Rank the Bond movies from best to worst.

Cafe Society
1

Despite the that I may well be pushing 50 before the next installment makes it to theatres, I figured I’d start rewatching all the Bond movies again, which has prompted me to start this thread wherein the EON films are ranked from best to worst (or, more accurately, from most to least favorite).

So, here goes:

[ol]
[li]Dr. No[/li][li]From Russia With Love[/li][li]On Her Majesty’s Secret Service[/li][li]Casino Royale[/li][li]Thunderball[/li][li]You Only Live Twice[/li][li]Goldfinger[/li][li]Licence To Kill[/li][li]For Your Eyes Only[/li][li]The Spy Who Loved Me[/li][li]Live and Let Die[/li][li]GoldenEye[/li][li]The Living Daylights[/li][li]Diamonds Are Forever[/li][li]The Man with the Golden Gun[/li][li]Tomorrow Never Dies[/li][li]Octopussy[/li][li]Quantum of Solace[/li][li]Moonraker[/li][li]The World Is Not Enough[/li][li]A View to a Kill[/li][li]Die Another Day[/li][/ol]

(I didn’t include the original Casino Royale or Never Say Never Again as I’ve never seen either all the way through.)

How would you rank them?

2

Damn-there’s been 22 of them? :eek:

I swear we had a poll on this, but a quick search says no.

3

Have only seen about half of all of them, mostly the Roger Moore - forward ones, but I would have to put many of those old Roger Moore ones at them bottom, particularly “Live and Let Die” with its terrible blaxploitation- and southern-archetype cliches. It doesn’t even work as camp.

4

Sean Connery
Timothy Dalton
Goldeyene
George Lazenby
Roger Moore

I am a busy man I don’t have time to list all 20 movies

5

I stopped watching the films midway through the Brosnan years. The general ranking given that would be:

  1. Diamonds Are Forever
  2. Goldfinger
  3. Thunderball
  4. You Only Live Twice
  5. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
    Everything else.
6

Here are my top five:

  1. From Russia With Love
  2. Goldfinger
  3. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
  4. Casino Royale
  5. Dr. No
7

Here is the quick ranking:

Non Sean Connery Bond films = all shite. No need to rank.

Sean Connery Bond films = all #1, cuz Sean is allllllllll that!

8
  1. Goldfinger
  2. From Russia With Love
  3. Casino Royale
  4. Thunderball
  5. Dr. No
  6. GoldenEye
  7. For Your Eyes Only
  8. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
  9. The Spy Who Loved Me
  10. You Only Live Twice
  11. Live and Let Die
  12. The Living Daylights
  13. Diamonds are Forever
  14. Quantum of Solace
  15. Licence to Kill
  16. Tomorrow Never Dies
  17. The Man With the Golden Gun
  18. Moonraker
  19. The World is Not Enough
  20. A View to a Kill
  21. Die Another Day
  22. Octopussy

There are some close calls there, but I think that’s a ranking I can live with.

9

1.) Casino Royale (2006)
2.) All the others.

10

I think I see a certain consensus forming here. For what it’s worth, here’s how I see them:

Casino Royale
From Russia With Love
Goldfinger
Dr. No
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

On a given day in a given mood, any of these could be #1. *Casino *really marked a renewed effort to tell a story and show aspects of the main character. *Russia *is probably the closest the series ever got to real espionage; NATO vs. Warsaw Pact is all a sham, SPECTRE (much like many third world nations of the time) plays them off of each other. * Dr. No *shows Bond at his most responsible and territorial. Connery either hasn’t found his voice here yet, or he absolutely has and all the subsequent films are compromises. *OHMSS *is the first attempt at a sea change, and the character takes on a more human dimension; Lazenby has been thoroughly screwed by history. Goldfinger set the mold for every film afterward, with a singular focal villain and a spectacular massing of forces at the denouement. If you like the Bond series as it played out, this is the best Bond film.

The Living Daylights
The Spy Who Loved Me
Licence To Kill

Dalton was able to put a rough edge back on the character after years of Moore’s cuteness. The films are good, but EON had gotten too lazy to make them great. Barbara Bach makes The Spy Who Loved Me; FINALLY we get a woman who’s halfway interesting (well, since Diana Rigg).
Quantum of Solace
Thunderball
You Only Live Twice

Near misses. *Thunderball *marks where the series settled into a formula; I find it forgettable, not unlike YOLT. Quantum of Solace may have marked a return to that formula; we shall see.

