James Bond 007 Movies Guide
Most memorable highlights of each film
Overview/perspective of each era and Bond actor
Full comprehensive reviews/summary/analysis of every movie
(in chronological order twice – full reviews at bottom)
Plus personal 007-related photos and Bond in Motion exhibits in London
by Scott Hettrick, July-August 2018
The cinematic adaptation of Ian Fleming’s British secret agent James Bond has become the longest-running film series – it’s about to enter its seventh decade – and has thus far featured six different actors in the lead role.
Sean Connery’s Two-Film Introduction as James Bond:
Before 007 became part of the global lexicon with the back-to-back releases of the outsized “Goldfinger” and “Thunderball” in 1964 and 1965, the British secret agent based on the popular Ian Fleming novels was introduced to theater-goers in 1962 and 1963 with two movies that focused much more on the character of James Bond and less on gadgets and chases on a grand scale. “Dr. No” and “From Russia with Love” also introduced audiences to Sean Connery, who, in part because of smaller budgets, used his wit, physical strength, and charm to overcome obstacles and foes. And, oh yes, his signature line of self-introduction, “Bond, James Bond.”
Interestingly, even as the world was moving closer to women’s rights in the 1960s, the film producers made the women in Bond movies seem more reliant on him than they were in the 1950s Fleming novels, more often getting themselves out of jams and coming to his rescue.
And the Bond of the movies was far more of a womanizer and not likely to fall in love and want to marry each woman he encountered in the first handful of Fleming books.
1. Dr. No (1962) – click titles to jump to full reviews below
The one with… Ursula Andress walking from ocean onto island beach in skimpy swimsuit; the introduction to Sean Connery and “Bond, James Bond” (at a casino table, of course); a black widow spider crawling up Bond’s arm in bed; the black metal hands of villain Dr No; Bond crawling through hot metal ventilation ducts
2. From Russia With Love (1963)
The one with… the gadget-filled briefcase with pop-out knife, exploding tear gas latches, and self-assemble rifle; the villain Rosa Klebb’s shoe with a pop-out toe blade; the gypsy women catfight; the fight in a sleeper cabin on a train; the trick death of Bond in opening scene; Bond causing a line of enemy boats to catch fire and explode; the introductions of Q branch and the actor who would later be known as “Q,” and the SPECTRE organization and leader Blofeld with his white cat
The Two Films That Made James Bond a Global Phenomenon
The third and fourth films in the franchise, “Goldfinger” and “Thunderball,” elevated the British spy to international superstar status with the introduction of the weapons-loaded Aston Martin DB5 car, a rocket-powered backpack and numerous other gadgets, a painted naked lady and women who would become “Bond girls” with names like Pussy Galore, egomaniacal larger-than-life villains, a brute henchman with a hat that doubles as a deadly weapon, chases in fast cars, fast motorcycles that shoot missiles, and fast boats that split in two, fist fights, shoot-outs, seductions, explosions galore, and powerful theme songs belted out by big stars as silhouettes of naked women danced on the screen.
Interestingly, both films featured the then-new Ford Mustangs driven by women.
Also of note, Connery does not utter the signature introduction of “Bond, James Bond” in either film.
3. Goldfinger (1964)
The one with… the iconic Aston Martin DB5 with gadgets galore, including ejector seat; the gold-painted naked girl on bed (dead); Pussy Galore; Oddjob (with the deadly bowler hat); that memorable title song by Shirley Bassey (first over opening titles); the attack at Fort Knox; great lines, including Bond throwing electric heater in bathtub to electrocute man and then saying “Shocking, positively shocking,” and Bond asking Goldfinger, “Do you expect me to talk?,” prompting Goldfinger response: “No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!”
4. Thunderball (1965)
The one with… the massive underwater battle among numerous SCUBA divers; Bond escaping wearing a rocket-powered backpack; the giant yacht that sheds its cocoon; Tom Jones performing title song with the first silhouettes of naked women across the titles; the airplane hooking Bond and his girl out of ocean; Sean Connery for first time replacing actor who turns and fires gun at camera in opening gun barrel sequence
New, Old, Unofficial Bond Actors in Next Four 007 Movies in Four Years
The enormous success of the first four Bond movies created new management, creative, and legal challenges for producers of the franchise. First, a chaotic star-studded spoof based on the original novel by Ian Fleming, “Casino Royale,” which was released just weeks before the official Bond movie of the summer of 1967, and which made about one-third as much money as “You Only Live Twice” (Bond movie producers would eventually get the rights to the Casino Royale book and make a legit version 40 years later).
That same year, Sean Connery was beginning to weary of the role (after five films in six years) and what he felt was unfair compensation. After a peak of crushing media and fan attention during production of “You Only Live Twice” in Japan, he quit unless he was paid an industry-high $1 million.
Producers refused to meet Connery’s demands and instead hired a 29 year-old Australian model who had never acted, George Lazenby, to take over the starring role in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” in 1969. The film takes place primarily in the Swiss Alps and featured spectacular locations, stunts, original songs by Louis Armstrong, and high-profile co-star Diana Rigg, whose character Bond married, a first for the British secret agent. Although the film was critically praised and is generally ranked by many Bond fans among the best in the history of the franchise, it made less than half the money as “You Only Live Twice” on its initial release and Lazenby became arrogant, defiant, and generally difficult for producers to manage.
Thus, Connery was paid the salary he requested and brought back for one more outing in “Diamonds Are Forever” in 1971, which took place primarily amidst the glitz and glamour of Las Vegas and brought audiences flocking back to theaters.
• non-Eon production:: Casino Royale (1967)
The one with… dozens of big-name stars in a spoof including David Niven as a retired James Bond and Woody Allen as neurotic Bond nephew Jimmy Bond; Herb Alpert & Tijuana Brass theme music; Burt Bacharach Oscar-nominated song The Look of Love performed by Dusty Springfield
5. You Only Live Twice (1967)
The one with… the yellow auto-gyro solo flying contraption called Little Nellie; Japanese women and baths; the fake volcano; the spaceship that swallows USA and Russian manned space capsules; Bond seemingly being shot dead in a Murphy bed that flips into a wall; Bond falling through trap door that becomes a slide; car being picked up by helicopter magnet and dropped in the ocean; woman dropped through walking bridge trap door into pool of man-eating piranha fish; the first appearance of the face of Blofeld (Donald Pleasance); Nancy Sinatra singing title song; one of the earliest cinematic depictions of ninja fighters
6. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)
The one with… the first different and one-time Bond actor George Lazenby; circular Blofeld headquarters atop a mountaintop peak in Swiss Alps; new Bond actor pre-title scene line, “This never happened to the other fella.”; first major ski chase shootout (much on one ski); Diana Rigg (TV’s “The Avengers”); first/only legit wedding for Bond; bobsled chase; Telly Savalas as Blofeld; Louis Armstrong song We Have All The Time In The World; hypnosis under colored ceiling lights
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7. Diamonds Are Forever (1971)
The one with… Connery returning to lead role in Las Vegas setting (including Circus Circus casino); Bond driving a red Mustang Mach 1 on two wheels; Bond girl Plenty O’Toole (“Named after your father, perhaps?”) getting thrown out a high hotel window into pool; gay henchmen partners Mr. Kidd and Mr. Wint, one of whom Bond sets on fire while throwing the other over cruise ship railing with bomb tied to tux tails; Jill. St. John as Tiffany Case; Bond fighting women called Bambi and Thumper at a house pool, driving moon buggy in desert chase, getting trapped inside a pipeline with a rat; finale battle with Blofeld on an oil platform; Bond arriving to oil platform on ocean inside silver walking sphere
Roger Moore Era Begins
There is almost no comparison to six of the seven installments in the James Bond series featuring Roger Moore to any of the seven episodes that preceded them.
Rather than spy dramas, they more closely resemble spy spoofs, in which agent 007 is the principle target.
Right from the beginning of the era, with “Live and Let Die” in 1973 (in fact, it actually began with Sean Connery’s “Diamonds Are Forever” in 1971), the Moore movies took on a much more topical and cartoon-ish attitude. Although a couple of these Bond-lite movies were fun at the time, they haven’t held up well with age and seem quite dated, especially with many culturally and physically insensitive portrayals in “Live and Let Die” (stereotypes of blacks) and “The Man with the Golden Gun” (Sheriff Pepper references to people of Bangkok Thailand as “brown pointy heads” and many jokes at the expense of the diminutive stature of little person actor Hervé Villechaize, later star of “Fantasy Island”).
The character of J.W. Pepper, a redneck, tobacco chewing, foul-mouthed and overweight sheriff from Louisiana who would be the inspiration for characters in the movie series “Smokey and the Bandit” and the TV series, “The Dukes of Hazzard,” removed any hope of credibility and sent a loud signal that the Moore pictures were to be quite a change in direction for the series.
“Live and Let Die” was obviously capitalizing on the popularity of the black action films of the day (“blaxpoitation”), such as “Shaft,” while “The Man with the Golden Gun” (1975), universally considered the weakest of the series and the second least-successful in ticket sales, used the energy crisis as a backdrop.
The character of arch-nemesis Blofeld was dispensed with almost completely in the Roger Moore era due to legal issues, and Moore is the only Bond actor who never drove an Aston Martin in any of his movies. Moore’s Bond also dispensed with wearing a hat, including in the opening gun barrel sequence. As an example of how misguided the series had become by 1975, the automobile of choice for secret agent James Bond was not an Aston Martin, a Lotus Espirit or even a BMW Roadster, but an American Motors Hornet (does anybody remember those?), in which he chased an AMC Matador. Can you say product placement?
The best thing about the Moore era is the title songs, almost all of which still hold up very well.
8. Live and Let Die (1973)
The one with… title theme song performed by Paul McCartney and Wings; debut of Roger Moore as Bond; bayou speedboat chase with jump over road; Bond walking over alligator backs to escape island; the introduction of Louisiana redneck Sheriff character J.W. Pepper; the villain getting inflated until he bursts; the top half of double-decker bus knocked off under bridge; actress Jane Seymour; the magnet watch Bond uses to unzip a woman’s dress; early 1970s black culture in New Orleans and Harlem
9. The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)
The one with… the AMC Hornet doing a rollover jump over a river; Little person actor Hervé Villechaize; the return of redneck sheriff J.W. Pepper; horror film vet Christopher Lee as villain; Britt Ekland as Bond girl Mary Goodnight; Maud Adams in the first of two Bond movies as different characters
Roger Moore Goes Big
The next two films in the Moore canon would set new and continuing trends for the series, beginning with a spectacular stunt in the pre-title sequence, and hopscotching to multiple exotic locations in each film. This pushed the running time of each film to more than two hours.
The effort to be topical continued with “The Spy Who Loved Me” (1977) trying to make a story out of the uneasy American/USSR truce called “détente,” and “Moonraker” (1979) being little more than a collection of previous Bond movies, re-done and cobbled together with a space theme, capitalizing on the popularity of “Star Wars,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and NASA’s fledgling space shuttle program. (In fact, as proof of the producers’ late decision to exploit the space craze of the late 1970s, one need only note the credits at the end of “The Spy Who Loved Me,” which indicates that James Bond would return in “For Your Eyes Only,” which was delayed until 1981 to make room for “Moonraker.”)
The cartoon-ish/spoof aspect also continued, as did the inclusion of absurd characters. The satire got to the point in “Moonraker” that the theme from “The Magnificent Seven” was played as Bond rode in to town on a horse dressed in gringo garb, and the five-note greeting of the Mother Ship in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” was used as a tone-driven security code.
Such cutesy touches can only be appreciated if all the Moore movies except “For Your Eyes Only” are judged out of the dramatic context of the series and viewed as exotic comedies with lots of action.
The sexual references and double-entendres intended for humor increased to the point that they were no longer cute or subtle but rather overt and, especially in retrospect, even cringe-inducing as the aging Moore (turning 50 in these two films and continued until he was 58) was now flirting with and seducing women who were 20-30 years younger.
“The Spy Who Loved Me” and “Moonraker” once again introduced a ludicrous cartoon-like character, this time an even more ridiculous behemoth man with a mouth full of metal teeth, called Jaws (Richard Kiel), who could rip a van apart with his bare hands. He also walked away from a free-fall out of an airplane into a circus tent, and suffered no injuries after plunging over a gigantic waterfall in a speedboat.
Blatant product ads became rampant in “The Spy Who Loved Me” and “Moonraker.”
In addition to these flaws of the early Moore movies, there is not a single memorable villain and all four of Moore’s first films are about 45 minutes too long. And yet, they are all still kind of fun to watch and each has good moments.
10. The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
The one with… Bond skiing off cliff and opening Union Jack parachute; the gadget-filled Lotus Espirit that goes underwater; the song Nobody Does It Better sung by Carly Simon; the introduction of giant henchman character Jaws; a super-freighter swallowing nuclear submarines; inaccurate credits tease that “Bond will return in ‘For Your Eyes Only’ ”; Barbara Bach
11. Moonraker (1979)
The one with… Bond wrestling a parachute off another man during free-fall; space shuttles; the tricked-out gondola that turns into a speedboat through the canals of Venice and drives like a car across St. Marco Plaza; the speedboat that turns into a para-glider over waterfalls; Bond girl Dr. Holly Goodhead; Bond fighting Jaws atop aerial cable car in Rio; Bond trapped in fast-spinning G-force centrifuge space flight simulator; spoof music of “Magnificent Seven” when Bond is in Western garb and tones of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” for door lock; Jaws falling in love with Heidi-like girl; credits tease for second time that “Bond will return in ‘For Your Eyes Only’ ”; final appearance by longtime M actor Bernard Lee
Roger Moore Gets Serious
After clearly going overboard in every way in the first four films with Roger Moore, the next two films, especially “For Your Eyes Only,” dispensed with the cartoon-ish characters of Sheriff J.W. Pepper and Jaws and much of the massive sets and special effects, opting for a refreshing return to the more serious secret agent missions of the originals. “Octopussy” brought back some over-the-top goofy moments of the previous films but was generally straight-forward overall, but “For Your Eyes Only” is considered Moore’s most credible Bond movie and features the only moments of true suspense and tension in his seven films. Alas, Moore would go out with a clunker in “A View to a Kill.”
12. For Your Eyes Only (1981)
The one with… Bond climbing towering rock wall; Bond using helicopter to drop Blofeld in wheelchair down a smokestack (only appearance of Blofeld in Roger Moore movies); Bond kicking car over cliff; Sheena Easton performing title song (first/only performer appearance in titles); keelhauling scene raking Bond and woman over coral; Bond visiting grave of his dead wife; ski chase with motorcycles on snow ending on bobsled run; an underwater submersible battle; return of Lotus (Turbo) – first white one self-detonates, second one is maroon; no appearance by longtime M actor Bernard Lee who died January 1981; score by Bill Conti (“Rocky”) with occasional disco beat influence; rare real suspense/tension in multiple scenes
13. Octopussy (1983)
The one with… Bond flying a mini-jet through closing hangar doors, clinging to the roof of an airplane as it flies upside down, driving a car on railroad tracks, battling villains atop a moving train, dressing as a clown at a circus, stepping out of the mouth of a fake alligator, avoiding a circular saw blade in bed, doing Tarzan yell while swinging on a vine; Rita Coolidge singing All Time High; Q coming to rescue in Union Jack hot air balloon; acrobatic women
Connery Returns, Moore Overstays His Welcome
Partly exploiting the opportunity to thumb his nose at Bond movie producer Cubby Broccoli, Sean Connery returned to the role of James Bond in a remake of “Thunderball” by other producers who won a court battle to do so. The movie helmed by Star Wars “The Empire Strikes Back” director Irvin Kershner was released within weeks after “Octopussy,” did almost as well at the boxoffice and was received more kindly by critics than the official 007 entry. It represented perhaps the only or very rare time in cinematic history when the same actor returned to repeat his starring role for a remake. It was Connery’s seventh and final outing as James Bond, the same number Roger Moore would wind up with.
Unfortunately, Moore’s final outing, “A View to a Kill,” would rank as one of the weakest critical and commercial outings in the franchise’s history.
