Now that Daniel Craig is done and all his movies are available to home viewing*, my wife and I have had a chance to re-watch them. He’s the best Bond and we like his movies the most. I believe I’ve seen all the pre-Craig movies multiple times growing up, but I think the series really soared with Daniel Craig.
He made five of them and while we could argue about one or two of them, I think they are all at least “good”.
My ranking, which I don’t think will be the common viewpoint.
Casino Royale - yeah, his first movie is simply incredible. One of my favorite movies of the past twenty years or so.
No Time To Die - his final movie was a real step back to the top quality of his first one. It isn’t as good, but it is excellent.
Quantum of Solace - this movie gets hate/dislike. I have no idea why. I love it, to be honest. The finale in the building on fire is extremely memorable.
Skyfall - a very popular movie, but I think it has a real draggy part before they meet the villain that pulls it down. I do like it, but it also steered away from the “Mr White” and “Quantum” storylines that I actually liked.
Spectre - this movie is not as bad as I remembered it. Knowing about Blofeld and how he is related or something to Bond helped me appreciate the movie. It was just too dumb and kind of lame the first time I watched it that the plot took me out of it. Getting that very strange decision in my mind ahead of time let me appreciate this movie more. It’s actually quite good. Craig’s worst movie in the series, but still really solid as a movie. If they could fix that final 40 minutes, it’d be much better.
*No Time to Die just got added as an included movie with Amazon Prime video. If you haven’t seen it and have prime, it streams free along with that now. Nice.
Yeah, I think your ranking is about right, though I might shuffle the middle three a bit but not exactly sure how; I think they are less distinctive in terms of quality.
Craig is the only Bond that I can watch, not to diss any of the earlier movies and stars whose iconic status I readily acknowledge. But the earlier Bond movies I’ve tried just feel too self-consciously “cheesy” to me.
There’s an argument to be made that that’s actually more faithful to the spirit of the books, and certainly actors like Moore and Connery looked more like books-Bond than Craig does. But I just feel that the grittier flavor suits the franchise better somehow.
Looking forward to seeing what experiments the next Bond reboot/spinoff might try.
Casino Royale is one of, if not the best, of all Bond films.
Skyfall is the worst Bond film… It would be in the bottom ranking of ALL films. The plot makes no sense, and wouldn’t even move at all if people weren’t making stupid decisions.
The others:
No Time To Die is a good Bond film, but it suffers from a silly plot driven by Star Trek-level tech. There’s no way those nanobots would work in probably the 24th century either.
Spectre is good, though I do get annoyed very fast with Bloefeld.
Quantum has the stupidest villain plan.“We’re going to corner the market on water, and charge tons of money!” Yeah, you saw how that was working in the film: everyone left - no one to sell that water to. In real life, when people tried that exact same thing, the government nationalized the water company. and PS: who the hell designed a hotel where no one wants to go, that appears to be designed to burn at the slightest spark??
I’m somewhere between these two opinions. Casino Royale had its moments but not enough to make me really enjoy the movie. Skyfall was typical Bond until they got to his house in the Highlands, and from there it felt like the writers just watched The Magnificent Seven and stole that idea. Mildly entertaining but not something I have any desire to see again.
I think the others sucked, but I haven’t seen No Time to Die yet. All in all I’m not a fan of Craig’s Bond.
Craig was very good as Bond, but I like Connery a little bit better.
Casino Royale is Craig’s best.
Quantum of Solace and Spectre are pretty good.
Skyfall and No Time to Die make no sense. The villain’s plan in Skyfall is way too complicated; he lets himself get captured so that he can escape to kill M. He has henchmen coming out of the woodwork to help him. There’s a scene during the escape where Bond has him dead to rights, but doesn’t shoot him. In NTtD I don’t even know what the villain’s plan is.
His original plan is to kill Bloefeld because Bloefeld killed his father. He was about as fast at it an Indigo Montoya.
He also wanted to bring down the SPECTRE organization. To do this he used a MI6 developed nanobot assassination tool (a DNA-targeted “virus” weapon. Star Trek tech.) that he was hired to steal by Bloefeld. He double crossed his bosses and killed almost all of Spectre with the weapon. He used the weapon and Bloefeld’s daughter to kill Bloefeld.
But Bond kept getting in his way, so he targeted Bond’s daughter with the DNA weapon. So to save his daughter, Bond allowed himself to be killed.
My infatuation with the Bond movies was entirely in the Sean Connery era of my youth, and to me he’s the only authentic James Bond. IMHO Daniel Craig is the least authentic, although I’ve only seen a couple of the movies. To me the whole genre is getting a bit tired, especially with all the parodies.
Safin was going to sell it to the highest bidder. They were going to target every political leader in the free world. I think they just wanted to “blow it all up”, create chaos and anarchy.
One of the knockout scenes in Casino Royale was the foot chase at the construction site. You don’t need fighter planes and space lasers and invisible cars to make a good Bond film. Unfortunately, the trend has been to make each movie bigger and louder than the one before it. I think there is still room to make good Bond movies, but they need a director who brings some inspiration, not just spectacle.
What did Blofeld want in Spectre? Or since he was revealed to be the big bad guy behind all of the story up to that point(Mr. White, Quantum, etc.), what was it that he wanted?
The Spectre movie is all about data collection, eavesdropping, and so forth. Turns out it is Spectre that is getting all the information on everyone in the world.
But what were they doing? What did Blofeld want to do if he won?
It was very well done, and totally unnecessary. Bond should have just followed him from the ground. He had to come down sometime. It was a stupid play: if Bond had fallen, the whole money laundering operation, and SPECTRE, would (probably) never have been discovered.