I agree.
Furthermore, these are the only two *true * Bonds.
I disagree. IMHO Brosnan also managed to mix the suave with the baddass. But Connery had to do it without the high-tech effects. Dalton was more a thug in a nice tux and Moore was basically a fopish dork.
A good James Bond needs to look not merely comfortable, but completely at home and even gleeful in certain disparate environments:
1: Gambling at Monte Carlo
2: Seducing a countessa
3: Driving a car at ridiculously high speed for the road/terrain, preferably while being chased
4: Getting into a no-holds-barred fistfight
5: Shooting everyone and everything in sight
6: Performing some incredibly contrived and idiotic but dangerous and cool looking stunt to either infiltrate or escape
So let’s compare the men against the situations.
Sean Connery: 1,2,3,4,5
George Lazenby: 3,4
Roger Moore: 1,2,3
Timothy Dalton: 3,4,5,6
Pierce Brosnan: 1,2,3,4,5,6
So to my mind, while for most of the picture, Connery and Brosnan are equals, Brosnan’s ability to many of his own stunts gives him a slight edge. Very slight, in that the most outrageous ones were done by stuntmen for both of these actors. Beyond that, it’s just a matter of taste. That taste is, I suspect, strongly influenced by whether you saw Connery as Bond first.
I think Brosnan is great, but he’s been saddled with some pretty bad movies. I just watched The World is Not Enough last night, and DAMN but that’s a silly silly movie. Apart from the fact that it features Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist (and you could argue that that’s plenty right there), I can remember at least three times off the top of my head where Bond outran an explosion that went off right behind him.
I think if Brosnan had done some of the earlier movies, he’d have a better reputation.