• non-Eon production: Never Say Never Again (1983)
The one with… Bond playing a shocking video game, doing a ballroom tango dance with Kim Basinger, jumping over a wall on horseback into the sea far below, riding a rocket-powered flying platform tube over the ocean, jumping over water on a rocket-powered motorcycle; Mr. Bean actor Rowan Atkinson; the huge Flying Saucer yacht; Barbara Carrera; underwater battle; the first black actor to play CIA character Felix Leiter (Bernie Casey)
14. A View to a Kill (1985)
The one with... the blimp and fight on Golden Gate bridge; the hook-and-ladder fire engine chase in San Francisco; the pre-title ski/snowboard chase to Beach Boys music; Iman base jump/parachute off Eiffel Tower; Bond driving car on/off roof of bus and continuing driving after decapitation of roof and back half of car; the steeplechase booby-trapped obstacle course; Bond buried alive underwater in Rolls Royce-breathes tire oxygen valve; Patrick Macnee (formerly of “The Avengers” with Rigg); the last appearances by Roger Moore and Lois Maxwell (Moneypenny), each at 58 years-old
A Hit and Miss for Fourth Bond Actor Timothy Dalton
Timothy Dalton provided a necessary dose of youth, vitality, intensity, and even just the right amount of cockiness and a little humor to the role of James Bond in his first outing, “The Living Daylights,” which reportedly had been prepped to star Roger Moore one more time and/or potentially Pierce Brosnan. The films even brought a welcome return of the iconic Bond car model the Aston Martin, although Bond was less of a womanizer due to the outbreak of AIDS and a general social discouragement of casual sex. Unfortunately, the Hollywood studio financing the Bond movies, MGM, was struggling financially and could not support the usual budget into the second Dalton movie, “Licence to Kill,” and it showed. The poor performance of that movie didn’t help the studio’s fortunes, which would not be able to release another movie for six years, ending Dalton’s run after just two outings.
15. The Living Daylights (1987)
The one with… the fight while hanging on net dangling out back of flying cargo plane; parachuting out the back of a burning vehicle and landing on a yacht next to a woman in a bikini; the new model gadget-filled Aston Martin with outrigger skis and spiked tires on frozen lake, carving hole in ice with wheel rim, jet-propelled jump over building, rocket missiles to blow thru blockade; the defector put in capsule sent through Siberian pipeline; out-running skiers while sitting/sliding in cello case; driving car out the back of crashing plane; the new Moneypenny; Bond bedding only one woman
16. Licence to Kill (1989)
The one with… a chase during which a tractor-trailer tilts on two wheels and pops a wheelie; Bond roping an airplane while hanging from a helicopter and then parachuting to a wedding, spearing a seaplane and barefoot water-skiing behind it before clinging to the pontoon as it goes airborne; Wayne Newton as a televangelist; Felix Leiter losing his leg to a shark; a henchman’s head exploding; a police truck driving off the Seven Mile Bridge for an underwater escape; Q as Bond’s chauffeur and boat pilot
Pierce Brosnan Revitalizes the Franchise with Four Installments
Pierce Brosnan seemed liked the perfect casting choice to just about everyone, even in 1987 when producers chose Timothy Dalton, but Brosnan was under a contractual commitment to his TV series “Remington Steele” through 1987 and, thus, he had to wait until that series ended and then until financing/releasing studio MGM came out of bankruptcy. It was worth the wait as the Brosnan era exploded onto screens with a jaw-dropping bungee jump off a spectacular dam in “Goldeneye.” Audiences immediately embraced Brosnan in the films that returned Bond to his womanizing ways, and kept the action, stunts, gadgets, and double-entrendres flowing at full-speed. They even had two of the strongest women characters as allies in the Bond series, with Michelle Yeoh and Halle Berry getting their own fight scenes in “Tomorrow Never Dies” and “Die Another Day,” respectively.
The Brosnan era also introduced Dame Judi Dench as Bond’s first female boss, M, and introduced the first new “Q” actor in 36 years, though John Cleese would only last for two films in that role.
17. GoldenEye (1995)
The one with… the incredible bungee jump off a huge dam; Xenia Onatopp with vice-grip legs; Bond driving tank through city with statue on top; the first female Bond boss “M” (Judi Dench); M saying to Bond: “I think you’re a sexist misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War.”; a torpedo-looking black train in flames as it rams tank; Alan Cummings as a computer nerd
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18. Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
The one with… the epic motorcycle chase ending under a tilted helicopter with Bond driving while handcuffed to Michelle Yeoh facing him; Bond ejecting “back seat driver” from jet into rear seat of jet above him; Bond/Yeoh slide down building banner handcuffed together; remote control car chase through parking garage; Teri Hatcher; Sheryl Crow and k.d. Lang songs
19. The World is Not Enough (1999)
The one with… Q-modified mini-speedboat that goes underwater, through streets and ends at Millennium Dome with hot air balloon; explosion in MI6 headquarters; a chase by fan-powered snowmobiles with parachutes; a helicopter swinging a long vertical column of spinning circular saw blades that cuts Bond BMW in half; Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist called Christmas Jones; Monty Python’s John Cleese introduced to Q actor Desmond Llewelyn in final appearance
20. Die Another Day (2002)
The one with... the invisible Aston Martin Vanquish; the ice palace; Halle Berry – emerging from ocean in bikini; Madonna theme song and short appearance as fencing instructor; the car chase on ice with Aston Martin and equally-weaponized Jaguar XKR; the weaponized hovercraft land battle in North Korea; the final outing by Pierce Brosnan and John Cleese as Q; Bond telling Q “It was only a flesh wound.”; Q and Bond walking through lab filled with famous previous 007 gadgets; the villain arriving to press conference by parachute with Union Jack flag ala “The Spy Who Loved Me”; Bond using car part to kite-surf from ice cliff; Bond/Jinx flying helicopter out the back of a crashing airplane
Rebooting 007 Origin Story and the Daniel Craig Era
Four years after the final outing by Pierce Brosnan, the series launched a kind of reboot with a quasi-origin story, based appropriately and remarkably faithfully on Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel, but expanding with far more multi-dimensional characters and complex multi-layered stories akin to the plots of novels by Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancy or John le Carré. The series also introduced yet another actor in the lead role, Daniel Craig, whose shorter and stockier physique and blonde-ish hair looked nothing like any of the other Bonds in the movies or as described in Fleming’s books.
Audiences quickly embraced all of it and Craig made Bond his own.
While the strategy seemed to work in terms of creating films that met the new standards set by movies like the Bourne and Mission: Impossible series, the question was whether James Bond could continue to stand out as a distinctive character with unique attributes that separated the 007 series from the others.
“Casino Royale” and “Quantum of Solace” were the first to be connected episodes in a continuing storyline. “Skyfall” appeared to be the first traditional stand-alone of the Craig movies until “Spectre” made a reverse-engineering connection to all the characters and back-stories through the first re-introduction in decades of Bond’s arch villain Blofeld. The fifth and final Craig film, “No Time to Die,” not only continued those connected storylines but, for the first time, carried over Bond’s deep romantic interest from the previous film. The first three films also had an ongoing new and more personal relationship between Bond and M – he even breaks into her apartment twice in the first three films simply to have a personal chat.
Bond is promoted to 00-status for the first time and given his initial assignment in “Casino Royale,” during which he has to be schooled about the most suitable tux to wear by a female colleague, and his knowledge of mixed drinks and his awareness of the name of his favorite drink seems to be in question in the first two films.
Many of the traditional Bond movie elements are missing from the first several of these installments, including 007 gadgets, theme music, and two primary supporting characters — Moneypenny and Q would not be reintroduced until the third Craig movie, “Skyfall” where they return as far more credible contemporary characters. The gun barrel sequence traditionally at the beginning of each film and the familiar theme music during the course of the films did not return in their original form until the fourth film, “Spectre.”
Also missing are Bond’s witticisms and memorable lines, replaced with a lot of sarcastic comments that may not evoke the “cool” factor but can spark almost as many laughs. When Q tells Bond in “Spectre” that he is injecting “smart blood” microchips in his bloodstream that allows MI6 to monitor his vital signs from anywhere on the planet, Bond responds, “Well that sounds marvelous.” When M sees flowers on Moneypenny’s desk and says, “It’s not your birthday is it?” Moneypenny responds with, “No sir,” and as he disappears into his office, “That was last week.”
By the end of this 21st century quintuplet of Bond episodes, every major character except Q and Moneypenny had been killed off, including Bond himself, as well as Felix Leiter, Blofeld, René Mathis, and one incarnation of M who had spanned 17 years and seven films. Bond left behind his first child, a five year-old daughter, and a world that reflected society in the 2020s, with Q being gay, Moneypenny being Black, and a Black woman becoming agent 007.
21. Casino Royale (2006)
The one with… new and very different-looking Bond actor Daniel Craig, emerging from the ocean in swimming trunks showing off his abs; the stunning free-running chase; Bond sitting fully-dressed in shower comforting crying girlfriend; the building in Venice collapsing into the canals; Bond falling deeply in love and resigning from his job; Bond driving both the classic Aston Martin DB5 and new DBS model; the airport gas truck chase; Bond nearly dying in Aston Martin while trying to self-administer a defibrillator
22. Quantum of Solace (2008)
The one with… the opening pre-title chase of Bond in new Aston Martin DBS V-12 down narrow and crowded Italian mountain roads; shootout/fight backstage during opera; boat chase; the dogfight over desert with Bond flying old cargo plane; naked dead woman on bed covered in oil
23. Skyfall (2012)
The one with… opening pre-title chase through Istanbul Grand Bazaar, motorcycle chase over rooftops and through glass windows, Volkswagen Beetles getting knocked off a moving train, Bond getting shot off the top of a train and plunging over a tall bridge; fight in Shanghai building in front of giant lighted billboards; fight in Macau casino against three bouncers and a giant komodo dragon; Bond getting whiskers shaved by Moneypenny; M (Judi Dench) getting killed; MI6 headquarters exploding; new Moneypenny and Q actors; Javier Bardem villain; subway train crashing down through hole in ceiling of room below; iconic Aston Martin getting riddled with bullets and blown up
24. Spectre (2015)
The one with… the pre-title fight on a helicopter above crowds at the Day of the Dead parade in Mexico City; car chase in Aston Martin prototype through Rome at night that ends with ejector seat; Bond driving plane on snow down mountain without wings; the return of arch-villain Blofeld; an extended fist-fight aboard a train; Bond in skeleton costume in parade and running from falling buildings; Bond having drills bored into his head by Blofeld
25. No Time to Die (2021)
The one with… two classic Bond Aston Martins, the V8 Vantage Saloon and the DB5, the latter of which has machine guns behind the retractable headlights, spraying bullets as Bond does 360-degree spins; Bond using stone stairs as a ramp to drive motorcycle over a wall; Bond grabbing a cable and jumping off a bridge; Felix Leiter getting killed; Bond accidentally killing Blofeld; Bond learning he has a five year-old daughter; Bond getting killed by missiles he ordered to blow up a biochemical factory
James Bond Movie Reviews
1. Dr. No (1962)
James Bond movie producers chose Ian Fleming’s sixth novel, Dr. No, (spelled out Doctor No in the book) as the first on which to base their introduction of the British Secret Service agent to theater-goers.
The story of a megalomaniac operating from a secret Caribbean island to sabotage U.S. test missiles was updated to refer to the then-contemporary U.S. space flight program getting underway at Cape Canaveral. Bond uncovers the operation when sent to investigate a missing British agent in Jamaica. Shortly after he begins asking around, he awakes in bed to find a tarantula crawling up his shoulder (it was a centipede in the novel). The incident further strengthens Bond’s resolve, so he hires a local man called Quarrel to get him to the forbidden island, where they wind up with unexpected partner in the beautiful bikini-clad Honey Rider (Ursula Andress, also shortened from the novel’s Honeychile), who was innocently collecting sea shells. When enemy hunters and dogs get too close while the three of them are hiking in a river, Bond improvises to hide underwater while using bamboo stalks to breathe (which was Honeychile’s idea in the book).
They are eventually caught and taken to the enigmatic and brilliantly malevolent Dr. No, who has hands of metal. Bond is held captive in a room while Honey is tied lying down where crabs are expected to come and eat her. Bond escapes by climbing through a ventilation system and rescues Honey (who managed to free herself in the book).
Dr. No is seen to be working for an independent organization called SPECTRE, which was introduced by Fleming in his eighth novel, Thunderball, not the Russian organization SMERSH of the first eight Fleming novels. Otherwise, the movie sticks very closely to the novel and is thus a compelling narrative combined with a charming star who is also tough and self-assured in conflict, cards, and sexual conquests.
Sean Connery, a relative unknown at the time, was the unlikely but perfect choice to embody the character for the first five films (eventually six, and a seventh unofficial Bond film).
“Dr. No” is the film that introduced nearly all the elements and characters that would become iconic to the series for decades to come:
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- the opening gun barrel sequence (an actor other than Connery)
- the iconic James Bond guitar theme
- silhouettes of sexy women dancing during the opening titles
- the hat toss onto Moneypenny’s hat rack in M’s outer office
- the introduction of CIA agent Felix Leiter (Jack Lord, pre-“Hawaii Five-O”), though Leiter is not in the novel
- the iconic introduction of 007 as Bond, James Bond, at a casino table
- Miss Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell) and flirtatious office banter w/ Bond
- Bond’s boss “M” (Bernard Lee)
- the Walther PPK pistol as introduced in the novel after M forces Bond to give up the unreliable “woman’s” Baretta he used in the first five novels
- The first two James Bond girls: Eunice Gayson (who prompts the famous introduction of Bond at the casino table, first giving her name as “Trench, Sylvia Trench,” and who later shows up in his hotel room wearing only a shirt top, and re-appears in “From Russia With Love”), and Ursula Andress (her dialogue was dubbed by Nikki van der Zyl), who makes her debut emerging from the ocean in a bikini, a scene that would be re-created 50 years later as an homage by Halle Berry in “Die Another Day.”
- Bond’s quips, one coming in the iconic sexy scene when Honey emerges from the ocean in a bikini and asks if Bond is also looking for shells, to which Bond responds: “No, I’m just looking.”
Unfortunately, despite the distinctive introductory themes, the music cues are overwrought and distracting, with the Bond theme played repeatedly, popping up randomly and unnecessarily and playing through its crescendos and dynamic climax even when there is nothing happening on screen to match, such as CIA agent Felix Leiter reading a newspaper in the airport and Bond going to make a call in a phone booth.
There are also some interesting missing elements that would quickly become part of the standard 007 movie recipe:
- No movie title song sung by a popular artist or anyone
- Armourer Major Boothroyd doesn’t have the nickname of “Q”
- No cool gadgets
- No cool cars; Bond’s car in his first cinematic chase (he’s actually the one being chased, by a huge, black hearse, no less), is a silly little convertible Sunbeam Alpine, although this is the car mentioned in the novel.
There are other notable elements, such as the title villain not being seen until 90-minutes into the movie, which then ends only 20-minutes later.
There is also a visual gag that is allowed to be subtle without hitting the audience over the head with it (as became the case in the Roger Moore era) – during his meeting with Dr. No, Bond pauses to look at a painting. Astute viewers (or those who listen to the audio commentary on the Blu-ray disc), will notice the painting is Spanish artist Francisco Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington, which was famously stolen the year Dr. No was in production and still missing at the time of the film’s release.
2. From Russia With Love (1963)
“From Russia With Love,” based on the fifth Ian Fleming novel that President John F. Kennedy cited as one of his favorite books he was reading at the time, which shot James Bond to new heights of popularity, is considered by many serious 007 fans to be among the best, though it is more slowly-paced than the later films that found broader appeal.
The story involves SPECTRE (using a former Russian SMERSH official) trying to steal a secret military decoder machine called Lektor (it was called Spektor in the novel written before Fleming created the SPECTRE organization in eighth novel Thunderball) by deceiving the Russians and the English and playing them against each other. SPECTRE also wants to retaliate against the British secret service and James Bond for foiling their efforts through Dr. No (in the previous movie, but this book preceded the Doctor No novel).
