Continuing the discussion from Amazon MGM takes creative reins of James Bond, ending an era of family control of 007:
In honor of (or memoriam for) the Bond franchise now that Prime has taken it over, I’m just curious who your favorite Bond is, apart from Connery. Why no Connery? Because if I include him I’m sure he’ll just be the runaway favorite. So choose your next favorite:
Had to go with Craig. I liked both Brosnan and Dalton in the role but they gave Craig better movies to be in.
I think Timothy Dalton might be the best actor after Niven in that bunch, but he was a terrible Bond for some reason.
I don’t really count Niven as he was in the weird comedy Casino Royal only, wasn’t he?
Lazenby was OK, but one and done is a small sample.
Moore was a clown, even if his Bond was the one I grew up with.
I just don’t like Craig as Bond and I don’t know why. He just doesn’t feel like Bond to me.
Connery of course is the One True Bond.
I voted for Brosnan who felt like Bond to me.
I like Craig the most as an action star. But on the rare occasions I go back and read the Fleming books, for some reason the image I have in my mind acting out the narrative looks a lot like Lazenby.
I liked Brosnan in the role, although he lacked the brain/wits of Craig, IMHO.
The thing about Bond is — when he’s not passing himself off as an expensively-dressed guy looking into investment possibilities — his job tends to involve just sort of showing up somewhere and being taken into custody by people who typically don’t bother to remove his innocuous accoutrements. Would you dismissively underestimate a cold-eyed hired killer who looks like Sean Connery or Daniel Craig? Well, no, probably not. Would you dismissively underestimate a Roger Moore type? Going by your post, I guess he’s my pick for putting the “secret” in “secret agent.”
Craig is a fine action star, and agree with @Loach that he has a lot better scripts to work with on the whole. But, if I consider (like the OP) Connery as the GOAT, then the one that evokes Connery for me the most is Brosnan.
The others range from meh to skilled (like @What_Exit I agree that Dalton is actually one of the most skilled actors in the role, but he doesn’t feel like Bond to me either), and their scripts also range from camp to “realistic”.
But again, Brosnan and the movies he filmed were very, Very Connery, with a certain arrogance (not always justified), over-the-top villains, and just barely short of camp (okay, sometimes over the edge) quips.
I went with Moore because Moore is the only actor (save Connery, perhaps) that could have played that role in the (admittingly cartoonish) films he was in. A serious and realistic Bond makes the films indistinguishable from the dozens of other spy thrillers that come out every year.
Agreed. Daniel Craig is probably the best actor on that list (except for David Niven, I guess), but that has nothing to do with being the best Bond.
Every time someone notes that the Roger Moore movies are silly, I feel compelled to point out that Dr. No is one of the silliest Bond movies of all time and it was the very first one!
I think Moore had a good idea of how to play Bond, that’s reflected in the comments above. But for a few of his entries, there was just a laziness to them that I find off-putting.
My nerdy comparison is always, Moore is to Bond what Colin Baker is to Doctor Who. Both of them stepped into their respective franchises during a period of tackiness and low-budget, and neither of them were served well by the material they were given (by which I mean both their scripts and their wardrobe). They’re both underrated because they were better than the final product showcased them.
Brosnan is my favorite non-Connery Bond. Craig is a great actor but for me he lacks the right sense of humor in his portrayal of 007.
I think Timothy Olyphant would be a good candidate for the “new” Bond.
I think Moore was pretty good. He played Bond well as an educated upper class gentlemen, but by the 60s that was a dated concept. Connery indelibly altered the character with his performances which were more credible in the time period for Bond tales told on film.
I think Pierce Brosnan could have been the best ever, if he had been able to get out of his Remington Steele contract. When he finally got to play, he was slightly too old for the Action aspect of the role. Also, he got saddled with some really bad scripts.
Timothy Dalton was probably the best Master Thespian to play the role, and his characterization was probably the most faithful to the books. But, “faithful to the books” does not necessarily mean “good movie”. And, again, he got saddled with bad scripts.
Oddly enough, I like George Lazenby the best.