Live and Let Die
GoldenEye
The Man with the Golden Gun
Diamonds Are Forever
The World Is Not Enough
Die Another Day

Misses, though they have their redeeming parts. *LaLD *is plotted well, but a little too cute to be a good film. *GoldenEye *showed real potential, but isn’t really impressive. *Golden Gun *is kind of a dumb movie, but a must-see because it pits Bond against Dracula/Sauron/Count Dooku and Tattoo. *Diamonds *has enough dead spots to fill a family cemetery–does Connery standing on an elevator really impress anybody? Why the hell doesn’t Blofeld just shoot the guy already instead of ordering him to reinsert that damn cassette? Partial redemption comes in a great opening sequence and the luscious Jill St. John–but my God, that character is too dumb to live. Likewise, the actresses in *TWINE *are appealing (Marceau is singularly sexy and exotic), but the story falls flat, and Denise Richards, for all her attributes, is the opposite of convincing. Die Another Day is an interesting idea for a movie, with the homages throughout tempting a smile, but the innuendo and cameos are forced and distracting.

Tomorrow Never Dies
Moonraker
A View to a Kill
Octopussy
For Your Eyes Only

Not good. The kung-fu in *Tomorrow *is kinda neat, and you gotta love Walken, but everyone involved in these is just phoning it in.

11

Her’e how I would rank them as of today:

  1. Goldfinger
  2. From Russia With Love
  3. Casino Royale (2006)
  4. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
  5. Dr. No
  6. Licence To Kill
  7. The Living Daylights
  8. Casino Royale (1967)
  9. Thunderball
  10. Quantum Of Solace
  11. For Your Eyes Only
  12. Tomorrow Never Dies
  13. GoldenEye
  14. The World Is Not Enough
  15. Never Say Never Again
  16. The Spy Who Loved Me
  17. Octopussy
  18. You Only Live Twice
  19. Die Another Day
  20. Moonraker
  21. A View To A Kill
  22. Diamonds Are Forever
  23. Live And Let Die
  24. The Man With The Golden Gun
12

Why is Casino Royale so popular

James Bond doesn’t play Poker

13

An excellent synopsis, overall, but I would quibble with a couple titles.

GoldenEye. Some nice character touches, Bond in the Aston Martin (wicked cute babe riding shotgun), the new M’s no-nonsense attitude, and Q without the stick in his ass. And one of my favorite bits of Bond dialog:

“Ah, an ex-KGB guy. Tough mother. Got a limp in his right leg. Name’s Zukovsky.”
“Valentin Dmitrovitch Zukovsky?”
“Yeah, you know him?”
“I gave him the limp.”

For Your Eyes Only. Dialed back some of the excesses of the Moore era; no army of henchmen in a supertanker or orbiting space station. Not so many clever quips, either. When the bad guy’s car is teetering on the edge of a cliff, there’s no punch line, Bond just kicks it over the edge. Moore’s most badass moment as Bond.

14

The opening scene with the bomb-maker was just too cool, sorry. It got me totally pumped for the rest of the movie. The torture scene near the end was fantastic, too.

“Left, left!”

15

1. Goldfinger
The unquestioned best Bond movie ever.

2. Casino Royale
I didn’t think this would be number two, but going back over the list I kept saying to myself “Well I like Casino Royale better than that movie” and it kept moving up.

3. GoldenEye
My first Bond. For all its faults, it is one of the best movies on this list. Also, Brosnan is a better Bond than he gets credit for.

  1. Licence To Kill
  2. From Russia With Love
  3. Tomorrow Never Dies

7. The Man with the Golden Gun
As someone else said. Bond versus Sauron and Tattoo, sure it’s hokey, but what’s not to love?

  1. The Living Daylights
  2. For Your Eyes Only
  3. The Spy Who Loved Me
  4. Dr. No

12. Die Another Day
See GoldenEye, Brosnan is underrated and the winking homages were fun.

  1. Live and Let Die

14. Quantum of Solace
Totally drops the ball from Casino Royale. What a disappointment.

  1. Moonraker
  2. The World Is Not Enough
  3. A View to a Kill
  4. Diamonds Are Forever
  5. You Only Live Twice
  6. Thunderball
  7. Octopussy
  8. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
16

Oh, I’d say there’s plenty of debate/question on this point. It’s good, but frightfully overrated.

