, every supervillain lair since owes it rent. But spectacle without stakes is just expensive theatre. Donald Pleasence finally gives Blofeld a face — bald, scarred, quietly menacing, the template every parody since has stolen wholesale — though continuity remains nonexistent: same cat, different scar, different everything, as if he's the only constant in an organization that can't agree what its own leader looks like. Leiter's changed faces again too, because consistency is apparently against company policy. The women are decorative at best, dubbed at worst, swapped out mid-film with the emotional weight of stock rotation. The ninja climax is loud, crowded, and dead on arrival — dozens of bodies, zero tension. Connery didn't phone this one in. He sent a telegram. The cat, of course, survived. It always does. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) — 3.5/5 Dir. Peter R. Hunt | George Lazenby The film the franchise stumbled into rather than planned — rookie actor, a director doing his only Bond, a shrinking budget — and the most emotionally honest entry the classic era produced. Lazenby had zero acting experience, lied his way into the role with a borrowed suit, and still managed what neither Connery nor Moore quite pulled off: making you believe Bond was in love. The romance with Tracy works because Diana Rigg does the heaviest lifting in franchise history, and Lazenby meets her with a vulnerability his inexperience couldn't fake. The Alps ski chase is the finest action sequence the classic era produced — real stunts, real mountains, no net. Telly Savalas's Blofeld can actually fight, physically credible in ways his predecessor wasn't — same cat, different face, zero explanation, a franchise that's never once been embarrassed by its own continuity wreckage. The villain plot is weak — agricultural terrorism via brainwashed women, YOLT-level nonsense without YOLT's production design to cover for it — but it doesn't matter, because the engine here is Bond and Tracy, not SPECTRE's annual scheme to inconvenience the planet. Lazenby quit after this on famously bad advice and spent decades publicly regretting it; he should have gotten three more films to become what this one only suggests. Instead the franchise panicked, bought Connery back with money, and made Diamonds Are Forever. The cat survived. It always does. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Diamonds Are Forever (1971) — 2/5 Dir. Guy Hamilton | Sean Connery A cynical cash-grab that squandered the one asset it had: Connery's return. He showed up for the record $1.25 million paycheck, and it shows in every dead-eyed close-up, every scene where the toupee competes with the performance for screen presence. The franchise tops this off by erasing Tracy's death with a single throwaway line from M — the series' worst act of emotional cowardice. What's left is Las Vegas kitsch standing in for British panache, a plot so incoherent it makes Hanna-Barbera look like le Carré. The car chase is Smokey and the Bandit outtakes; the moon buggy is slow, silly, and pointless; Blofeld shows up wearing Charles Gray's face and a full head of hair — apparently a different man each time, none of the actors agreeing on so much as a hairline — and makes a drag entrance no script meeting should have survived, with zero menace to show for it. Leiter changes faces too, because why should Blofeld hog all the fun. The franchise bet audiences wouldn't notice or care. They didn't. I did. Wint and Kidd — creepy, competent, the one genuine bright spot — can't rescue a film that is, finally and accurately, a train wreck: tonal chaos playing dress-up as entertainment, built for American box office with so little regard for continuity it can't even keep the Mustang on the same two wheels through its own famous stunt. The cat, of course, survived. It always does. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Live and Let Die (1973) — 3/5 Dir. Guy Hamilton | Roger Moore Moore's debut, and the transition from Connery is handled with the franchise's characteristic approach to continuity: none. A different man walks in, sits at Bond's desk, nobody mentions it — admirable economy or institutional cowardice, depending on your generosity. Where Connery commanded scenes, Moore is part of the furniture; the snake scene says it all — Connery would've clobbered the thing, Moore torches it with aftershave and a cigar, a fair summary of his entire tenure. Hamilton, finding his natural leading man on his third go, calibrates the camp about right here — better than he will next time. The Blaxploitation aesthetic is borrowed, not understood: Bond drifts through Harlem and Jamaica with the breezy superiority of a colonist watching the locals be local, and the racial politics belong firmly to 1973, though at least Sheriff Pepper, the designated comic white authority, is equally buffoonish. He overstays his welcome by roughly the length of the overlong boat chase. Yaphet Kotto's Kananga deserved better than the inflated cartoon death he gets; Jane Seymour's Solitaire is a psychic virgin whose power depends on chastity and is therefore "liberated" by Bond — the franchise again being casually repugnant and dressed it as romance. The crocodile farm escape is genuinely impressive practical stunt work — real animals, real danger, an absurd solution that earns its place through sheer desperate commitment. Felix Leiter number five arrives wearing yet another face, a running gag nobody at Eon has ever acknowledged. Paul McCartney's theme is, by some distance, the best thing here — one of the finest Bond songs ever made, sharing nothing with the film it opens except the logo. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) — 3/5 Dir. Guy Hamilton | Roger Moore Not as bad as remembered, not as good as it should've been — a burger of a movie: fills time, goes down without complaint, forgotten almost immediately. Hamilton directs his fourth Bond with the professional competence of a man who stopped asking questions a while ago. Moore is finding his footing — steadier than Live and Let Die, not yet the full eyebrow-raising machine — and the film's smartest move is casting Christopher Lee, Bond's dark mirror: elegant, cold, frighteningly competent, a hired killer who respects his opponent rather than merely despising him. The dinner table scene, where the two briefly share the same moral space and the film almost becomes genuinely interesting, is the best moment and disappointingly the briefest — a real conversation about licensed versus freelance killing would've been worth more than every boat chase combined. Instead, Sheriff Pepper returns for reasons no script meeting should've approved, overstaying his welcome for the full length of an already-overlong chase. Britt Ekland's Goodnight is decorative by design and a liability in the field — Bond beds Andrea Anders out of duty, Goodnight out of inclination, and she spends the third act accidentally sabotaging things with her backside. The Solex Agitator MacGuffin is at least timely, riding the oil crisis into something resembling coherence. The slide whistle under the corkscrew car jump is a crime against an otherwise genuinely impressive stunt; the karate school fight is pointless spectacle playing dress-up as local color. Scaramanga's death — one bullet, clean, the same method he used on everyone else — is correct, respectful to Lee, and probably the most fitting ending a film this unsure of itself could've managed. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) — 3/5 Dir. Lewis Gilbert | Roger Moore Formula executed flawlessly — which is both the achievement and the ceiling. Gilbert, still in love with enormous sets, finally has material that almost justifies the scale: the Union Jack parachute ski jump is genuinely spectacular, the Lotus submarine car is absurd fun at the exact border of plausibility, and the pre-title sequence remains one of the franchise's finest practical stunts. Moore, fully comfortable at 49, has found his register — suave, flamboyant without tipping into camp, more brutal than usually credited. He's not commanding scenes like Connery; stuff happens and Moore navigates it with wit and aftershave. But that's the character he's built, and it works here. Barbara Bach's Anya is the best Bond girl since Tracy — capable, motivated (Bond killed her lover in the pre-title sequence), sharp enough to land the "shaken, not stirred" line and to hit Bond where it still hurts: the wife he never mentions. One line, but it matters. Stromberg earns none of that — a man behind an absurdly long dinner table, shooting harpoons with enough lag for victims to relocate countries, pushing buttons, dying anticlimactically, making every Blofeld look like a man who occasionally left the room. One wonders who among his red-jumpsuited cannon fodder was stocking the '52 Dom Pérignon in the escape pods while the help drowned. Jaws, by contrast, is exactly the right threat — seemingly indestructible, genuinely frightening in the train fight (Moore's fear reads as unperformed), just shy of being undercut by the comedy the film can't resist piling on him. The formula isn't stale here, it's smooth and efficient — a machine delivering precisely what it promises. The problem: that's the 3/5 ceiling, not a 3.5 floor. No emotional weight, no earned stakes, nothing that costs anything beyond maintenance. Spectacular formula, nothing more, and knowingly so. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MOONRAKER (1979) — 2.5/5 Directed by Lewis Gilbert | Roger Moore Moonraker begins decently enough — the parachute-free free fall opening is a genuine stunt, Jaws' return is welcome, his circus tent landing appropriately comic — and maintains something close to credibility for the better part of its first hour. The centrifuge murder attempt is genuinely hardcore; Moore sells Bond's physical terror and shaken aftermath with more conviction than the material usually demands of him. Drax is introduced coldly, effectively, with musical nods to Kubrick and Spielberg that show someone on the crew had taste. Rio looks spectacular. The Venice glassware destruction — two bulls in a china shop, John Wick would approve — is absurd fun. It was all scoring a generous 3.5/5 right up until Jaws developed a crush on a girl who — contrary to what approximately half the planet falsely remembers — did not have braces. She had pigtails and glasses. The Mandela Effect in full operation: audiences collectively invented the obvious joke the filmmakers missed, then remembered their invention as fact. Suddenly, the film went to shit. Another boat chase that Bond barely survives, and then he strolls out of the Amazon jungle and directly into Drax's hidden rocket launch facility, arriving just in time for the launch, because that's apparently how NASA scientists spend their field work. What follows is The Spy Who Loved Me restaged in orbit with worse logic and a larger budget: industrialist villain wants to destroy the world and rebuild it with a master race of genetically perfect breeders, partners Bond with a capable woman — this time a NASA scientist rather than a Soviet agent — brings back the giant henchman as comic relief, and assaults a space station with U.S. Marines armed with laser guns, because apparently this is a normal Tuesday for the American military. The space station itself, visible to the naked eye from Earth's surface in the manner of the ISS, is hidden from detection by a single radar jammer — this in an era of Copernican telescopes, optical tracking, and amateur astronomers. The breeders, incidentally, simply vanish once the film loses interest in them; they were loaded into shuttle cargo holds like holiday passengers en route to Hawaii and are never seen or mentioned again, presumably still waiting for the stewardess to bring shrimp cocktails. The Drax/Musk parallel writes itself, though Drax, it must be noted, has class. The space battle is chaotic, forgettable, and loud in a vacuum where sound does not travel — same old trope, same old indifference to physics. Felix Leiter is somewhere in here too, wearing yet another face, because the franchise treats his casting with the same casual indifference it applies to everything else of no commercial consequence. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For Your Eyes Only (1981) — 3.5/5 Dir. John Glen | Roger Moore Proof Moore had more range than anyone usually bothered to demand of him — a deliberate course correction after Moonraker's orbital nonsense, stripped back toward actual espionage, and much better for it. The film opens by disposing of Blofeld (due to intellectual property bickering) — wheelchair, industrial chimney, one-way trip — the cat, presumably, got out some other way. What follows trusts grounded stakes over spectacle: the ATAC system as a credible Cold War MacGuffin, Melina Havelock armed with a crossbow and a genuine personal motive rather than a plot convenience, Columbo arriving late but purposeful, everyone eventually delivering their own earned justice. The Meteora rock-climbing sequence is the Moore era's finest action set piece — no gadgets, no cavalry, no Q Branch rescue, just a man being methodically dismantled from above, and Moore commits to the desperation more than the material usually asked of him. Locque's death — Bond kicking the car over the edge with cold, deliberate fury — is the definitive statement that beneath the quips sits a man who executes without flinching when he's decided to. Carole Bouquet is ice-cold and better for it; Bibi Dahl is correctly rebuffed; Kristatos is a villain discovered rather than introduced, which is elegant. Not perfect — the ice-skating subplot is dead weight, the underwater mine sequence bloated — but Moore's best, the film that argues for what his era could've been with less interest in going to space. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Octopussy (1983) — 3/5 Dir. John Glen | Roger Moore First cinema Bond — saved-up money, big screen, the whole ritual — and the adult verdict honors rather than betrays that kid, consistency or sentimentality, pick one. What works, works genuinely: Cold War stakes feel contemporary rather than manufactured, drawing on 1983's real nuclear anxiety, and General Orlov is a rarity among Bond villains — a true believer rather than a mercenary, his insane plan grounded in actual ideological logic. Kamal Khan has real presence; Gobinda is the best Moore-era henchman since Jaws — cool, silent menace, zero comedy. The clown sequence, mocked reflexively for forty years, is actually the dramatic peak: Bond stripped of gadgets and backup, alone with a ticking bomb and ordinary civilians as obstacles, reduced to hitchhiking and a stolen Alfa Romeo. The desperation is real even if the costume isn't — and Moore plays it desperate, not comic, a register he's rarely asked to find. What undermines it is the usual Moore-era problem when nobody's paying close attention: the fortress battle is silly spectacle dressed as action, the plane finale has painfully obvious stunt doubles, and India gets treated as spectacular wallpaper rather than a place. The film knows what it wants to be — a serious Cold War thriller with circus trimmings — and mostly manages it. Mostly. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A View to a Kill (1985) — 3/5 Dir. John Glen | Roger Moore A film that shouldn't exist — not because it's terrible, but as a monument to institutional cowardice. Moore was 57 during filming, visibly tired, patently too old for a role already straining credibility, and the franchise made the film anyway because he kept saying yes and nobody had the spine to say no for him. The result is more competent than it has any right to be, which is almost worse than failure — Bond running on fumes while insisting the tank is full. Christopher Walken's Max Zorin is the unexpected saving grace: a genetically engineered psychopath who laughs while machine-gunning his own workforce down a mine shaft — committed villainy wasted on a lesser film. Grace Jones's May Day — physically imposing, aerobically terrifying — is the franchise's most visually arresting henchperson since Jaws, minus the comedy. The plot — cornering the microchip market via a deliberately triggered earthquake — sounds like it was pitched on a napkin and approved before the soup arrived. San Francisco delivers the one genuinely spectacular sequence: the fire engine chase down the hills, chaotic and excessive and somehow working despite — or because of — Moore hanging off the side like a man who's forgotten he's 57. Stacey Sutton is among the weakest Bond girls in franchise history, agency in name only, mostly asking to be rescued in nice clothes. Moore isn't disgracing himself exactly — he's just too old, and the camera knows it even when the script pretends otherwise. There's a scene where Bond seduces a woman thirty years his junior and the film expects charm rather than discomfort — the franchise's most dishonest moment since erasing Tracy with one line. Glen directs with the competence of a man on his fourth of these, knowing exactly where to put the camera and how little imagination that requires. Duran Duran's theme is, against all odds, genuinely excellent — propulsive, era-defining, the best thing here by a mile, and the clearest proof that a great Bond song and a great Bond film are entirely unrelated variables. Moore's run ends not with a bang or a whimper but a shrug — a serviceable farewell the man deserved better than, from a franchise that had already checked out. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Never Say Never Again (1983) — 3.5/5 Dir. Irvin Kershner | Sean Connery Not technically a Bond film — no gun barrel, no Eon, no Broccoli, just the fallout of Thunderball's tortured rights history — and purists will never forgive it, which isn't my problem. What it undeniably is: a film where Connery, at 52, showed up and meant it. Not for the paycheck this time — Jack Schwartzman gave him creative control, and it shows in every frame. This is the Connery absent since 1963: present, warm, physically committed, carrying a mature gravity his younger self couldn't have faked. Kershner, fresh off The Empire Strikes Back, directs with real craft, grounding the action in physical reality rather than spectacle. Klaus Maria Brandauer's Largo is the franchise's most psychologically sophisticated villain — not a megalomaniac but a narcissist, charming and cruel, the kind of man who plays a video game that electrocutes his opponent and calls it fun. His control over Domino is the franchise's most convincing portrait of coercion, which makes her eventual agency actually mean something. Kim Basinger is better here than the franchise usually deserves. The horse sequence, the motorbike chase, the underwater finale — all grounded, all coherent, directed by someone who understands tension needs geography. Is it Thunderball remade? Technically. Is it considerably better than Thunderball? Also yes — the embarrassing admission the ranking demands. No cat. No recognizable Blofeld. Just Connery, one last time, finally giving a damn. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Living Daylights (1987) — 3/5 Dir. John Glen | Timothy Dalton Took three attempts to finish, and that's the verdict. Not terrible — just competent rather than compelling. Dalton waited twenty years for this role, read every Fleming novel, and delivers exactly the damaged, cold-eyed professional the books describe. The problem: stripped of iconography — quips, gadgets, girls — what's left could be any spy thriller starring anyone. Connery's swagger, Moore's charm, even Lazenby's rawness were flavors. Dalton's intensity, however genuine, is just a color temperature. The Gibraltar opening establishes him well — physical, controlled, calculating in ways Moore never bothered with. The Bond/Kara relationship is the most emotionally credible since Tracy, a real slow burn earned by d'Abo's warmth. The Necros safehouse extraction is the film's cleverest sequence. Brad Whitaker is the weakest element — a forgettable second-tier villain who barely registers by the final confrontation. Glen directs his fourth Bond in his sleep, which is the actual problem — a rawer director might've pushed Dalton into genuine darkness instead of calibrated seriousness. The cello case ice chase is almost embarrassingly Moore-adjacent, a tonal compromise that runs through the whole film. Kara's lovely, Pushkin's surprisingly warm, the new Moneypenny has no spark, and Leiter's changed faces again. Mid-tier. Correct. Inevitable. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Licence to Kill (1989) — 3.5/5 Dir. John Glen | Timothy Dalton What The Living Daylights was setting up: Dalton finally given material that deserves his intensity. Bond goes rogue, Felix is half-eaten and widowed on his wedding day, and the franchise that spent two decades saving the world now watches one man burn down a drug empire for personal reasons — Death Wish in a dinner jacket. Robert Davi's Sanchez is one of the better villains precisely because he's not trying to end the world — he's running a business, loyalty is his defining value, and Bond exploits exactly that to destroy him from within. Q goes rogue out of personal loyalty and supplies most of the comic relief; Pam Bouvier dispatches anyone who mistakes her for decoration; Gladys Knight's underrated theme is commanding and soulful. The tanker-truck mountain-road climax is spectacular practical stuntwork. Bond uses the lighter Felix and Della gave him, shows Sanchez the engraving first — a detail that makes the kill better, not worse. Felix mentions Tracy (Bond's dead wife) — a throwaway line, and it lands. Glen's direction is the film's greatest liability — a more vicious director could've turned this into an actual avenging demon; Glen kept the furniture familiar, which is why it works and also why it's slightly less than it could've been. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- GoldenEye (1995) — 3.5/5 Dir. Martin Campbell | Pierce Brosnan GoldenEye does something the franchise never quite managed before: it makes "is Bond still relevant?" the actual drama, not just marketing copy. Campbell's answer is disarmingly simple — confront the problem head-on, cast someone who can carry both self-examination and spectacle, rebuild from scratch. Brosnan arrives fully formed and immediately right: beautiful, effortlessly charming, and underneath both, capable of genuine cold rage when the material demands it. GoldenEye demands it. The villain, Trevelyan, isn't a madman chasing power — he's a man with a legitimate grievance, son of the Lienz Cossacks betrayed by Churchill's government and handed to Stalin's massacre, who chose catastrophically wrong methods, and the film knows exactly what it's doing with that. Dench's M arrives fully formed as the franchise's moral conscience, calls Bond "a sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War," and doesn't lose the argument. Natalya refuses to be impressed. The tank chase is pure joy. I didn't expect Brosnan to become my favourite Bond. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) — 3/5 Dir. Roger Spottiswoode | Pierce Brosnan The Brosnan era's burger film — competent, propulsive, decent ingredients assembled carelessly. Elliot Carver, a media mogul manufacturing news to provoke a war for exclusive broadcast rights, is the franchise's most prescient villain — satire in 1997, almost quaint by 2026, because reality scaled the concept so far past Carver's theatrical ambitions that the film version now looks naive. Jonathan Pryce plays him as a narcissist performing omnipotence — camp, fun, ultimately as disposable as Stromberg. The real asset is Wai Lin — competent, disciplined, refusing to be impressed by Bond — and Michelle Yeoh doing her own stunts gives the Saigon motorcycle chase real stakes. Paris Carver exists to be sacrificed for motivation, handled with professional coldness — M literally tasks Bond to "pump her for information," the franchise's most honest admission yet of how it uses women. Brosnan registers something at her death — not grief exactly, but more than usual. The dialogue is the sharpest of the Brosnan era; the Kaufman scene, four minutes of Vincent Schiavelli being quietly professional before getting shot for it, outclasses anything in the third act. And then the third act happens: a stealth ship with physically impossible internal geography, Carver killed by a conveniently timed drill, a finale with volcano-lair energy and no volcano. Jack Wade — Joe Don Baker, back from GoldenEye — is cheerfully unprofessional and contributes what a phone call could have. David Arnold's arrival as composer is the unsung triumph — the relief is audible from the first bars. A good Bond film the way a burger with decent ingredients, carelessly assembled, is a good burger. You won't feel cheated. You won't feel fed. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The World Is Not Enough (1999) — 3/5 Dir. Michael Apted | Pierce Brosnan The Brosnan era's most interesting film and its most frustrating — a genuinely sophisticated idea that doesn't fully commit to itself. For the first time, the Bond girl is the villain. Elektra King — daughter of a murdered oil magnate, survivor of a kidnapping she orchestrated herself — is the most psychologically complex woman the franchise has produced, and Sophie Marceau plays the dual register flawlessly: traumatized victim and calculating operator, simultaneously, in every scene. The reveal lands because she's been honest the whole time. I just wasn't watching for it. Brosnan finds something genuine opposite her that his era rarely demands — in the mine confrontation and Elektra's execution, this is Fierce Brosnan: cold rage, finally deployed with full conviction. When he shoots her, with M watching, having refused to believe it until that second — the film earns four seconds of genuine cinema. Robert Carlyle's Renard has an extraordinary premise — a bullet slowly destroying his senses while making him stronger as it kills him — and the film consistently undercuts a magnificent actor; what's left is a compact, menacing little tough with a grudge, nothing more. He's Elektra's instrument, which is structurally correct, but Carlyle deserved a film willing to let him be actually terrifying. Apted brings real interest to the character scenes and real incompetence to the action — the Thames boat chase is impressive in scale, disorienting in geography. Denise Richards isn't a casting problem so much as a costuming one — the wardrobe department made choices her character's intelligence never visually recovers from. The Christmas line is a document of collective institutional failure; we won't speak of it further. What redeems the film is Desmond Llewelyn's final scene as Q — nobody knew it was the last — descending into his workshop floor telling Bond to always have an escape plan. The franchise got it exactly right by accident. It does that, occasionally. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Die Another Day (2002) — 2.5/5 Dir. Lee Tamahori | Pierce Brosnan The tragedy isn't that it's terrible — it's that it opens with twenty minutes of genuinely serious cinema and then abandons it. The pre-title sequence is bold: Bond captured and tortured in North Korea for fourteen months, titles running over his degradation rather than silhouetted beauties — using the credits as narrative rather than spectacle, which is actually smart. For those twenty minutes, this is Fierce Brosnan: committed, physical, cold, better than the film he's in. Then he escapes, walks into a Hong Kong hotel in wet pyjamas, and demands the presidential suite and tailored suits like he'd only been gone for a weekend — either the franchise's boldest statement about Bond's indestructibility or its most brazen cowardice. Probably both. Then the film discovers CGI and forgets everything it knew. Colonel Moon reborn as Gustav Graves — British accent, British manners, an Icelandic ice palace, a solar satellite weapon that somehow works at night — is a premise embarrassing enough for a Saturday cartoon, though there's a real political observation buried underneath about North Korea's ruling class consuming Western capitalism while its population starves. The film finds this and immediately covers it with a death ray. Miranda Frost is cold, precise, and dramatically inert — Elektra King's shadow in a film with neither the ambition nor courage to do anything with what it borrowed; Rosamund Pike isn't the problem, the script is. The invisible Aston Martin isn't a mistake, it's a symptom — the endpoint of four Brosnan films gradually preferring gesture over reality. I apparently dozed off during the CGI surfing. I'm told that was correct. The fencing match between Bond and Graves is the one other good thing here — civility as dominance ritual, blades widening as the politeness thins — with real chemistry between Brosnan and Stephens. The defection subplot, Bond burned and stripped of 00 status, is potentially the most interesting premise in the Brosnan era, and the film drops it in twenty minutes; the Craig era will spend five films on the same idea. John Cleese's Q knows he's comic relief, which kills the dignity that made Llewelyn funny. Dench is wasted. Jinx gets an ocean entrance and then stops being a character. The anniversary callbacks — the jetpack, the ejector seat played for laughs, the Connery martini choreography — read as inadvertent criticism rather than homage: each one points at a better film. Brosnan deserved better. Nobody knew it was the last time. It took Martin Campbell stripping the franchise to the bone to make it breathe again. The pre-title sequence argues for 3.5. The invisible car argues back. The car wins. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------