For me, Moore was a great Simon Templar (though I’ve known people who would disagree with me) and Brosnan was the one and only Remington Steel. Dalton was just okay, and I haven’t seen any of Craig’s movies. Nelson’s Bond wasn’t British, and Niven’s movie wasn’t Bond.
So I voted for Lazenby by default, even though his Bond didn’t show quite the sardonic wit Connery displayed so well.
Certainly if they elect to change the setting to southern Kentucky. “I was justified.”
For me it is a toss up between Craig and Dalton, with the former winning out just because he had more opportunity to expand into the role, where as Dalton had one very good film and one utterly forgettable one. You can see the elements of writing for Dalton in Goldeneye (how they try to make the character seem jaded and embittered even though Brosnan looked like he was having the time of his life), and aside from the physicality of some of the more extreme action sequences I can absolutely see him in Casino Royale or Skyfall; it’s a shame the legal and financial issues didn’t permit him to play at least one more Bond film.
I found the Craig films to be monotonically declining in the quality of the writing even as the cinematography got better and the budgets got successively larger. Casino Royale was brilliant, Quantum of Solace had a good setup but the writer’s strike left it without needed polish or a good conclusion, Skyfall was basically an extra-long episode of Archer, Spectre was just dumb fan service, and No Time To Die was narratively incoherent and a full forty minutes longer than it needed to be, if indeed its existence could be considered essential at all. Craig was good through all of them (as were his supporting cast although I could have done without Ralph Fiennes cosplaying Bernard Lee right down to the mannerisms and tonality) but that didn’t make them good movies.
Pierce Brosnan is a fine actor (and a good Irish gentleman that people like to work with) but watching his films feels like watching someone in an escape room; there is never any instance in any of those films where there is even a suggestion that he won’t find some way to escape. (The best thing about that era of Bond films was that it gave the international audience an appreciation for Michelle Yeoh.) I found him so much better in charismatic and sometimes sleazy roles like The Tailor of Panama and the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, and he also has great comedic timing.
Moore was really just playing the same variation on Simon Templar that he was in most films; although he occasionally and effectively played against type in a few movies like The Wild Geese and ffolks. Lazenby was not a trained actor but even the RADA-trained Diana Rigg (brought in basically to help bolster him up) admitted that he he became quite good (and really outstanding in the action scenes even if Peter Hunt did that stupid speed up style of editing and cuts that was so popular at the time), and you can definitely see from the scenes that were filmed later that he improved, but apparently he was such an ass off-set that there is an argument whether he refused another film or Broccoli refused to give him another chance.
The less said about the Niven film or the crappy t.v. movie with Barry Nelson as “Jimmy Bond of the CIA” the better.
Stranger
Voted Moore although I really liked Lazenby and OHMSS might be my favorite Bond as of this minute.
He is terrific in The Matador along with Greg Kinnear and Hope Davis.
He’s the only one I count.
I agree with nearly all this Stranger. I’d be interested to hear which of the Dalton films you thought was very good and which was utterly forgettable, because I rate both of them in my top half of rankings!
It’s interesting to hear how many don’t rate Dalton, or at least say he’s a good actor but got Bond wrong (sorry, bit 'Partidge-esque there). I think he got Bond the, er, rightest, in terms of what Fleming put on the page. Connery would be a close second. But then a lot of people have seen many of the films and never read the books and their version of Bond is what they grew up with, so probably Connery or Moore.
In terms of who I picture as Bond, these days, ironically, it is probably Mads Mikkelson, of course a baddie in Casino Royale. He’s a handsome so and so but in my opinion he has that ‘cruel’ look that Fleming describes (I’m sure he’s a lovely fella).
For anyone interested, there is a documentary focussing on Lazenby’s time on Bond, it was on Prime recently and I really enjoyed it, called ‘Becoming Bond’. Huge womaniser, but despite that I came away with a bit of respect for him as he explained why he didn’t do any more Bonds after his debut. It was also very funny.
OHMSS is definitely the best of the post-Connery Bonds. (IMHO.)