I’d say he gets too much credit, especially with younger people (which is understandable, as he was Bond for the better part of a decade). As it is, I find him too much of a fop to be a believable cold-blooded killer in the British government’s employ. And for anyone about to sputter Roger Moore’s name at me in righteous indignation, I refer you to both the previously mentioned kicking-the-car-off-the-cliff scene in For Your Eyes Only, and to Moore’s surprisingly rough, Connery-as-Bond-like treatment of poor doomed Andrea Anders in The Man with the Golden Gun.

Really? On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, a movie that, had it starred Sean Connery as originally planned and not George Lazenby, would be a serious contender for best Bond film of all; that, even as is, starring Lazenby, is in most serious Bond film fans’ top five or ten list; despite the fact that it features the finest performance of a Bond girl actress of all… you’ve really ranked it dead last?

17

Someone likes Diamonds Are Forever? Even as a Connery film, it falls near the bottom. (It doesn’t help that in this film Connery resembles an future aging Lee Majors, and his toupee slips several times.)

Goldfinger is a film that is as illogical as it is iconic. It is sort of the Gilligan’s Island of Bond movies. Bond does nothing right in the entire film. He nearly gets killed in the pre-title sequence despite an associate warning him not to go back to his hotel room. He then gets caught cheating Auric Goldfinger (who he’s just supposed to be keeping an eye on), getting himself knocked cold and Jill Masterson killed. He’s then identified by Goldfinger as an infiltrator at the golf club, and proceeds to get Tilly Masterson killed and himself captured despite his Aston Martin DB5 which Q Branch, which has spent “tireless years perfecting”. He’s then flown to Goldfinger’s Kentucky ranch, which is the headquarters for his scheme to blow up Fort Knox and allowed to discover Goldfinger’s secret plan (which he can’t help but divulge in order to justify all the time he spent building a diorama, even though he immediately executes his cohorts) only to completely fail to get a message to the CIA agents waiting just outside the compound. He is then trapped inside Ft. Knox with a ticking atomic bomb, managing to defeat Oddjob only by the most narrow luck, and still can’t disarm the bomb. Really, the only thing he does right the whole film is seduce Pussy Galore from her lesbian ways, and then, I think she just wanted the hell away from Goldfinger and his insanity and was looking for the best deal. Great Ken Adam design, moronic plot.

I’m not even certain Connery would have improved it. Connery was droll and sanguine, and so careless about women one would have almost sworn he was as gay as Rock Hudson. Lazenby, for all of his faults as a would-be actor, did manage to convey a degree of seriousness to the role when Bond was in jeopardy of his life or losing the attention of Tracy. In a few instances, as when he is being pursued through the alpine skating village, he manages to look scared for his life. Connery has never been a romantic lead, and I don’t know that he would have actually fared well in this role.

For me, the top five are:

[ol][li]Casino Royale[/li][li]On Her Majesty’s Secret Service[/li][li]From Russia With Love[/li][li]Dr. No[/li][li]The Living Daylights[/ol][/li]
Quantum of Solace misses the list by being half a good film, marred by being slender on plot and too much Lara Croft+Shakycam in the action sequences (though the knife fighting sequence in the hotel room in Port-Au-Prince is thirty seconds of unmatched cinema). For Your Eyes Only would have been a good film if not for having one of the screechingest Bond girls ever and a disco soundtrack that was horribly dated thirty seconds after the film was released, plus one of the silliest chase sequences filmed since Herbie: The Love Bug. The less said about the Brosnan films, the better; the best of them failed to serve as an adequate vehicle despite Brosnan’s obvious suitability for the role.

Stranger

18

My top five:

  1. From Russia With Love
  2. Goldfinger
  3. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
  4. Casino Royale
  5. GoldenEye

Then everything else. The Roger Moore films hold up least well for me, but that’s due more to truly dire scripts and direction than Moore himself, although he definitely was way too old by the end of his run.

19

It’s set in Vegas, it has Jill St. John and Jimmy Dean, Bambi & Thumper, and a chase scene with a lunar rover. What more can you want?

*James Bond: I tend to notice little things like that - whether a girl is a blonde or a brunette.
Tiffany Case: Which do you prefer?
James Bond: Well, as long as the collar and cuffs match… *

20

A hollowed out volcano? :wink: