Another love of mine is the James Bond films…What is your grade/ranking/review?
My ranking:
Well, here’s mine:
We’ve done this before, but I don’t mind revisiting the subject. And I will make some changes to my old list.
I’m not sure where I’d put Spectre in that list. I’ve only seen it once; liked it but wasn’t blown away, so maybe insert it at 11, 12, or 13. Ask me again in seven years.
How about the original Casino Royale and Never Say Never Again?
Having re-seen them all within the last month (except the Craig films, holding off on them until I get all the blu-rays) I have some very strong opinions
Great
Okay
Terrible
Thoughts upon rewatch
The Brosnan films are way worse than I remember, even after last seeing them about 10 years ago. They’re all either incredibly dry and bland or full of “comic” lines that completely fall flat. 90% of Brosnan lines are terrible jokes that don’t land, as opposed to Moore who could at least salvage a groaner with his mannerisms.
Connery as always is King, but his latter ones are just good enough and don’t top the heights of some of the other Bonds. I found Thunderball very boring and actually liked Never Say Never Again way better, if I replaced it with Thunderball it would jump four positions.
Lazenby I like but Majesty’s Secret Service has serious pacing problems even earlier Connery films don’t suffer from. Cut 30 minutes and you got a really great Bond film but there’s just so much stuff that doesn’t go anywhere.
Dalton was way better than I remembered, Living Daylights is a great spy thriller but Licence To Kill is a film I absolutely don’t understand the hate for. It’s not really a Bond film (which is a common criticism I see) but it’s a great action movie in it’s own right. Remove the Bond name from either and you’d have an amazing stand-alone franchise that doesn’t have the baggage of the name.
Moore has so many films it’s hard to organize them all. At his best he’s equal to Connery, at his worse he’s basically a very boring Brosnan. Spy Who Loved Me is equal to Goldfinger and From Russia With Love in greatness. I’m the rare person who really enjoys Moonraker, it’s completely stupid but I was never bored watching it and its close connections to SWLM made it much better in my mind. Live and Let Die and For Your Eyes Only are more serious (if you can call Moore serious) outings that work well with incredible stunts. Octopussy is just on the edge of being great but I thought the were a few weird elements that drag it down (the “storming the base” sequence was really dumb, even for Moore) while A View To A Kill is basically an okay Bond film if you skip the entire first hour which has almost nothing to do with the rest of the plot. The Man With The Golden Gun is a film that’s way too slow for its own good, and even after the big bad gets his comeuppance the film drags on for another 15 minutes. The biggest sin of a Bond movie is being too boring.
Casino Royale is impossible to put into the list for me. Not only is it different from the other Bond films, it’s different from itself; multiple directors worked on different parts of the movie, so it has huge changes in tone. It’s a classic example of the 1960s throw-everything-at-the-screen-and-see-what-sticks style, and can be appreciated as such, but it’s the Cousin Oliver of Bond films.
Never Say Never Again would be somewhere in the middle. Connery still had it, and Klaus Maria Brandauer was good as the villain, but it was missing a certain something from the Eon Bond films.
To be fair, it’s not just Bond going off on a personal vendetta due to Felix Leiter; it’s that Leiter, hospitalized and minus a limb, can’t seek tear-soaked revenge after his wife is killed on their wedding day by the head of a crime syndicate.
I figure that’s enough of a hook into Bond’s baggage to deserve a pass.
(By comparison, there’s a bit in X-MEN: FIRST CLASS where Xavier pleads for mercy from Magneto by saying that, yes, the military personnel were trying to slaughter a bunch of innocents, but, well, they were Just Following Orders – and there may be worse phrases to use on the guy, but none actually come to mind.)
True story. I have been a James Bond fan since I was 9. I have tried many, many times to watch Thunderball, and I have never once done it without falling asleep.
When you think about it, a lot of Bond films aren’t really “Bond films” necessarily. I mean, Diamonds Are Forever kind of rides the wave of early 70s action films. Live and Let Die is basically James Bond meets Blaxploitation. The Man with the Golden Gun is Bond meets Bruce Lee films. Moonraker is Bond meets Star Wars. License to Kill wasn’t the first Bond film to jump on a bandwagon.
The problem is that License to Kill goes TOO dark, for what people expected out of a Bond film. The Living Daylights was more serious than the Moore movies, but it wasn’t bleak. I think the amount of blood, guts, and what have you just didn’t sit right with a lot of Bond fans.
At the same time, a British guy in a tuxedo didn’t fit in with the more off-beat action heroes of the same era like John McClane, Rambo, and Riggs.
So the film failed on two fronts - too bloody and Miami Vice for the Bond fans, too stuffy and British for the action fans, with a plot that really was pretty standard for the period it was released in.
I enjoy it, personally, but I can understand why it’s generally disregarded.
Not that a lead-up is necessary, but I’ll preface this by saying I’ve been a Bond fan for over 40 years. My father was a film projectionist so I got to see most of the Moore stuff onward in the theatre, though interestingly enough, Connery was Dad’s favourite. He didn’t live long enough to see Daniel Craig in the role.
Just about anything between let’s say 15-23 is fairly interchangeable for me; I wouldn’t argue too much if 16 and 23 were switched, for instance. But I will not be moved on #24.
Me? I never understand the hate for Die Another Day. So it has an invisible car. So what? EVERY Bond movie has something stupid, even the Connery ones.
Same with Octopussy. I think both of them are not only quite fine movies, they are better than Goldfinger and Dr. No combined. Seriously - Bond threatened in Dr No by a (rear projection, no less) tarantula, a spider that isn’t even deadly. And Goldfinger? Bah!
I have a soft spot for Octopussy, the villain and his main henchman are credible threats and great at being menacing, Maud Adams is both sexy and given plenty to do in the film, the plot has some nice twists and turns, and overall it would be an above average Moore film EXCEPT for the ending. Everything after Bond foils the evil plot feels like they didn’t know how to end it so they just threw everything at it to see if it stuck.
Never saw Die Another Day or Spectre.
All the Bond films wanted to be, at least at first, were decent imitations of Hitchcock’s North By Northwest, and From Russia With Love comes closest to that Platonic ideal.
Goldfinger and The Spy Who Loved Me are great silly fun, while OHMSS and Skyfall are the only entries that attempt to transcend the limitations of the series, not just by being emotional but by being so exceptionally well shot and edited.
The Man With the Golden Gun has one of the very best villains in Christopher Lee. Problem is that he’s so much more interesting than Moore, who didn’t grow into the role for one more movie.
I do not remember anything that happens in Octopussy or The Living Daylights, but I don’t remember disliking them.
The relentless sexism of the later Connerys really bothers me now, but I loved Diamonds Are Forever as a kid.
Thunderball and Casino Royale are just so dull. They feel endless, and Casino Royale practically is.
Tomorrow Never Dies has a great Bond Girl in Michelle Yeoh and a good villain in Jonathan Pryce (as Rupert Murdoch), but nothing else about it works.
TWINE is pretty bad, but it contains one bravura moment for Brosnan:
Elektra: You wouldn’t kill me. You’d miss me.
Bond [shoots her]: I never miss.
Quantum of Solace is just incompetent. Edited by epileptic hamsters. Unwatchable. Cool title though.