Bond is set up by SPECTRE to procure the Lektor, after which SPECTRE plans to steal it from him and then kill him. The Bond set-up involves a beautiful Russian clerk in Istanbul called Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi), who seduces him in front of a hidden hotel movie camera.
Bond’s MI6 contact in Turkey is Kerim Bey (Pedro Armendáriz), who takes Bond to a rural gypsy camp where they become an audience to one of the series most memorable fight scenes between two pretty young scantily-clad women dancers (one of whom is Martine Beswick in her first film role, and who would return in another small role in “Thunderball” as a pretty woman in a bathing suit who helps Bond into her boat).
In addition to the first title song sung by Matt Munro (not over opening titles but when Bond is initially sent on his mission and over end credits), this is where the series begins to get bigger and more exotic, with locations in Turkey and Venice. It’s also where Connery begins to throw out more toss-away witticisms.
It still doesn’t feature a cool Bond car yet but it does have a two–minute fight scene (Bond against a henchman played by Robert Shaw) in the close quarters of a sleeper train compartment that was considered one of the best of its era. And the last 15-minutes features a helicopter chase of Bond on foot across hillsides with a climactic explosion, a boat chase that also ends in fire and explosions, and one final fight between Bond and an older short woman with a knife spring-loaded in the toe of her shoe. (Bond is rescued once again – twice – by the Bond girl Tatiana when she first blocks Klebb from shooting Bond and then shoots Klebb herself.)
Among the other notable elements:
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- Pre-title sequence in which it initially appears that James Bond is killed.
- SPECTRE chief Blofeld and his white cat are introduced (without seeing face of Blofeld), even though neither were part of the original novel that preceded Ian Fleming’s Doctor No. (SMERSH, the Russian agency that preceded SPECTRE, is mentioned in passing in this film)
- James Bond (the real one) does not appear on-screen for nearly 18-minutes; in the novel his entrance comes nearly halfway through the story
- Sylvia Trench (Eunice Grayson) returns in playful first scene with Bond
- Q Branch is introduced along with the actor (Desmond Llewelyn) who would later become known as Q – here he is Equipment Officer Boothroyd
- First gadgets introduced – exploding briefcase with a self-assemble rifle, pop-out knife, and more
- a labyrinth of underground tunnels, passageways and rats in Istanbul
- Unlike the novel, Bond manages to avoid Rosa Kleb’s poison-tipped shoe and the movie doesn’t end on a cliffhanger with Bond’s life in question
- “Not Quite the End” after which we see the first end-credits teaser “James Bond Will Return” alert to theater-goers to the next film, “Goldfinger”
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3. Goldfinger (1964)
Sean Connery is at his best in his third outing as James Bond in “Goldfinger” — widely considered the most iconic and memorable James Bond movie — stepping out of a wet-suit and sticking a rose in the lapel of his tux, and sipping nonchalantly on a drink as explosions of his own making erupt behind him. Soon after, he utters one of his familiar Joe Cool comments as he tosses a portable electric heater in the bathtub where he has just shoved an attacker, “Shocking; positively shocking.”
And Shirley Bassey’s dynamic title song would be a signature associated with the franchise for decades to come and launch an ongoing collection of 007 movie song hits that is unparalleled. For the first time in the series, the theme song is played over the opening titles, which also feature highlights of the upcoming movie, something not done again until decades later.
First-time Bond director Guy Hamilton managed to create what would become the enduring image of 007, the suave and unflappable secret agent facing overwhelming odds in exotic locations and with nifty weapons to conquer a bigger-than-life foe, not to mention a beautiful woman who seems to have no interest in men despite the delicious name of Pussy Galore, to which a groggy Bond responds when she introduces herself, “I must be dreaming.” The upscale world is established immediately after the opening titles with a dazzling aerial shot that moves over the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami and glides the viewer close enough to see a man diving into the pool.
It’s in this hotel that a pretty young woman is suffocated naked in bed by being painted in gold from head to toe. This comes after Jill Masterson (Masterton in novel) helps Bond make Goldfinger lose at a card game, then gets seduced when Bond – laying in bed with the naked Jill – puts off dinner in a phone call with Felix Leiter by telling him “Something big’s come up.” Jill becomes another in a string of Bond women who die shortly after sleeping with him (this does not happen so quickly or as fatally in the novel, in which Goldfinger paints a different woman gold every month but doesn’t kill them).
From Miami, Bond flies back to London to meet with M to get further details of his mission to investigate gold smuggler Goldfinger. This is the movie that first refers to the gadget man as Q and establishes the ongoing humorous banter between he and 007. It’s also the film that introduces the iconic Aston Martin DB5 loaded with technological devices and weapons, and that famous ejector seat (none of which were in the novel except a homing device so Bond could track Goldfinger’s car) – the film also deftly has Bond make a casual reference to his previous automobile of choice from the Ian Fleming novels, a Bentley.
With his mission and new car intact, Bond stages a second encounter and unfavorable outcome for Goldfinger on the links at Royal St. George’s golf course in England, where we first meet Oddjob, the Korean with the deadly bowler hat. Bond uses his in-car radar screen to track Goldfinger in his Rolls Royce to Switzerland (in the novel, Goldfinger invited Bond to his home for dinner after golf). Along the way Bond becomes entangled with another Masterson, sister Tilly, driving recklessly in the first Mustang ever seen in a major movie (she drove a Triumph TR3 in Fleming’s novel). Her fate upon meeting Bond isn’t any less lethal than her sibling’s. Bond sneaks up on her as she is lying prone, taking aim at Goldfinger guards with her rifle. When he jumps on her back it pushes the gun barrel into a wire that sets off an alarm, which sends them on the iconic chase where Bond gets to show off the first few of the DB5 gadgets, but which ultimately gets Tilly killed by Oddjob and gets Bond captured. (Bond also blew Tilly’s cover in the book, instead by leaving the radar on in his car, but Fleming didn’t have Tilly die until much later during the attack on Fort Knox and after she is sexually attracted to Pussy).
The enormous scale of Goldfinger’s personality and diabolical plan is made clear with the magnificent extravagant sets of his Kentucky war room and the imaginary glistening metallic interior of Fort Knox designed by Ken Adams.
And yet, Hamilton manages relative restraint (compared to his over-the-top direction of three later Bond installments, “Diamonds Are Forever,” “Live and Let Die” and the dreadful, “The Man with the Golden Gun”).
Henchman Oddjob is far more subdued than the ridiculous Jaws character of “The Spy Who Loved Me” and “Moonraker.” And Auric Goldfinger is not interested in ruling the world so much as he is in becoming the richest man on Earth through a clever scheme to increase the value of his gold reserve by knocking over Fort Knox.
Goldfinger also shows that he is unimpressed by Bond’s clever talk — “Choose your next witticism carefully, Mr. Bond; it may be your last.” — and perfectly capable of throwing those witticisms back in Bond’s face. As 007 lies strapped to a table with a laser beam threatening to burn him in half (it was a buzz saw in the novel), starting at the crotch and moving north, Bond asks Goldfinger, “Do you expect me to talk?” To which Goldfinger responds with the best line of the entire series: “No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.”
It was the first English-language film for the German actor who played Goldfinger, Gert Frobe, and his voice had to be dubbed. Honor Blackman (Pussy Galore) said Frobe had such a thick accent that she didn’t understand a word that he said during her first scene with him. Her only cue to begin her lines was when he stopped talking.
“Goldfinger” does show its age when among the things on Bond’s list of “things that just aren’t done,” is “listening to the Beatles without ear muffs.” (Beatlemania began in the U.K. in 1963, the year before this film was released in 1964, a few months after The Beatles came to America and appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”)
In the penultimate scene inside Fort Knox in which the ticker on the atom bomb clicks down to 007 seconds before being stopped, you may wonder why Bond mentions averting doom had it gone “three more clicks.” The counter clock was originally filmed clicking down to 003 but producer Albert Broccoli later suggested reshooting the clock to indicate 007.
4. Thunderball (1965)
With Connery at his peak, “Thunderball” stands as one of the best and perhaps the quintessential installment in the series. The fourth film in four years featured all the essential elements as the franchise was hitting a peak in popularity, including Connery’s first appearance walking, turning and shooting at the camera in the now-iconic opening gun barrel sequence.
Except for the unfortunately speeded-up climactic fight aboard the yacht that appears quite silly, this is a tremendously enjoyable movie. Connery tosses off more witticisms and cavalier gestures in this movie than any other, such as when he stops to dump flowers from a vase on one of his victims, his comment to a couple at a table where he sets a villainess who has just been shot to death while dancing with him: “She’s just dead,” and his comment after killing a stalker with a spear gun: “I think he got the point.” When he complains about being driven recklessly to his hotel, henchwoman Fiona Volpe suggests his whining may be because “Some men don’t like being driven,” to which Bond rebuts, “Some men don’t like being taken for a ride.” It’s an example of the often more clever retorts in the Connery films.
Luciana Paluzzi’s Volpe is one of the most deliciously strong and evil femme fatales of the entire series, just one of the many memorable female characters in “Thunderball.” She also has one of the most memorable encounters with Bond, which happens when he walks in on her taking a bath in his hotel room and she asks him to hand her something to put on. He smirks while offering her a pair of shoes. Claudine Auger is stunning as primary Bond woman Domino, who is being kept by villain Emilio Largo while he uses her jet pilot brother to pose as someone else to hijack a military aircraft with two nuclear warheads before he is killed. Molly Peters is Bond’s first conquest as a massage therapist, and Martine Breswick, who made an eye-catching appearance in “From Russia with Love” as one of the two gypsy women fighting each other, returns as a Bond ally in a bikini to assist him with a contrived introduction to Domino.
Adolfo Celi is vastly outplayed as the villain Emilio Largo by Klaus Maria Brandauer in the non-official 1983 “Thunderball” remake, “Never Say Never Again,” but unlike many of the Bond movies that followed, the “Thunderball” plot is not only imaginative but believable, with two nuclear bombs being hijacked from a military aircraft flown by an imposter, and hidden beneath the ocean and used for extortion.
Released just a year after “Goldfinger” in 1965, “Thunderball” does not measure up to “Goldfinger” in some categories, including the lack of a memorable henchman like Odd Job, and Tom Jones’ theme song is a bit overwrought. But it has nearly every other ingredient of a great 007 adventure, including CIA agent Felix Leiter, the Aston Martin car, a spectacular yacht called Disco Volante that splits in two in cocoon-like fashion, and other great gadgets from Q branch like the rocket-powered backpack. Bond’s arch-nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld with his precious white cat and SPECTRE organization are even briefly represented. The film also features the exotic location of Nassau, a plot in which Bond must save the world from destruction, and, of course, plenty of action and sexy women.
Terrence Young, who directed the first two Bond movies, “Doctor No” and “From Russia With Love,” was thrilled to come back for the fourth installment to enjoy his first big budget as a result of the success of “Goldfinger.”
Nearly one-fourth of the 2-hour and 10-minute “Thunderball takes place underwater, an expensive process that helped elevate costs to $9 million, compared to the $1 million spent on “Dr. No” just three years earlier. There is very little dialogue during this final half-hour of the movie.
The opening titles were also filmed underwater, with the silhouettes of women swimming nude ranking among the raciest title sequences of the series.
“Thunderball” was to have been the first Bond movie but was delayed due to legal haggles between Fleming and the co-writers of the screenplay for the movie (including producer Kevin McClory, who has a cameo smoking a cigar in the Nassau casino).
• non-Eon production: Casino Royale (1967)
The first feature film iteration of “Casino Royale” is a ridiculously chaotic mess that was released in 1967, two months before Eon’s 007 entry of that year starring Sean Connery, “You Only Live Twice.” The big-budget, overdone spoof that exploited the Bond characters but none of the story from the first novel by Ian Fleming for which it is named, wore out five directors, including John Huston (he also plays “M,” who is killed by an explosion early on, after which comes a funeral for his hairpiece). Each director was assigned to different segments of the film that are barely connected to each other.
The flimsy excuse for a plot has something to do with Bond, who has been elevated to royalty-level status (despite a stammer early in the film), being lured out of luxurious retirement to combat an effort by arch-nemesis Russian spy agency SMERSH to besmirch Bond’s reputation. This involves a half-dozen Bond imposters, Bond’s jittery and neurotic nephew Jimmy Bond, and Bond’s long-orphaned daughter he sired with Nazi spy Mata Hari.
It also features an enormous and unlikely cast including Peter Sellers, David Niven (Bond), Woody Allen (Jimmy Bond and Doctor Noah), Ursula Andress (Vesper Lynd), Orson Welles (as the primary villain of the actual Ian Fleming story, Le Chiffre), and a litany of celebrity cameos ranging from William Holden, Deborah Kerr, Charles Boyer, and George Raft to Peter O’Toole and “Jacky” Bisset as Miss Goodthighs, all for no good reason.
The James Bond film series was ripe for satire as the much later “Austin Powers” would prove, but “Casino Royale” is just unbridled, convoluted, and unfunny.
Although it is one of the worst movies ever made, it has two terrific songs, the enduring romantic ballad, The Look of Love, sung by Dusty Springfield, which was nominated for an Academy Award, and the instrumental theme song played by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass during the opening titles. The latter was Top 30 on the Billboard charts and is equally memorable and perhaps even more timelessly enjoyable. Burt Bacharach is responsible for both songs (Alpert added trumpets, marimba and percussion to the theme song – there was never an actual Tijuana Brass band) as well as the movie’s incidental music, some of which sounds remarkably similar to the score in Bacharach’s “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” two years later.
There are other elements in “Casino Royale” that seem to have been liberally lifted by future films, including Peter Sellers dressing as Toulouse-Lautrec here just as he would do again 11 years later in “Revenge of the Pink Panther.” The Sellers gag most famously remembered from the 1975 “Return of the Pink Panther,” in which Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau is left standing in puzzlement when he tells a cab driver to “follow that car,” which he then does on foot, was first staged in this film. And the madcap all-hell-has-broken loose scene near the end featuring cowboys and Indians suddenly romping through a modern casino is strikingly reminiscent of the culminating scene of mayhem on a studio soundstage in “Blazing Saddles” seven years later.
Conversely, “Casino Royale” borrows from others as well, including the use of a few strands of music from official Bond movie composer John Barry’s “Born Free” and Bacharach’s “What’s New Pussycat” Oscar-nominated song a year earlier in the movie that also starred Sellers. And “Pink Panther” stars Sellers and Niven are reunited here along with other stars from that series, including Burt Kwouk (Cato) and Graham Stark (Hercule).
5. You Only Live Twice (1967)
“You Only Live Twice” was somewhat of a pale follow-up to “Goldfinger” and “Thunderball” in 1967, although it is enjoyable if judged independently.
This is the one that takes secret agent 007 to Asia, starting out in Hong Kong in the pre-title sequence where James Bond is seemingly shot dead in a Murphy bed that flips up into the wall following a staged seduction with a Chinese woman.
After his secret resurrection following a publicized burial at sea where he is wearing a hidden oxygen mask, the adventure takes Bond to Japan. Following a fatal encounter with his fellow MI6 operative, Bond is led to a dramatic introduction with the head of the Japanese Secret Service via a trap door in the floor that turns into a curving metal slide, dropping Bond into a guest chair in the office of “Tiger” Tanaka. Japan also has its own Q, who provides Bond with an exploding cigarette that comes in handy. He is also treated to a bath at the hands of several young women but also must escape several attacks on his life, the first of which ends with a car that is pursuing him being picked up by a giant magnet carried by a helicopter and dropped in the ocean. Next, a woman pilot locks his arms under a shelf and jumps out of her plane, leaving Bond to break his bonds and crash land the plane safely. The pilot suffers the wrath of Blofeld when she becomes a victim of his walking bridge with another trap door that drops her into a pool of man-eating (and clearly woman-eating) piranha fish.
After all this, Bond gets a makeover to go undercover as a Japanese man, trains to be a ninja fighter (one of the first mainstream cinematic depictions of ninjas), and even goes through a pretend wedding ceremony to a Japanese woman who becomes his partner on the mission. That mission also includes a flight and eventual dogfight in a cool auto-gyro (mini single-person helicopter that is akin to modern UltraLight) outfitted by Q with all kinds of weaponry. This leads to the discovery of a hollowed-out volcano being used by Blofeld, whose face we see for the first time in the series (Donald Pleasance), but not until there is just 18-minutes left in the movie.
It turns out that Blofeld is using the fake volcano to send his own space ships into orbit that are capturing U.S. and U.S.S.R. manned space capsules in hopes of sparking a war between the two super powers.
Nancy Sinatra does a nice job with the title song and the movie was a boxoffice success, even as it was the most overblown and irreverent of the Bond films to that point. And Connery’s toupee (he wore a hairpiece in every movie), his increasing weight, and growing disinterest in the franchise were all becoming slightly more obvious (he would resign from the series after this film before returning briefly four years later).
But “You Only Live Twice” is still a lot of fun and filled with most of the essential elements you expect and enjoy in a James Bond movie.
6. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)
Having successfully plucked former bodybuilder Sean Connery out of obscurity at age 32 to become the face of James Bond, the producers took another chance by casting 29 year-old obscure Australian model George Lazenby (30 at time of release), who had never acted before, to replace Connery. “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” released in 1969, became and remains one of the best films of the series, if not as financially successful as its predecessors.
The then (and still) relatively unknown Lazenby introduced himself cleverly in the opening segment; when the series most enchanting lead actress Diana Rigg flees a fight scene without throwing herself in the arms of 007 in thanks for her rescue, Lazenby, the first to step into Connery’s enormous shoes, looks into the camera and says dejectedly, “This never happened to the other fella.”
The movie then further breaks with the formula of the previous four films by having a theme song without any vocals, but the instrumental piece by John Barry is magnificent.
There are some nice and perhaps strategic nods/links to the films that came before — the opening titles feature clips from the first five movies in the series (conspicuously omitting “the other fella”). And when Bond threatens to resign because he is not granted permission to pursue Blofeld, as he is cleaning out his desk he appears nostalgic as he picks up mementos from his previous missions in “Dr. No,” “From Russia with Love” and “Thunderball” as subtle music cues from each play.
And Lazenby’s Bond continued the tradition of throwing his hat onto Moneypenny’s hat rack as he entered the outer office of M. In a nice gesture showing there is more to M’s assistant than superficial flirtations, Moneypenny rescues Bond from himself by circumventing his resignation letter and replacing it with a request for leave, which both Bond and M appreciate. This also leads to the only time we see inside M’s home, where Bond finds M working on his butterfly collection.
The bulk of the film takes place at the impossibly spectacular Piz Gloria round building perched atop a snowy mountain peak in the Swiss Alps with a restaurant that was only completed with the help of producers during film production, and which is only accessible only by aerial cable car. Bond goes undercover as a genealogy expert (Lazenby’s voice is dubbed during a half-hour of scenes with this accented character) to learn what Blofeld (this time played by Telly Savalas, pre-“Kojak”) is up to in the secret and heavily-guarded fortress. Of course, the place is filled with young pretty women undergoing some sort of allergy treatment, which turns out to be hypnosis sparked by colored lights in the ceiling, so Blofeld can control them to carry out his latest diabolical plot. And of course Bond takes full advantage of the opportunity, even blowing his cover by sneaking into the girls’ rooms at night during their treatments.
This film is loaded with action, including Bond chasing Blofeld down a bobsled run, and a ski chase in which Bond is mostly on only one ski – it’s the first Bond film to feature a spectacular ski chase, which was repeated in several other films. There’s also a car chase on a snowy race track, and of course the use of the aerial tram to good effect.
Bond even experiences true love and his only cinematic legitimate wedding that ends with the series’ only downbeat climax until the 21st century.
There is no tricked-out car and no notable gadgets, which leaves Bond to handle each situation by his wits, ingenuity, and his own physicality. He turns his pockets inside out to use as gloves to slide on the aerial , he brushes snow off a car windshield with his own arms, and he uses an eraser and clip to open an electronic door in order to sneak out to get to the girls’ rooms.
Bond finally gets into an Aston Martin, the DBS, in the final scene.
The only minor imperfections are several scenes that unfortunately utilize sped-up film, one of which is the opening pre-title sequence on the beach that also features poor jump cuts in which Bond and men he is fighting keep appearing in different positions relative to the water’s edge and the sky changes from overcast dusk to pre-sunset brighter skies from shot-to-shot.
Otherwise, this is a very convincingly resourceful, charismatic, and romantic James Bond who also handles himself in physical and gunfire battles as well as “the other fella.”
7. Diamonds Are Forever (1971)
Four years after quitting the series, Sean Connery reluctantly agreed to return for one more outing as James Bond in “Diamonds Are Forever,” but only if he was paid the then highest-ever salary of $1 million that he would donate to his Scottish boys charity. Even though he was still only 41 when the film was released, his advancing age, weight, and toupee were obvious but his charisma and command of the screen was still firmly intact.
The pre-title sequence shows Bond putting the squeeze on informants to tell him where he can find Blofeld – just as it looks as if he is about to seduce a woman lounging in a bikini with one of his patented lines, “There’s something I’d like you to get off your chest,” in a blur he unfastens her top, pulls it off, and wraps it around her neck, getting her to divulge Blofeld’s location.
“Diamonds Are Forever” was the beginning of the shift to a more overt style of humor and playing the character as if he is a kind of super-spy celebrity within the story. Everyone seems to know his name and the way he prefers his vodka martini prepared. “You just killed James Bond!” gasps Bond girl Tiffany Case (Jill St. John) after Bond swaps his ID with the man he just killed in an intense and well-staged elevator brawl. “Is that who it was?” Bond responds with feigned shock and amazement. “It just shows that no one’s indestructible.”
The movie’s story and characters adhere in general to the Ian Fleming novel, although an Old West ghost town called Spectreville is omitted even though the SPECTRE organization headed by Blofeld was not an element of the novel but was added to this movie.
In addition to bringing his sexy, smart-aleck Tiffany Case to the screen, the Bond movie producers also expanded on Ian Fleming’s tradition of outrageous names for women, introducing Plenty O’Toole – “Named after your father, perhaps?” – a buxom casino groupie (Natalie Wood’s sister) who winds up getting thrown out of Bond’s upper-floor hotel room window into a pool.
The garish Las Vegas setting is ideal for this apparent send-off for Blofeld, who takes a Howard Hughes-type character (Jimmy Dean) hostage in an elaborate scheme to acquire diamonds to power a satellite laser to control the world. Not only does Vegas provide the perfect casino environment for 007 but the neon-drenched city creates a glitzy backdrop for a car chase involving yet another new model Mustang, a Mach 1, this time with Bond doing the driving, and on two wheels, no less.
Wildly expanding the tradition of memorable henchman first introduced by Fleming are the overtly effeminate, perfume-using, gay partners who call each other Mr. Kidd and Mr. Wint (Mr. Kidd: “I must say Miss Case seems quite attractive… for a lady.”) and delight in inflicting extravagant forms of pain and death. So it’s an audience-pleaser when Bond thwarts their final attack on him by setting one of them on fire and flipping the other over a ship railing with a bomb attached to the tails of his tux. The fun but over-the-top nonsense also finds Bond making an escape in the desert by driving a moon buggy and an ATV three-wheeler. And the action literally explodes in the penultimate finale on an oil derrick where Blofeld tries to make his escape in an underwater pod before Bond uses a crane to take him for a ride.
Shirley Bassey returns to belt out the dynamic title song following a pre-title sequence in which multiple Blofelds (and multiple of his white cats) appear, with one of the Blofelds winding up seemingly sinking for good in a pool of mud.
8. Live and Let Die (1973)
Roger Moore had already established a character with similar personality and physical traits to James Bond in the British TV series “The Saint” when he was picked to take over the role in 1973. At the age of 46, he was already five years older than Sean Connery was at the end of his run as Bond, having played the role in his 30s for his first and most memorable five episodes. And Moore was 17 years older than George Lazenby in his single outing.
After a dynamic opening title montage backed by the first rock title song performance of the series by Paul McCartney and Wings, “Live and Let Die” picks up from the approach of “Diamonds Are Forever,” playing the secret service agent for laughs and winks. In one of the opening moments, Bond uses a watch that acts like a magnet to unzip the dress of his first random woman of the movie. Later he escapes serious injury by running across the backs of several alligators. The villain meets his ultimate demise by being inflated like a helium balloon until he bursts.
Following on the U.S.-based locations of “Diamonds” in Las Vegas, this one stays in the U.S. where Harlem and New Orleans are the settings to capitalize on/exploit the popularity of the black action films of the day, featuring stereotypical dialects/lingo, clothing, pimped-out automobiles, and general behavior.
“Live and Let Die” also introduced lovely actress Jane Seymour to the world, and, on the flip-side, the redneck, tobacco chewing, foul-mouthed, racist, and overweight sheriff from Louisiana called J.W. Pepper, who would become the inspiration for characters in the movie series “Smokey and the Bandit” and the TV series, “The Dukes of Hazzard.”
The standout action sequence is a bayou speedboat chase in which Bond’s boat jumps over a strip of land and Pepper’s police car. And a double-decker bus gets its top level knocked off by a bridge in a decent chase scene.
There is no cool Bond car this time and “Q” is missing from this episode, although Bond refers to him and utilizes multiple gadgets.
9. The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)
“The Man with the Golden Gun” is easily the worst of all the Bond movies for multiple reasons, the first of which is that it brings back the vulgar Sheriff J.W. Pepper as a comedy foil for 007. Bad enough that he’s not funny, but worse are Pepper’s multiple racist and derogatory comments about “pointy-headed brown people” in Bangkok and the film’s laughs at the expense of little person Hervé Villechaize with the belittling name of Nick Nack (later Tattoo in “Fantasy Island”) are also insensitive and not funny. Then there is a random Chinese woman swimming naked in a swimming pool for no apparent reason other than to be nude and say her name is Chew Me. And Britt Ekland, who manages to find a way to be somewhat endearing and the lone bright spot despite her role as James Bond assistant Mary Goodnight, a stereo-type dumb blonde dressed in a bathing suit in unlikely situations, and who is made to suffer the humiliation of being pushed in a closet by the man she adores so Bond can have duty-calls sex with another woman while Goodnight is forced to listen.
And then there is the terrible scene in Beirut where Bond absurdly sucks a smashed golden bullet ornament from the navel of a cabaret dancer and then gets in a fight during which we see the camera crew in the mirror.
Even aside from all that, the movie itself is bad, opening and ending with a rip-off hall-of-mirrors scene from Bruce Lee’s “Enter the Dragon” of a few months earlier. The 007 version looks as cheap as the title golden gun of villain Francisco Scaramanga, which is made of a pen, cigarette lighter and case and appears no more convincing than a plastic toy. (Scaramanga is played by B horror film star Christopher Lee who would also appear in two of the worst Star Wars movies a quarter-century later.) Even the signature stunt in the movie – a car jump doing a 360-degree revolution mid-air – is undercut by the fact that the car is an inexpensive AMC Hornet sedan and that the filmmakers add a silly slide whistle noise as it is mid-jump.
The uninvolving plot capitalizing on the global energy crisis of the era finds Bond going rogue to find assassin Scaramanga and a device that can harness the power of the sun called the Solex Agitator.
Maud Adams, who would return as the title character in the Bond movie “Octopussy,” is only sufficient here as Scaramanga’s mistress.
10. The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
There are three things everyone who saw “The Spy Who Loved Me” think of immediately: first, Bond skiing off a cliff and free-falling until he opens a parachute with the Union Jack flag on it; secondly, the Carly Simon song Nobody Does It Better; and third, the car that goes underwater.
That crowd-pleasing opening – the first of what would become part of the 007 formula of giant jaw-dropping spectacular stunts in the pre-title sequence — doesn’t seem nearly as dynamic or mind-blowing now as it did in 1977 before ski-base jumping became a common thing, and before sponsor logos on parachutes became ubiquitous. But it’s still very fun and the song, the first that didn’t include the name of the movie in the lyrics, remains a classic (even though the film itself makes an effort to undermine it as the movie is ending by reprising Nobody Does It Better with a silly men’s glee club rendition.)
The story of yet another reclusive megalomaniac, Karl Stromberg, who wants to destroy the world, is the first completely original screenplay because Ian Fleming’s ninth full-length James Bond novel of this name is about a Canadian woman with a troubled past who gets into more danger at a motel where she finally meets Bond near the end of the story. In the story of the film, Stromberg plans to create a new underwater civilization of his own design. But first, taking advantage of the uneasy Allied/Communist truce called “detente” at the time, Stromberg decides to let the world’s superpowers help him by destroying each other when they mistakenly believe the other is capturing their ballistic-missile submarines. In fact, Stromberg has a super-freighter that is secretly capturing the submarines by enveloping them in its giant jaw-like bow that opens upon approach, much like Blofeld’s spacecraft swallowed American and Russian manned space capsules in the Bond film ten years earlier, “You Only Live Twice.” This supertanker – the hull and the massive interior — was also a much-discussed visual spectacle at the time, before the sophistication of digital effects.
“The Spy Who Loved Me” also began the globe-trotting to multiple myriad and often exotic locations in each film.
While in Egypt to learn about the submarine tracking system, Bond meets and strikes an uneasy alliance with Russian KGB agent Triple X/Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach, who became the wife of Ringo Starr four years later). The two have the first of several encounters with the most ridiculous Bond henchman of the series, the behemoth metal-toothed Jaws (7’ 2” Richard Kiel), who picks up and tears metal off cars and kills foes with a vampire-like bite on the neck.
In the best chase and stunt of the film, Bond and Triple X escape from a pursuing helicopter by driving their Q-converted Lotus Esprit off a pier into the water, where they navigate like a submarine and fire a missile from underwater to destroy the helicopter before driving out on a beach.
“The Spy Who Loved Me” is the only film to include the wrong title of the movie that would follow when it notes at the end of the credits that James Bond would return in “For Your Eyes Only.” That film would be delayed until 1981 to make room for “Moonraker” in 1979.
11. Moonraker (1979)
Jumping ahead of the planned “For Your Eyes Only” to capitalize on the Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek, and Alien space craze of the late 1970s, “Moonraker” continued the globe-trotting trend, taking Bond to Rio de Janeiro, Venice, the Amazon River, Los Angeles, and most notably even to outer space.
Luckily, Ian Fleming had a book with a space-related title, which Bond writers applied to a fleet of world-controlling vehicles for their villain Hugo Drax, based on the highly-publicized new spaceship being developed by NASA at the time, the space shuttle (the maiden voyage would be two years later in 1981).
Aside from having almost nothing in common with Fleming novel, “Moonraker” has it all, starting with another spectacular stunt in the pre-title sequence, this time Bond leaping from a failing plane and diving to wrestle the parachute off the back of his assailant.
Even two-time Bond movie singer Shirley Bassey (“Goldfinger” and “Diamonds Are Forever”) was recruited to perform the title song for a third time.
There’s another Bond woman with an audacious name, Dr. Holly Goodhead, and terrific action scenes – Bond gets trapped in a G-force centrifuge space flight simulator, gets in a fight on the roof of an aerial cable car high above Rio, and outruns pursuers on the Amazon River in a speedboat that turns into a para-glider as it goes over giant waterfalls.
“Moonraker” is nothing more than a collection of previous Bond movies, redone and cobbled together with a space theme. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t great fun.
In fact, it would still hold up as a pretty solid entry if it had not included a return of the goofy cartoon-like character Jaws who walks away from a free-fall out of an airplane into a circus tent, suffers no injuries after plunging over a waterfall, and finds sappy infatuation with a Heidi-like woman. The film would also have been better off not turning Bond’s gondola – which was already converted to a speedboat in the canals of Venice — into a reverse Chitty Chitty Bang Bang vehicle that he drives like a car across St. Marco Plaza, or inserting silly spoof music of “The Magnificent Seven” when Bond is in Western garb and tones of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” for a door lock.
As it turned out, this was the final appearance by Bernard Lee, who portrayed Bond boss “M” in all 11 movies to that point. He died at age 73 just before his scenes were to be shot for the next film.
12. For Your Eyes Only (1981)
Without question, Roger Moore’s best outing as secret British agent James Bond, 007, was his fifth effort, “For Your Eyes Only.”
The movie also featured a dynamic title song by Sheena Easton that was nominated for an Academy Award and stands among the best of the series alongside such chart-topping tunes as Live and Let Die by Paul McCartney and Wings, The Spy Who Loved Me by Carly Simon (also an Oscar nominee), All Time High (from “Octopussy”) by Rita Coolidge, and Oscar winner Skyfall by Adele. Easton became the only performer to also be shown singing her song during the iconic opening titles sequence.
“For Your Eyes Only” was taken from a combination of two short stories by Fleming – the primary Bond girl’s surname of Havelock and her bow-and-arrow skills and vengeance against the killers of her parents based on the short story of the same name For Your Eyes Only, and the principle plot and characters based on short story Risico. It also integrates a terrific realization of a scene written by Fleming for his Live and Let Die novel that was not used in the earlier film with that name — in the scene, Bond and a woman are strapped together and tied to the back of a boat which drags them back and forth over sharp coral reefs, attracting the inevitable sharks. The film also keeps Bond’s boss M and his secretary, Miss Moneypenny, in their office after unwisely having them and weapons gadget man “Q” set up shop in ridiculous exotic locations in the previous few movies. There’s even a fitting poignant scene at a cemetery with Bond paying respects to his slain wife (from “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”).
The boat “keelhauling” scene is one of the most memorable action scenes of any Bond movie, but is only one of several such spectacular and yet just barely believable sequences in the film. Others include the opening remote-controlled helicopter scene in which Bond dispatches wheel-chair bound arch-enemy Blofeld (the only incarnation of 007’s arch villain in any of the Moore films); an innovative chase down narrow mountain switchbacks in an unlikely ugly and awkward-looking Citroen automobile; a ski/motorcycle chase down a bobsled run; Bond on foot chasing a car up mountain switchbacks and eventually kicking it off a cliff; a deep sea battle in submersible mini-subs; and a well-shot climactic rock-climbing segment that accomplishes a rare moment of real tension for the viewer.
Not only is the plot more reasonable, but Moore finally convinces viewers that he can play the physical side of Bond and restrain himself from his usual over-the-top silliness. The still-unnecessary silliness is left to a giddy young figure skater (22 year-old Lynn-Holly Johnson) who has a crush and sexual appetite for Bond (Moore was 53 at the time).
“Rocky” composer Bill Conti’s film score is decent except for the music behind an early action scene that sounds too much like it is favoring the disco sound of the era.
Noticeably absent from the film is Bernard Lee as Bond’s boss “M,” having died in early 1981 just before his scenes were to be filmed.
13. Octopussy (1983)
Unfortunately, the return to Ian Fleming’s vision of 007 was short-lived. “Octopussy” was a fair effort and certainly second best in the Moore series. But facing competition in the summer of 1983 from an unofficial Bond movie starring Sean Connery, “Never Say Never Again,” “Octopussy” fell back into the trap of inserting goofy bits, such as a snake charmer in India who plays the Bond theme, and a chase involving a motorized rickshaw that does wheelies. Then there is Bond doing the Tarzan call as he swings from a vine, and invoking the command of then-popular English dog trainer Barbara Woodhouse in ordering an attacking tiger to “Sit-ta.”
A notable foot chase atop a moving train lost some of its impact since much of it is lifted from a film released five years earlier called “The Great Train Robbery,” in which Connery, of all actors, performed a very similar scene.
Also recalling an earlier film is the Octopussy International Circus troupe of acrobatic women. The female pilots assisting Goldfinger were called Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus.
A small element of the story involving a Faberge egg was taken from the Ian Fleming short story The Property of a Lady that was included in the collection of short stories under the umbrella title of Octopussy (only the word Octopussy – the name for a pet Octopus of the villain – is borrowed from the short story of that name).
Although no one could incorporate the word Octopussy into credible and rhyming lyrics, the movie had a notable theme song from Rita Coolidge, All Time High.
There are a couple of good action sequences, including one in which Bond clings to the outside of an airplane while it flies upside down, but “Octopussy” will be most remembered for its pre-title sequence in which Bond evades a heat-seeking missile by flying a tiny single-seater jet (a Bede BD-5 Micro) through an airport hangar just before the door is closed.
It is the last James Bond movie that notes the title of the next movie at the end of the credits.
• non-Eon production: Never Say Never Again (1983)
The basic premise of Sean Connery’s 1983 remake of “Thunderball” called “Never Say Never Again” is the same as Eon’s 1965 film that also starred Connery – it was highly unusual, if not unprecedented, for the same actor to star in the original and the remake. And the running time of 2 hours and 14 minutes is virtually identical to its predecessor. “Never” even features human rocket platforms late in the film, a seeming homage to the pre-title sequence of “Thunderball” in which Bond escapes with a jet-powered backpack.
But the two films are very different, with the nod for excitement going to “Never” for its addition of a terrific motorcycle chase, one of the best Bond villains ever in Klaus Maria Brandauer’s reincarnation of SPECTRE’s #1 lieutenant Largo (this time with first name of Maximilian), and the spiffy electronic/laser game played between Bond and Largo at a casino. Like “Thunderball,” there’s even a modernized weapons-loaded motorcycle, but Bond gets to drive it this time, and Q (Algernon) has outfitted it with a jet booster that allows Bond to jump over a water hazard.
Barbara Carrera conjures a deliciously over-the-top femme fatale called Fatima Blush, and Connery delivers one of his most charismatic performances and is clearly having great fun with his double entendres and tongue-in-cheek dialogue. He also dazzles with a ballroom tango (a cinematic first for 007) with Kim Basinger as Domino.
The original spent much more time underwater — more than 26 minutes compared to about 10 minutes in “Never.”
Of course, “Never” has none of the trademark James Bond music (this score by Michel Legrand is downright awful and even distracting – it plays like it is made for an entirely different movie), nor the erotic title sequences or the traditional opening gun barrel shot, since it was not produced by the creators of the official franchise. But it’s light fun and better than many of the official Bond movies.
14. A View to a Kill (1985)
Roger Moore’s last James Bond film was “A View to a Kill,” in which he and Lois Maxwell (Moneypenny) were both 58 years old when the film was released in 1985 (it was also Maxwell’s final film), and Desmond Lewellyn (“Q”) was 71 (he would soldier on for 14 more years). The movie title was teased at the end of “Octopussy” with an extra word at the beginning, “From A View to a Kill,” the full title of one of the Fleming short stories in the collection “For Your Eyes Only.” There was nothing of the Fleming story of Bond investigating and thwarting a motorcycle assassin used for the movie.
Sadly, the swan song for Moore and Maxwell was a return to the over-the-top silliness of their earlier outings and even some blatant rip-offs from previous Bond movies, but there are a few redeeming elements, one being the appearance during the first 45-minutes of Patrick Macnee, formerly the co-star of former Bond actress Diana Rigg in TV’s “The Avengers.” Macnee brings both gravitas and humor to his character, posing as a chauffeur/valet who suffers humorously under the feigned boorish demands of Bond.
Otherwise, the film features a preposterous and corny pre-title sequence that has Bond snowboarding to the Beach Boys’ California Girls, a completely uninvolving plot, an uninspired villain (Christopher Walken), a maddeningly helpless blonde (Tanya Roberts), and an outrageous chase involving a hook-and-ladder fire truck in San Francisco that appears to have been inspired by both The Keystone Cops and “It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.”
The movie also steals from its own franchise when Bond uses only one ski during the pre-title chase as he did in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” and with a near-duplicated scene from “Goldfinger” – Walken’s Zorin shows off a giant model of his plan to potential investors, then kills one skeptic who bails out early – drops him from a blimp instead of sending him to a car compactor.
This is the first James Bond movie that does not name the title of the next film in the series, simply stating at the end of the credits, “James Bond Will Return.”
15. The Living Daylights (1987)
After 12 years of the suave Roger Moore in seven James Bond movies, Timothy Dalton, who was originally considered at age 22 to take Sean Connery’s place as Bond 18 years earlier in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” brought a welcome return to the physicality of agent 007 in 1987 in “The Living Daylights,” another standout in the series.
That physical element was immediately evident in the notable pre-titles opening segment in which he escapes from a burning truck that has plunged off a cliff by parachuting out the back of the truck and landing on a yacht, where he grabs an early bulky cellular phone from a bikini-clad woman and introduces himself with convincing authority as the new Bond, James Bond.
The plot, the initial segment of which is based on the Ian Fleming short story of the same name, is more than just Bond-against-a-psychopath-seeking-world-domination. It is a multi-layered story that actually requires the viewer to pay attention between action sequences, a pleasant change of pace.
Not that the action sequences suffered. A fistfight while clinging to a rope net hanging out the back of a cargo plane is still one of the most jaw-dropping of the series.
And there was every familiar 007 element that fans expected: a return of a new model gadget-filled Aston Martin (missing from the Moore era) customized to allow a jet-propelled jump over a shack, rocket missiles to obliterate a road blockade, and outrigger skis and spiked tires used on a chase over a frozen lake – when one of the tires was shot off, Bond carved a hole in the ice with the rim of the wheel. Other fun Bond-ian moments included a defector being put in a capsule that was sent across the border through the Siberian pipeline; Bond and his lady out-running skiers shooting at them by riding a cello case down the mountain and through a security checkpoint; and driving a car in reverse out the back of a crashing plane.
The 2-hour 11-minute movie bogs down substantially halfway into the film during a half-hour stretch in the dusty deserts of Afghanistan, where it also borrows a little from “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and in scenes involving Joe Don Baker’s eccentric arms dealer character Brad Whitaker who has a passion of playing with toy soldiers. (Baker would return as CIA agent Jack Wade in “Goldeneye” and “Tomorrow Never Dies.”)
Robert Brown is no better here in his third of four outings as Bond’s boss M. And Caroline Bliss, who joins Dalton in also being introduced here in the first of only two outings in the role of Miss Moneypenny (only the second actress to play the role since its inception 25 years earlier), is, unfortunately, also the weakest.
The final Bond movie score by the inimitable John Barry is, sadly, also one of the weakest of his eleven classic compositions, as is the theme song very much of its 1980s era by Norwegian pop group A-Ha, the first non-British or non-American group to record a Bond theme song.
But Dalton’s 007 seemed equally at ease in a tuxedo, a turban or a T-shirt. He was also just as convincing at being charming as he was at throwing a punch. But this was the AIDS era so Dalton’s Bond was seen seducing only one woman in “The Living Daylights,” the lovely cello player portrayed well by Maryam d’Abo.
Most notably, Dalton brought a new depth of visible emotions to Bond, a refreshing development.
16. Licence to Kill (1989)
Timothy Dalton’s second and final performance in the 007 series, “Licence to Kill” in 1989 – the first film with a title that didn’t come from an Ian Fleming novel or short story (although the name of the villain and his boat are taken from the Fleming short story “The Hildebrand Rarity”) and the last Bond entry before Pierce Brosnan took over six years later in 1995 with “GoldenEye” — is a disappointment compared to his debut effort, “The Living Daylights,” one of the best non-Connery installments in the series.
“Licence” also harkens back to the Fleming novels (another scene is incorporated from “Live and Let Die” in which CIA agent Felix Leiter – played for the second time by David Hedison — loses his leg to a shark) but it is the most graphically violent Bond film (a henchman played by Anthony Zerbe whose head gets pressurized until it explodes in a gory mess is far more bloody and disturbing than the similar inflating and explosion of a villain in “Live and Let Die”) and is completely devoid of humor.
The movie offers the potentially compelling premise of Bond resigning from the service in order to avenge the attack on his friend, Leiter, after getting off to a rousing start with a pre-title sequence in which Bond hangs from a helicopter, wraps a chain around the tail of a plane to capture the villain (Robert Davi), and then parachutes to Leiter’s wedding below. The spectacular stunts continue right away with the daring escape of the drug-running villain in a police truck that intentionally drives off the Seven Mile Bridge causeway in the Florida Keys to meet divers waiting in the water. The villain manages to find Leiter, drop him into a shark tank where he loses a leg, and then kill Leiter’s bride.
It’s a kick to watch Q and Moneypenny circumvent the system in order to secretly help Bond – Q (at 75 years old) even flies to meet Bond and become his chauffeur and boat pilot. And Wayne Newton is a mini-hoot as a sort of televangelist.
At least two sequences are worth repeated viewings, one in which Bond spears a seaplane and catches up to it by barefoot water-skiing before it goes airborne with him clinging to the pontoon (the mid-movie Bond theme that had been absent in recent films, is used perfectly here), and a climactic chase offering the best tractor-trailer chase since Steven Spielberg’s TV movie, “Duel.” Sadly, rather than allowing the stunts to simply stretch the bounds of credibility, the filmmakers once again opt to crash headlong into absurdity by having Bond tip the entire tractor-trailer rig on two wheels to dodge a missile, and later have him pop a wheelie in the huge truck tractor.
But the 2-hour, 13-minute film, based initially in the Florida Keys and later Mexico, lacks any exotic locations and drags badly for about 45-minutes of the second half.
Ultimately it ends up playing like nothing more than an episode of “Miami Vice” but without the glamour or style. Further, among the many things that distinguish Bond movies from ordinary action and spy films is that the villains are always bigger than life ego-maniacs and megalomaniacs. The villain in “Licence to Kill” is more akin to an ordinary brutal drug lord we see in many movies and TV shows.
Substituting for all this is an overload of recognizable stars playing too many characters. In addition to the complete MI6 staff — Robert Brown as M and Caroline Bliss as Moneypenny, both also in their final outings, are still the weakest actors of the series in those roles — we also get Felix Leiter and his new bride played by Priscilla Barnes from the silly Three’s Company sitcom, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as a Hong Kong police narcotics agent who briefly teams up with Bond, Frank McRae as Sharkey — the black local character that Bond movies always include when they go to Florida and the Caribbean — as well as the beautiful Talisa Soto as the victimized woman Bond is trying to rescue (and also use to get to the main bad guy).
In addition to Davi, Zerbe and Newton in the camp of the villains, we also get Benecio Del Toro, Everett McGill, Anthony Starke, and Don Stroud, each with notable character roles.
Finally, Carey Lowell’s stilted acting as Bond’s partner in the mission is nearly as groan-inducing as Denise Richards would be later in “The World is Not Enough.” Granted, Lowell doesn’t have much of a chance with the amateur-ish dialogue she is given, or the type of scenes she is given, such as the uninspired bar fight she and Bond get into together during her introduction.
That bar fight and the rest of the movie is not helped at all by the indistinctive Michael Kamen score that sometimes sounds like something we’d hear on Charlie’s Angels.
Gladys Knight delivers a decent title song but a Patti LaBelle song during the closing credits is barely noticeable and certainly not memorable. And
17. GoldenEye (1995)
The fact that secret agent James Bond was back after his longest screen absence ever (six years), and the introduction of Pierce Brosnan from his popular “Remington Steele” TV series, was justification enough to see “GoldenEye” when it was released in theaters in 1995. That was a good thing because the movie itself was not particularly noteworthy after a dynamic opening jaw-dropping bungee jump off one of the world’s tallest dams.
Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that the movie series producers would not hesitate to cross the lines of plausibility when Bond drives a motorcycle off a cliff and free falls to catch up to an airplane that he saves from a crash. Amusing but absurd.
Still, the movie recovers and does give Brosnan – and the viewers – all the essential trappings of 007, beginning immediately after the titles with a chase in the iconic Aston Martin DB5 against a pretty woman in a new red Ferrari down a winding mountain road that leads to the Monte Carlo casino in Monaco where the two play baccarat and he introduces himself as Bond, James Bond, and orders a martini, shaken, not stirred. Check, check, check, check, check, check, and check.
Next, it’s time to introduce Bond’s new boss, a woman for the first time (Judi Dench), who immediately lets him know she’s all business by telling him, “I think you’re a sexist misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War.”
Brosnan’s first scene with “Q” — the indefatigable Desmond Lewellyn is back at age 81 – is also handled well, with Q even seen having a rare chuckle and snapping at Bond when he picks up an ordinary-looking extra-long hoagie to see what kind of weapon it may be. “Don’t touch that!” barks Q. “That’s my lunch!”
Brosnan, age 42, demonstrated the necessary charm and physicality, and quickly mastered the cavalier Bond mannerisms, such as straightening his tie while driving a tank. (Oddly, his posture seems too perfect at times; he stands so erect with his shoulders so far back that he seems almost hyper-extended and as if he might tip over backwards.)
The 130-minute story takes place primarily in very dark and cold locations in Siberia, St. Petersburg and Cuba, not the usual picturesque and exotic locales of most Bond movies. Still seeking to get mileage out of the inherent philosophical conflict between democratic and communist societies even in the post-Cold War period of 1995, the producers concocted a plot in which an offspring of former Russian Cossacks from 50 years earlier is seeking revenge against England for war crimes that even Bond admits do not represent his nation’s finest hour.
That revenge is to come in the form of a satellite weapon that will knock out the memory of England’s computers at its financial institutions after the perpetrator transfers billions of dollars to his account, leaving the country in financial ruin.
Longtime Bond fans may feel like several aspects of the plot and villain weapons are retreads of previous films, including the satellites and spacecraft from “You Only Live Twice,” “Diamonds are Forever” and “Moonraker,” and the giant satellite dish under a mountain lake that recalls the rocket launch pad of the fake volcano in “You Only Live Twice.”
The integration of some tough self-examination of Bond’s cold-blooded nature is a welcome nod to the stuff of creator Ian Fleming’s novels. But in an apparent attempt to keep up with movies like “Die Hard” and “True Lies” (the latter a rip-off itself of the Bond movies with Roger Moore), “GoldenEye” incorporates far too many explosions and not enough thrilling chases. The closest thing we get is Bond driving a tank through the streets of St. Petersburg as if it’s a sports car. The front of the tank lifts when he hits the gas, stops on a dime when he hits the brakes, and skids around corners. It’s amusing – sometimes even silly – but not spectacular. Gratefully the producers continue the tradition of playing the familiar rousing James Bond theme music during these action scenes.
A major disappointment is that even though Q provides Bond with a terrific-looking new gadget-filled car, a BMW Roadster, the vehicle is only used once very briefly and that’s for nothing but transportation.
Bond also shows an uncharacteristic penchant for gunning down dozens of perceived enemies every few minutes with a machine gun, an element that is not only very noisy and uninteresting to watch, but not in keeping with 007’s usual cleverness in foiling his foes. In addition, this movie starts a disappointing new trend of Bond getting involved in chases that result in buildings and shops getting mowed down and innocent bystanders in offices and on the street put in jeopardy.
Tina Turner delivers a powerful performance of the title song, written by Bono and Edge of U2, but the low-key opening notes slightly dulls the segue from the opening dam/aircraft scene to the trademark sexy titles. And the Eric Serra song over the closing credits is slow, soft, and quite anti-climactic.
Finally, the villains are very two-dimensional, with the stereotypical computer nerd (a very young Alan Cumming); the psychotic megalomaniac (Sean Bean; a renegade former 00-agent); and his female henchwoman with a unique skill-set of dispatching her prey by squeezing them to death with her thighs. In fact, Famke Janssen’s over-the-top performance of villainess Xenia Onatopp is very nearly a copy of the mannerisms and characteristics Barbara Carrera brought to her portrayal of Fatima Blush in the unofficial 007 “Thunderball” remake “Never Say Never Again” nearly a decade earlier.
Izabella Scorupco delivers some nice moments with Bond as Russian computer programmer Natalya Simonova, who gets betrayed by her superiors and becomes and ally of Bond’s.
The most enjoyable character in the movie is a stereo-typically crass and unsubtle American CIA agent Jack Wade, played by Joe Don Baker. The character and casting is interesting since the series has heretofore featured Fleming’s CIA character named Felix Leiter in many episodes (he lost a leg in “Licence to Kill.”) Also, like Maud Adams, who played two different characters in “The Man with the Golden Gun” and “Octopussy,” and Charles Gray, who came back as arch villain Blofeld in “Diamonds Are Forever” after having played Bond’s ally in “You Only Live Twice,” Baker returns in “GoldenEye” as an ally of 007 after having been killed off as his villain in “The Living Daylights.”
18. Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
“Tomorrow Never Dies,” the first James Bond movie in 26 years to clock in at less than two hours (barely), is a marked improvement over Pierce Brosnan’s debut effort in the visually dark and bullet-filled “Goldeneye.”
The tone and colors are much lighter and brighter, with Bond chasing a Rupert Murdoch-like media mogul (Jonathan Pryce) who is trying to go one step further than publisher William Randolph Hearst in creating a military conflict for the benefit of his global news empire. By secretly pitting China against Great Britain on the high seas with the help of a stealth ship, he plans to step in as the peacemaker in exchange for exclusive TV rights in China.
The pre-title scene in which Bond hijacks a jet armed with nuclear missiles is solid and enjoyable if not as jaw-dropping as others, although it’s amusing when he ejects his enemy co-pilot into the same seat of the jet flying directly above him.
Sheryl Crow delivers a title song of a similar tone and style as Goldeneye, and k.d. Lang’s Surrender (Tomorrow Never Dies) over the closing credits is equally strong.
Unlike “GoldenEye,” the gadget-filled BMW is put to extensive use here, with a spectacular chase through a parking garage as Bond lies in the back seat controlling the car by remote control.
It’s a kick to also see Bond make a HALO jump/dive from a plane at high altitude, free-falling with an oxygen mask into the ocean where he immediately begins SCUBA diving.
It doesn’t say very much for the wooden and emotionless Brosnan that Asian stuntwoman/martial arts actress Michelle Yeoh all but steals the second hour of the movie from Brosnan as Bond’s Chinese ally. She is one of the most self-sufficient women in any Bond movie, walking away from him saying, “I work alone,” after a very cleverly exciting and impressive large-scale motorcycle/helicopter chase through the shacks of Saigon during which she shares driving duties while handcuffed and riding backwards facing Bond on the motorcycle.
She and Bond also make a spectacular jump off a tall building, sliding down a ripping banner for many stories while still handcuffed.
Puzzlingly, Yeoh even gets her own two-minute action sequence during which she dispatches many men with her martial arts expertise while Bond is all-but-absent from the screen. She also reveals her own Q-like gadget and tech center in the midst of the shanty town, which is played for some humor when Bond rejoins her.
Several very brief slow-motion shots of Yeoh’s expressions near the end of the movie are also puzzling since they stand out without any apparent justification for the slow-mo.
Teri Hatcher is effective as a former Bond lover who is now the conflicted wife of the media mogul. It’s a delight to see Joe Don Baker return in a couple short appearances as the humorous CIA agent Wade who likes to call Bond “Jimbo” and “Jimmy,” and Vincent Schiavelli (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”) is terrific with a very brief scene as a funny/evil henchman called Dr. Kaufman who is sent to kill Bond in his hotel room.
Brosnan still seems somewhat emotionally detached. While one always had the impression in earlier Bond movies and in the Bond novels that the secret agent thoroughly loved the danger and exotic lifestyle, Brosnan’s 007 doesn’t look as if he enjoys much of anything. He also needs to work on that erect and open-handed running style, which looks distractingly un-athletic.
Nonetheless, due especially to the supporting cast and the two lengthy riveting chase scenes, “Tomorrow Never Dies” is the best Brosnan Bond episode and one of the stronger films in the series.
19. The World is Not Enough (1999)
The third 007 movie starring Pierce Brosnan is the weakest of his four outings. “The World is Not Enough” has all the required elements of a 007 movie: a rousing pre-title speedboat chase sequence; sexy female villains and allies (one is the outrageously unlikely American nuclear physicist with the Bondian name of Christmas Jones played by Denise Richards); hot cars and slick gadgets; globe-trotting sequences; and a ski chase involving flying snowmobiles.
It also has another good scene with gadget armourer “Q,” this time literally an exit scene for the 85 year-old Desmond Llewelyn (and a poignant final line: “Always have an escape plan.”), and the fun introduction of 60 year-old Monty Python veteran John Cleese in the first of two outings as “Q’s” comical “young assistant” — dubbed “R” facetiously by a cynical Bond. (Cleese was initially contracted to play the role in at least four films.)
But while Brosnan once again shows his cool by calmly straightening the knot of his tie in the most unlikely situation — this time as he holds his breath when his rocket-powered mini-boat plows underwater to get past a bigger boat — his expression remains too stoic, and he still delivers too many puns and double entendres.
And this installment puts Bond’s boss M (Judi Dench) on a dangerous path of becoming more of a peer of 007 than a boss, relying on him to prevent her from making uncharacteristically emotion-driven decisions. An opportunity to explore M’s reaction to seeing the brutality of Bond’s work in person when she ventures unwisely from the cocoon of her office out into the field is disappointingly unexploited.
In the exciting chase on the Thames River, Bond drives a Q-modified mini speedboat loaded with more fun gadgets and capabilities and turning over in mid-jump as Bond did in a car in “The Man With The Golden Gun,” which leads to a “Moonraker”-like drive down London streets in the boat, and then a climax involving a hot air balloon atop the visually dynamic Millennium Dome.
Other notable action scenes involve Bond being attacked during yet another Bond movie ski scene by a hit squad in armed snowmobiles with parachutes powered by fans, and an attack by a tree-trimming helicopter swinging a long vertical column of spinning circular saw blades that cuts Bond’s BWM in half. And Bond goes back inside an energy pipeline to ride a maintenance machine as he did in “Diamonds are Forever,” this time with more on the line than finding a way out.
The biggest problem with this movie is that the plot and the characters are far too muddled and convoluted for any movie, let alone a 007 adventure.
There’s an explosion in MI6 headquarters that kills a billionaire friend of M’s, after which Bond is assigned to protect the billionaire’s adult daughter Elektra (Sophie Marceau is literally painfully seductive), who had previously been held for ransom by the MI6 bomber Renard (Robert Carlyle). Bond learns about and tries to unravel a scheme to increase petroleum prices by triggering a nuclear meltdown in the waters of Istanbul, where Elektra happens to be overseeing construction of an oil pipeline.
Amidst all this, Bond’s boss “M” is abducted by Elektra.
There are long stretches of boring sequences in which the only thing the audience can do is get frustrated trying to figure out what is going on and who the characters are (or not, and just wait for the next action scene).
And there are other problems; even though great effort is made to explain that the villain Renard has a bullet lodged in his head that causes him to feel no pain but which will surely kill him, his lack of pain is not much of a factor in anything, and he never dies. So what was the point?
And the pre-title sequence begins with a fight inside an office in Bilbao, Spain from which Bond makes a dramatic escape jumping out the window of a building hanging on to a window shade cord. Then, an entirely new sequence is introduced in London that leads to the speedboat chase, after which the title sequence is finally introduced. So why not just introduce the titles after the first sequence?
“The World is Not Enough” also continues the unnecessary and seemingly out-of-character new trend of showing Bond’s chases causing destruction to ordinary businesses and putting the lives of innocent bystanders at risk, here especially when both boats demolish restaurants and a fish market and send patrons of each leaping out of the way.
Robbie Coltrane is once again moderately entertaining as a former Russian mafia boss introduced in “Goldeneye” who runs a casino and appears to be in league with Elektra.
The title song by Garbage doesn’t seem as dynamic as others during the opening title sequence but stands alone fairly well over time.
Disappointingly, the finale has little dramatic or humorous effect with only an obvious Roger Moore-like sexually suggestive final line relating to the name of Christmas Jones and Bond and Christmas being spotted by their surprised and embarrassed bosses once again in infrared sensors.
But none of the problems is so big that it prevents the movie from being enjoyable overall; they simply diminish the pleasure a bit along the way.
20. Die Another Day (2002)
The 20th official installment in the 007 series, “Die Another Day,” once again features a very strong female partner for James Bond as did “Tomorrow Never Dies,” this time played by Halle Berry as a CIA operative called Jinx. Combined with numerous rousing action sequences (albeit a couple that are over-the-top absurd), the result is arguably the best of the four Bond movies starring Pierce Brosnan, or at least the one you may enjoy re-watching multiple times on TV more than the others.
That’s because there are several terrific chases and action sequences, starting out dynamically with the obligatory pre-title scene involving weaponized hovercraft on land. There is also a well-staged clever car chase on ice with Bond being pursued in the latest model of the Aston Martin by an equally weaponized Jaguar XKR convertible. Bond even gets into a lengthy sword-fight duel and he and Jinx jump out of an airplane in personal “switchblade” wings.
Just as Michelle Yeoh did in “Tomorrow Never Dies,” Jinx later engages in her own fight scene, a saber-rattling/fist-fight with a turncoat MI6 agent called Miranda Frost (Rosamund Pike) who tells Jinx to read The Art of War that ends with a crowd-pleasing shot of Jinx stabbing Frost with the book attached to the knife and saying, “Read this, bitch!”
This is but one of the many unusually well-written lines of humor in this installment that actually make you laugh instead of roll your eyes. The banter between Bond and Q is particularly humorous. When Q scolds Bond for killing his boss M in a virtual reality simulation, Bond suggests that if Q checks a replay he will see that “it was only a flesh wound” (a playful insider reference to new Q John Cleese’s iconic line in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” 27 years earlier). To which Q responds by calling Bond “double-oh-zero.”
It’s a kick to see some of the more famous 007 gadgets from previous films show up in this 20th official film on the 40th anniversary of the franchise as Bond and Q walk through the lab – the shoe with a blade in the toe used in “From Russia With Love,” the single-seater Bede BD-5 Micro jet and fake alligator from “Octopussy” – and especially when Bond playfully triggers the rocket-powered backpack from “Thunderball.” After Q shows Bond the newest Aston Martin Vanquish model that he has dubbed the Vanish since it can become invisible, Q jabs Bond with, “I wish I could make you vanish.”
Make no mistake, there are perhaps more sexually-suggestive groaner comments than ever before in this installment, the best of which is Jinx responding to a question about understanding Bond’s big bang theory with “Oh, I think I got the thrust of it.”
The two villains are sufficiently evil while being compelling at the same time.
The premise of the story involves an effort by the son of a North Korean General to build a satellite weapon called Icarus that will allow North Korea to take over control of South Korea and, later, the world. The son, Colonel Moon (Will Yun Lee), is seemingly killed by Bond in the opening hovercraft battle, and his assistant, Zao (Rick Yune), is captured after getting diamonds embedded in his face by an explosion triggered by Bond. But Bond is also captured, imprisoned, and beaten for 14-months by the North Koreans. When information about a CIA agent is leaked to North Koreans, allowing them to kill the agent, the CIA believe Bond has begun to submit to torture and reveal information. He is traded to North Korea in exchange for Zao, an exchange which M uncharacteristically tells Bond was not worth it except for the risk of Bond spilling more secrets. “You’re no use to anyone now,” she says coldly while rescinding his 00-status.
That sends Bond out on his own once again to learn the identity of the insider who betrayed everyone (spoiler: it’s Frost, played solidly by Pike).
In short order Bond finds himself in Havana driving a 1957 Ford Fairlane 500 convertible, similar to the 1957 Chevy Bel Air convertible in which he was a Caribbean island passenger in “Dr. No.” (Berry drives a new version of the classic 1957 Ford Thunderbird.) While there, Berry is introduced in dramatic sexy fashion emerging from the ocean in a bikini as homage to Ursula Andress, also in “Dr. No.”
In the process, Bond and Jinx learn that Moon didn’t die but has returned with a new face and identity posing as a billionaire philanthropist called Gustav Graves (similar to Bond novelist Ian Fleming’s Hugo Drax character in the book version of Moonraker) who arrives at a press conference via parachute with a Union Jack flag reminiscent of “The Spy Who Loved Me.” Minutes later Bond meets a fencing instructor played well by Madonna, the first and only singer of the movie’s theme song to also appear briefly in the movie. The techno/electronica song itself is a major departure in style for Bond themes, and coupled with the scenes of brutal torture of Bond during the opening titles, is at first dour and off-putting, but grows on you with repeated viewings.
Following an extensive, well-choreographed, exciting fencing duel between Bond and Graves, Bond and Jinx find themselves in Iceland at the ice palace headquarters of Graves.
It’s here that we get a couple especially ridiculous sequences (note, I’m OK with the invisible car just as I was with the underwater car in “The Spy Who Loved Me), the first of which is Bond racing a rocket ice-car over a cliff and hanging by a grappling hook until he rips off a piece of metal as the ice cliff collapses into the ocean, causing a monstrous wave that Bond kite surfs on the piece of metal with the rocket car’s parachute. (Cue mass audience simultaneous groan and eye-roll.) The climactic action scene finds Bond and Jinx riding a helicopter out the back of a burning and crashing airplane and getting it started as they drop, flying to safety just a few feet before hitting the ground where two cars that also fell out of the burning plane have landed face down in the ground like blocks of Stonehenge. (More groans but with a few laughs mixed in.)
“Die Another Day” is gratuitous silliness intermingled with a lot of fun and exhilarating action, a fitting send-off to the Brosnan era. This would also be the final film for Q actor Cleese and Moneypenny actress Samantha Bond.
21. Casino Royale (2006)
Going back to Ian Fleming’s first novel about British secret agent James Bond for the first official cinematic adaptation (aside from the unofficial 1967 spoof) was a good idea for a reboot of the franchise after only one 007 movie had been released during the previous seven years.
“Casino Royale” is indeed a terrific movie filled with riveting action scenes and a compelling plot served by charming characters and a convincing romance. The opening titles are visually dynamic, backed by the instantly engaging Chris Cornell song You Know My Name. And within five minutes we’re treated to one of the most exciting 10-minute chase scenes in any Bond movie – a jaw-dropping freerunning pursuit across a Madagascar construction site. Not long after is a “Die Hard 2”-like five-minute nail-biting pursuit of a gas tanker truck headed for a giant new jumbo jet on the tarmac of a Miami airport (a moment of absurdity when the driver makes a 180-degree emergency brake turn in the cumbersome vehicle). Later there is a spectacular climactic fight inside a building sinking into the canals of Venice.
The only problem is that, while it adheres to the book more closely than any in the series since the 1960s and early 1970s, “Casino Royale” bears little resemblance to any other James Bond movie. In an apparent effort to make the franchise more competitive with other globe-trotting action-spy movies of the day such as the Jason Bourne and Mission: Impossible series, director Martin Campbell stripped this installment of nearly every James Bond cinematic checklist element that made them distinctively 007 films:
- instead of being tall and slender with dark hair as described by Ian Fleming and portrayed by five previous actors, new performer Daniel Craig is shorter and muscle-bound stockier with dirty blonde/light brown hair.
- a villain (not Bond) owns and drives the iconic Aston Martin DB5 (until Bond wins it in a game and drives it around the resort circle driveway)
- no traditional through-the-gun barrel turn-and-shoot opening with James Bond guitar theme by Monty Norman (the sequence has a cameo in an interesting abbreviated black-and-white version without the music at the end of the opening scene)
- no James Bond music in the movie until the last few seconds
- no iconic self-introduction of “My name is Bond, James Bond” until the final line of film
- no Q and no gadgets or cool 007 weapons (except for a defibrillator and a gun in an electronic drawer in the car glove box)
- no Moneypenny (only a reference when Vesper Lynd introduces herself as “I’m the money,” to which Bond responds, “Every penny of it.”)
- almost no witty quips
- no big stunt in the pre-title sequence
- no sexy silhouette women in opening titles
- no car chase with Bond driving one of vehicles
- Bond not a 00-agent yet in first scene
- Bond is so un-intimidated by M that he breaks into her home
- Bond needs a woman to tell him the best tuxedo jacket to wear
- Bond dismisses the option of a Vodka martini shaken or stirred with, “Do I look like I give a damn?”
- almost no humor except for romantic banter
- Bond loses a high-stakes bet as a casino card game (which is a simple game of hold-em poker rather than the more European baccarat/chemin de fer)
- Bond gets bloodied and face cut multiple times
- Bond falls deeply in love, so deeply that he turns in his resignation (these are both similar elements of the book but his thoughts of resignation – he never actually submits it – begin before he meets Vesper, and while Bond in the novel does consider asking her to marry him, it does not appear to be a deeply felt love, coming just a couple weeks into rehab following his brutal torture, and days together at a beach-side residence during which there is constant awkward tension as she often acts cold and secretive with him).
- Bond allows his anger to cause him to make several mistakes in judgment, one of which leads to being led by decoy into a trap
- Bond doesn’t know his good CIA friend Felix Leiter
All of this would have been acceptable in the context of an origin story if all of the above would have been restored with the very first scene of the next film, but sadly it was not. “Casino Royale” perfectly sets up such a scenario in the final moments when the music begins to swell and Bond pronounces he is “Bond, James Bond.” It’s a rousing climax where we feel, OK, now this man we have been watching move around the edges of the 007 world has become the James Bond we know and enjoy.
There are other problems with this reboot, which seems to want to have it both ways. For instance, the pre-title sequence shows Bond prior to earning his 00-status — it’s even in black-and-white in Prague, Czech Republic. But in scenes with his MI6 boss M, it looks and sounds like they are longtime colleagues. And later on in the film while still on an extension of his first assignment, Bond makes references about being burned out as he prepares to submit his resignation, saying, “You do what I do for too long and there won’t be any soul to salvage. I’m leaving with what little I have left.”
So, which is it? Is Bond just starting out or finally burning out?
Those issues aside, the 2-hour, 20-minute film sets the new stage right away, showing us in the opening scene that this will be a more gritty and self-reliant Bond than we are accustomed to seeing as he is shown earning his 00-stripes with a cold-blooded killing and brutal fistfight that integrates cleverly into what may be the most convincing iconic turn-and-shoot in the circle of the eye of a gun barrel by a Bond actor, albeit a truncated version.
When the result of the free-running chase through a construction site in Madagascar goes bad and Bond rather shockingly breaks into M’s home and talks very out-of-character impertinently with her, she scolds the newly-minted 007: “I knew it was too early to promote you.” This is also the beginning of much more personal relationship between Bond and M that quickly becomes a bad idea carried on much too long through the next two films.
Back in her home in this film, M pulls Bond off any further missions, which, of course, leads Bond to go rogue yet again to get the job done on his own. And he winds up in Nassau, Bahamas, where he exhibits the slick and smirking cool of the more familiar James Bond, pretending to be a resort car park valet and driving a patron’s vehicle full speed into another parked car just to create a distraction, walking cavalierly into the resort where several pretty women ogle him as he walks by. But then another break from tradition, when someone else drives up in the iconic 1964 Aston Martin DB5.
Bond is also soon seen emerging from the ocean in bathing trunks showing off his impressive body as Ursula Andress and Halle Berry did in previous Bond films but, again, like no other Bond actor before him.
He soon wins the Aston Martin in a card game, which he uses to pick up a date, both the car and woman formerly the property of the henchman of the man he is after, a gambling addict called Le Chiffre, who has some very dangerous clients to whom he owes a ton of money, including the no-nonsense gang from the initial Madagascar scene.
Since Le Chiffre is of interest to MI6 and they know he is heading towards a high-stakes casino game and that Bond is a good card player, Bond is brought officially back on the case nearly an hour into the movie but under the eye of a woman who works with the British Treasury called Vesper Lynd, assigned to make sure Bond doesn’t squander the government funds (this is all exactly as written in the book, as is most of the rest of the story).
Of course, Vesper (a captivating performance by Eva Green) is immediately attracted to Bond during a charmingly amusing introduction scene filled with flirtatious banter on the train ride to the Casino Royale card game in Montenegro. Likewise, unlike any time since his encounter and marriage to Tracy Draco in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” in 1969, Bond also falls hard for Vesper. “Whatever is left of me, whatever I am, I’m yours,” he eventually tells her, adding that he loves her “enough to quit and float around the world with you until one of us has to find an honest job.”
But first there is a half-hour depiction of the card game that generates credible tension as it is more a test of wills and diagnosing “tells” than actual card-playing skills. In another rare Bond-type moment, he guesses wrong and loses a critical hand to Le Chiffre. During breaks in the game both men sustain intensely-staged attempts on their lives, which leaves Vesper emotionally-drained and vulnerable in a particularly sensitive scene during which Bond comforts her on the floor of a shower with both of them fully dressed.
Following the game, Vesper appears to be kidnapped, suckering Bond into briefly chasing her (in a new Aston Martin DBS V-12) right into a trap that leads to him being tortured viciously by Le Chiffre. The torture that fills a grueling 20-pages, more than 10% of Fleming’s book – during which Bond is seated naked in a bottomless chair so his testicles can be flogged from beneath with a knotted thick rope – fortunately isn’t depicted as graphically as it could have been in the film and lasts only five-minutes.
From here Bond and the viewer are led to believe that, first, a seeming ally – MI6 operative Rene Mathis (played intriguingly by acclaimed veteran actor Giancarlo Giannini) – betrayed them, and then that it may be Vesper instead. This all leads to the shootout in Venice where Bond tries desperately – and heart-wrenchingly — to rescue Vesper from drowning in an elevator that is painful to watch.
Even when M explains to Bond that Vesper was being blackmailed by a man called Mr. White, who was holding her boyfriend hostage, and asks if he needs more time before his next assignment, Bond withdraws back into his cold, emotionless shell, asks why he would need more time, noting the job is done and then uttering the line that ends the Fleming novel, “The bitch is dead.”
But that’s not the final line here, as Bond goes to the home of Mr. White, shoots him with the intent of inflicting only a temporary wound, and then announces he is “Bond, James Bond.”
Director Campbell cast Jeffrey Wright as the first black actor to play the role of Felix Leiter (not counting Bernie Casey in the unofficial “Never Say Never Again”), which Wright plays very well here and in the follow-up “Quantum of Solace.”
Campbell also stages a fun cameo here by British billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson getting patted down at an airport metal detector.
Taken on its own, “Casino Royale” is by far the most layered of all Bond films and it delivers significantly more visual reality and emotional depth than any previous installment, but it is almost completely devoid of any of the trappings of a 007 film that have made the franchise the longest-running series in cinema history.
22. Quantum of Solace (2008)
The first James Bond sequel — second-part of a two-part storyline that picks up right where previous episode “Casino Royale” left off — is also the weakest of the Daniel Craig movies and one of the most dreary and visually unappealing.
Once again there are few traditional James Bond elements – no 007 theme music, no Moneypenny or Q, no gadgets, no self-introduction of “Bond, James Bond.” The opening through-the-gun barrel sequence does not appear until the end of the movie but at least it’s back in full form with Craig in the circle for the first time officially. Bond still seems to have a questionable knowledge of his famous vodka martini – a bartender explains the ingredients to him. And other than a riveting chase in an Aston Martin that opens the movie in the pre-title segment, Bond never drives that car or any cool vehicle thereafter – he’s only seen briefly driving a Ford Edge mid-size crossover SUV hatchback and pulling up to a stop in a Range Rover, and is picked up for rides in a tiny Ford Ka and a beat-up Volkwagen, not exactly typically cool 007 cars.
But the title sequence featuring silhouettes of sexy women is back, along with images of Craig as Bond, all of which is set to an unconventional style of song Another Way to Die, performed by Jack White and Alicia Keys, that takes a few viewings to warm up to.
“Quantum of Solace” writers Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Oscar-winner Paul Haggis deliver a fairly dark and convoluted story about a secret plot to control the water supply of South America while making it appear as if the goal is oil, a fiction more like something written by Robert Ludlum (Jason Bourne novels), Tom Clancy, or a John le Carré story, with Bond killing several people cold-bloodedly (stabs one in the neck and waits until he bleeds out), including a fellow MI6 agent. There are also many important plot references to situations and characters from “Casino Royale” that may elude viewers of “Quantum,” even those who saw “Casino” two years earlier. The rationale is that, in picking up from the last story (something Bond creator Ian Fleming never did in his novels), Bond is still pissed about getting duped by the woman he was ready to marry, Vesper Lynd, and is now hell-bent on seeking revenge against Vesper’s real boyfriend and the men who manipulated her into tricking Bond.
Once again an MI6 agent betrays M and once again Bond runs afoul of his superiors, is relieved of duty, and has to go rogue to address his quest for vengeance that also proves to be valuable for MI6.
Picking right up from “Casino Royale” when Bond shot Mr. White in the leg, the opening pre-title sequence follows Bond with Mr. White in the trunk of his Aston Martin DBS V-12 racing in and out of traffic on the narrow and winding mountain roads near Sienna, Italy trying to elude pursuers. At one point Bond avoids construction vehicles by going off the paved road onto gravel/dirt and skids into a U-turn that seems like a rather fun nod to a similar scene in the first Bond movie, “Dr. No.”
But this and later action scenes feel like director Marc Forster (“Monster’s Ball,” “Finding Neverland”) is simply trying to prove that he can film them innovatively without justification for doing so, which results in sequences riddled with an editing style that make them feel completely implausible. In this case, it appears that the editing is simply covering for skids, turns, and situations that would be impossible. Likewise, a rooftop foot chase that ends up in a fight on a swinging rope on construction scaffolding, a very digitized-looking dogfight in which Bond flies an old cargo plane, and a boat chase in Port Au Prince during which Bond rescues a woman, Camille, who didn’t want to be rescued. (Olga Kurylenko’s performance as Camille is one of the strongest aspects of the movie.)
A scene late in the film shows Bond and Camille free-falling out of their crashing plane and not opening their parachutes until a few feet above the ground without experiencing a landing that’s even a little bit hard on their feet and knees.
The climactic exploding villain headquarters in a desert of La Paz, Bolivia, is also staged a little preposterously but is not as bad as the others and is visually dynamic.
The best action sequence is a shootout/fight backstage during a Tosca opera murder scene onstage at an elegant theater in Bregenz, Austria. It also ends with Bond’s cold-blooded killing of man he later learns was a fellow MI6 agent.
It’s perhaps appropriate that the title is taken from an Ian Fleming short story about James Bond since this is the shortest James Bond film ever at 1-hour, 46-minutes. Unlike “Casino Royale,” which follows Fleming’s first James Bond novel very closely, this film is not a continuation of that story as written by Fleming, nor does it depict any elements of the Quantum of Solace short story. None of that would be a problem – certainly many other James Bond movies have been created out of whole cloth — but this script is nowhere near compelling enough to justify setting a precedent of producing a continuing storyline (In “From Russia with Love” Blofeld did reference Bond foiling the efforts of Dr. No in the preceding movie, but none of the villain characters or storyline carried over.)
The villain running the oil/water scam, Dominic Greene, is jointly targeted by Bond and Olga, both of whom want to go through him to get to the real person of their desired revenge, a man who killed her mother in the case of Olga, and Mr. White for Bond.
Continuing the unusual emotional depth shown by Bond in “Casino Royale,” we see some brief flashes of real anguish by Bond here, such as when he is holding his colleague Rene Mathis (Giancarlo Giannini also from “Casino Royale”) as bad cops shoot Mathis in the back. He seems to show slight remorse when he sees a woman he seduced — who was sent by M to keep an eye on Bond — killed and left naked and covered in oil on a bed a la the young woman left in a similar position and condition covered in gold paint in “Goldfinger.” In fact, Greene forced the young woman called Fields to ingest the oil, causing her death. (Keen observers will see in the credits that the first name of the young lady who refuses to give it to Bond is Strawberry, an interesting choice to omit that very Bond-type character name movie element.)
When Bond eventually captures Greene he leaves him stranded in the middle of the desert with only a bottle of oil to drink.
Finally, in Russia, Bond also finds and kills Vesper’s former lover and then, upon meeting back up with M, drops Vesper’s necklace in the snow.
Even though this is supposedly Bond on the extended tail end of his very first mission as a 00-agent as laid out in “Casino Royale,” M seems less in command than ever in this film, more uncertain and more on an equal plane with Bond rather than his boss.
“I need you back,” M says to Bond in that moment standing in the snow. “I never left,” he says.
23. Skyfall (2012)
Director Sam Mendes brings a distinctively dynamic visual style to “Skyfall,” the first James Bond film to also be presented in giant-screen IMAX theaters. (I saw the movie on the full giant-size commercial IMAX movie theater in a multiplex in Seoul, South Korea with a nearly sold-out audience of young adults at 10:30 p.m. Wednesday night, Oct. 31.)
A high-contrast hand-to-hand fight scene at night on a vacant floor in a tall, dark building in Shanghai silhouetted against the backdrop of the glossy, bright-colored lights of a giant digital billboard across the street is one of the most riveting and excitingly-staged and photographed cinematic combats in decades. The next moment Bond is getting shaved by a woman in a sexually provocative way, and the next scene shows Bond arriving at night in exotic Macau amid fireworks with the dark water glimmering reflections of a brightly-lit dragon entrance of a glitzy casino filled with extravagantly-dressed women and men. Next, he’s in a shower with another entrancing woman on a yacht. This is exactly the environment and lifestyle – the James Bond world – that we most enjoy escaping to see our favorite British secret agent inhabit, and which we’ve been missing for a decade.
Unfortunately, Skyfall loses its way and the audience in the last hour when the villain is introduced and sets up a series of strategically nonsensical chases and implausibly-timed and executed confrontations leading to a painfully-slowly-evolving, overdone, never-ending showdown at Bond’s childhood home (Skyfall). Bond gets to use the pop-out machine guns of the classic Aston Martin but it ultimately gets riddled with bullets and blown to pieces, just one of two longtime Bond movie fixtures we seemingly lose in the final moments.
But none of that is enough to completely derail the sheer fun of this Bond movie that begins instantly. In the first few minutes of the 2 ½-hour “Skyfall” you’re following 007 on an opening chase in which he helps his lovely young partner drive a Land Rover (Naomie Harris is captivating) through the congested streets of the Istanbul Grand Bazaar, then as he goes solo on a motorcycle over rooftops and through glass windows, and eventually on a fast-moving train as he uses a bulldozer/crane to knock Volkswagen Beetles off a flat car, and then dukes it out on top of a boxcar while ducking under tunnels before being shot while going over a very tall bridge.
The plot involves a former 00-agent Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem is one of the most tantalizingly psychotic evil villains in any James Bond movie) who is bent on avenging his former employer (apparently he also had even more overt Mommy issues with M than Bond has) by exposing a secret list of the identity of all NATO agents embedded in terrorist organizations worldwide and has turned to cyber-terrorism for his weapon of choice.
Bond must first dispense with one of Silva’s agents and deal with another sultry enemy accomplice Sévérine (French actress Bérénice Marlohe in a riveting performance) – Bond’s involvement gets her killed rather sadistically.
>> Actors and characters
- Ben Whishaw is a terrific blend of fun and expertise as the new young comic-relief geek Quartermaster (Q – the gadget man) and delivers some of the film’s most amusing moments in introductory repartee with Bond when he notes he can do more from a laptop in his pajamas than Bond can do in a year from the field. But he admits that every now and then a field agent is needed when a trigger needs to be pulled. To which Bond responds, “Or not pulled. It’s hard to know which in your pajamas.”
- Javier Bardem is engaging as the typically power-hungry psychotic – he has even bigger issues with M’s maternal bullying and playing favorites with former fellow agent 007 – and the sexual ambiguity and leanings toward homosexuality is perhaps a first for a Bond villain, unless you count the two hit men in the 1971 “Diamonds are Forever.”
- Bérénice Marlohe is devastatingly tantalizing as the vulnerable villainess temptress Sévérine – her sultry introduction and intense verbal exchange with Bond is gripping; one of the series best.
- Rory Kinnear, who was introduced briefly in “Quantum of Solace,” gets a little more welcome screen time as M’s chief of staff Bill Tanner (another of the ongoing characters in the series re-introduced with a new actor in the role in the Daniel Craig movies).
- The brilliant Albert Finney is wasted in the somewhat throwaway role of the childhood home gatekeeper.
- Ralph Fiennes is solid as a new MI6 administrator Gareth Mallory who promises to become even more prominent in future installments. He gets a nice introduction as the new M in the final scene just after the audience and Bond first learn the name of the young woman field agent who has decided to take an office job at MI6. It’s a fun and fitting way to introduce the new team playing our favorite characters.
The story and characters are a marked improvement over the last sullen and convoluted entry four years ago, “Quantum of Solace,” and Mendes scores fan-boy points for finally re-injecting this new version of the series under Bond actor Daniel Craig (much shorter haircut here, and white-whiskered beard stubble) with at least some of the traditional elements that have been missing:
- There are a couple music queues and strands of the original Monty Norman and John Barry 007 theme music in well-chosen key moments in the action scenes early on.
- The vintage Bond Aston Martin DB5 makes a significant appearance and even displays the old retractable machine guns in the front grill from the “Goldfinger” days of nearly half a century ago.
- Bond is shown cavalierly taking at least two women for a casual sex ride, and flirting throughout with another, who turns out be a familiar character that has also been missing from the last two Bond movies.
- We even hear the iconic “Bond, James Bond” line — and at a casino, no less — for the first time in six years and the first time in a decade spoken during the course of the movie as a legit introduction of himself.
- Bond is handed what is clearly a vodka martini that is cleverly shown visually to be shaken for him, not stirred, though he never utters that line while acknowledging the female bartender got it just right.
- Adele’s haunting theme song is ideally suited for the opening title sequence that is true to the style of the series even if unusually visually dark in tone and symbolism. It would go on to win the series’ first Oscar for a title song.
- Bond’s famous Walther PPK handgun gets an electronic user-print update.
- Craig delivers more of the personality, super-cool mannerisms, and even quips that we expect from James Bond — with a bullet in his shoulder and after jumping off the scoop of a bulldozer into the passenger car of a moving train, he simply adjusts the cuffs of the shirt under his jacket and walks forward in pursuit of his prey. Same thing after escaping a giant komodo dragon.
Some of the newly-introduced humor, such as a Roger Moore-esque silly facial expression in mid-fight amidst komodo dragons and a walking-away line of “It’s the circle of life” will elicit a smirk but doesn’t quite feel right yet as it comes out of the blue and out of character for an agent who is, and has been otherwise so deadly (literally) humorless.
But there are plenty of amusing lines by Bond and others:
- Bond quietly approaching approaching Sévérine unexpectedly in a shower and saying, “I like you better without your Beretta.”
- Banter between Bond and M that begins with Bond making note of the goofy object on her desk that survived her office being destroyed, to which she responds, “Your interior decorating tips have always been appreciated, 007,” and continues when he rolls out the original Goldfinger Aston Martin DB5 for her to ride in, sparking her response: “Oh and I suppose that’s completely inconspicuous.” When M notes that it’s not very comfortable, Bond replies, “Are you going to complain the whole way?” while pointing to the famous red button on the gear shift to which she remarks, “Go on then, eject me – see if I care.”
- Bond’s multiple banters with his new field agent partner, chiding her for shooting him instead of the villain atop a moving train, noting a moving target is harder to hit, to which she replies sarcastically, “Then you better keep moving.”
- Repartee between Bond and villain Silva (Bardem), including Bond’s retort to Silva’s homosexual overtures by saying, “What makes you think this is my first time?” And Silva’s sarcastic line, “All this jumping and fighting, it’s exhausting!”
- An observer in the subway “tube” station when Bond leaps onto the outside of the train, barely hanging on: “He’s keen to get home.”
- Quips between Bond and the new young Q, such as when Q says, “We don’t do exploding pens anymore,” and Bond’s jab about decisions being hard to make “in your pajamas.” When trying to open a jammed door in a subway tunnel and Q suggests from his office that Bond put his back into it, Bond says, “Why don’t you come down here and put your back into it.”
The familiar gun barrel scene is once again inexplicably and disappointingly placed at the very end of the movie instead of at the beginning. And the Craig-era trend of featuring the actor throughout the opening credits is not as enticing as the silhouettes of naked women.
This film also continues a disappointing trend started in the Pierce Brosnan 007 movies of the 1990s in which the chase scenes and shootouts – particularly in the opening pre-title sequence — take place in crowded markets and other very public places, endangering innocent bystanders, and causing great damage to otherwise un-involved vehicles, buildings, and businesses.
This three-picture story arc focusing so much attention on M (the great Dame Judi Dench) — the obvious and absurd mommy issues Bond has with her that result in each of them speaking and acting superficially harshly to each other as if they are primary school students on the playground, pretending not to like each other when everyone knows that they have mutual strong feelings – long ago grew quite wearisome but it continues to an even greater degree here. The only good thing is that you’re provided comfort that this element with M will not be continued in the next outing.
Once again Bond breaks into M’s home just to have a personal chat as he did so uncharacteristically in “Casino Royale.”
And if this trilogy of movies with Daniel Craig was supposed to represent the character of James Bond prior to his days when he became the suave and sophisticated 007 character of the novels and the first 20 films, then the writers can’t have it both ways by having M and Bond tell each other they have each “been playing (the game) long enough” and “maybe too long,” and MI6 officer Mallory suggesting to Bond that he leave the service because “It’s a young man’s game,” just two of several exchanges and references to James Bond getting long in the tooth. That’s the kind of dialogue we would expect if the character were still being played by Roger Moore, who was 58 in his last outing as 007 in “A View to a Kill” in 1985. This Bond was introduced in “Casino Royale” as he is first being promoted to 00-status. (Craig was 38, several years younger than both Pierce Brosnan and Timothy Dalton when they took on the gig in their early 40s, and just a few years older than Sean Connery was in his first five outings.) The next movie/sequel “Quantum of Solace” was a continuation that took place immediately after the events in “Casino.” And this film, “Skyfall,” presumably lands on the timeline shortly thereafter – confirmed by villain Silva referencing having worked as an MI6 operative 1986-97, implying he preceded Bond’s service at the agency.
>> More credibility issues
- Where’s the second wound/bullet? There is a rather obvious issue near the beginning when Bond is initially clearly shot in the right chest/shoulder by his enemy during that pre-title chase and then shot again – apparently in about the same spot – by his field agent partner off the top of a moving train and falls down over a high bridge, plunges deep into the water below and is carried, seemingly unconscious, over a steep waterfall where he plunges even deeper underwater — still unconscious. Next thing we know he is recovering nicely on a beach, seemingly without any medical assistance. Huh? He later removes bullet fragments from his chest with his own knife and without anesthesia, of course, remarkably only withdrawing those fragments from the enemy’s gun. No mention is made about the wound caused by the shot that knocked him off the train.
- Silva’s plan of revenge: When Silva escapes from MI6 it turns out he had apparently intended to be captured so he could get to M but he doesn’t do that at MI6 headquarters, instead luring Bond in a very lengthy and pre-choreographed pursuit into the London Underground “tube” (subway) to a very specific room below the train tracks where he detonates a pre-planted explosive, forcing the subway to crash through the ceiling and nearly hitting Bond, but not doing so. Thus, Bond is able to continue chasing Silva to the building where M is testifying. Silva’s plan to kill M here seemingly also goes awry: this was all so impeccably-timed that he bursts into the room just as M is concluding her testimony – he starts shooting but misses M when Mallory throws her behind him, taking the bullet in his arm as Bond creates a diversion, forcing Silva to flee yet again. This entire strategy by Silva seems odd and the dependence on timing less than convincing.
- Booby-trapped house: Pretty silly that on the spur of the moment Bond would come up with a plan to lure Silva to his childhood home in the country (called Skyfall), where he and old lady M would make a stand against Silva and his gang of 20 soldiers using nothing but an old shotgun and some hastily-assembled booby traps such as shotgun shells screwed into light bulb sockets (Bond didn’t know he would also have the help of the aging game keeper at the home, which only helped a little).
- Does he or doesn’t he?: Silva announces he wants to kill M himself, and yet he sends a dozen soldiers in ahead of him to the Skyfall house showdown who could easily have killed M and Bond before he even arrives, and in fact do inflict a slow-moving mortal wound on M.
- No moor: all the above isn’t enough – a chase out into the open moors is added where Bond shoots a circle of bullets in the ice to create a hole so he and yet another bad guy fall into the icy cold and dark water – at night. With likely no visibility whatsoever, Bond not only wins an underwater wrestling match by holding his breath long enough to choke the man with a single leg hold, but also still has enough oxygen to swim down to the sinking man, steal what appears to be a flare gun the man luckily was carrying, and use it to find the lone opening in the ice above. All this apparently just to give Silva enough time to go back to confront M before Bond could race back again.
Although this is a return to the bloated 2 ½-hour movies of this spy series in the past, and therefore bogs down for a half-hour towards the end, “Skyfall” has 007 back on the right track, and IMAX has James Bond back where he belongs, larger than life.
24. Spectre (2015)
007 returns for another big-scale, globe-trotting, car-chasing, gadget-filled, action-packed, sarcasm-laden, woman-izing adventure in which he once again introduces himself as “Bond, James Bond.” And even his most infamous arch-enemy Blofeld (and his white cat) returns for the first time in decades.
“Spectre” is filled with spectacular and lightly amusing moments, but ultimately it’s a flawed mission with nothing particularly memorable and an annoying continuation of storylines, characters and back-stories of recent films in the series that does little but bog down each new episode.
Happily, the new actors introduced in the roles of M, Q, and Moneypenny in “Skyfall” all return, with Q getting the character’s most active participation yet, and the new M even getting in on the action a bit. Sadly, Moneypenny’s role is diminished a tad from her splashy and engaging debut in “Skyfall,” while Rory Kinnear’s screen time as M’s Chief of Staff Bill Tanner keeps increasing in his third outing and he handles it well. Ralph Fiennes also has more screen time as the new M struggles with his feelings of button-down loyalty as he and his department are being marginalized while trying to maintain discipline among his growingly frustrated staff and yet support Bond, Moneypenny and Q as they collude behind his back to undermine his authority and the impending political and bureaucratic changes.
Ben Whishaw is once again brilliant as “Q” – the repartee between he and Daniel Craig is one of the most pleasing carry-over elements of the 21st century Bond films — just as amusing but in a far less silly manner than those of decades past.
Thank goodness the iconic gun barrel sequence has finally been restored to the beginning of “Spectre” where it belongs for the first time since Daniel Craig took over the lead role 13 years ago, even if only a couple seconds of familiar theme music is heard at several well-timed moments before the end of the film.
But Thomas Newman’s original music here is among the most notable in many years, creating a palpable sense of anticipation and a dynamic supplement to the action and drama on the screen.
After seemingly being reluctant to say the words in his first three outings, Craig’s Bond finally orders his traditional “vodka martini, shaken, not stirred,” only to be told by a bartender at a clinic that they don’t serve alcohol. To this, Bond responds with the kind of sarcasm that replaces the memorable witty rejoinders of his predecessors, “I’m really starting to love this place.”
Bond’s Aston Martin, both old and new, are also back and put to good use. The new Aston Martin prototype DB10 gets shown off in a glossy nighttime chase through the streets of Rome by a villain in an equally stylishly powerful-looking Jaguar C-X75, all while Bond calmly and amusingly handles a phone call with Moneypenny. A couple weapons gizmo switches malfunction in a humorous way before ending with a push-button blaze. Bond also gets ejected in a clever homage with a modern twist. And the original Aston Martin DB5 also returns in a couple of respectfully fun cameos after seemingly being destroyed in the previous “Skyfall.”
The multiple references to all three previous films starring Craig include fleeting images in the titles, photos of Bond’s villains during the film, an old VHS tape of an interrogation of the woman Bond proposed to in “Casino Royale,” Vesper Lynd (VHS? Was it recorded in the 1980s?), and even a post-mortem video of the late M (Judi Dench – this one on a contemporary digital format).
There are also many apparently intentional homages to several early Bond movies:
- the opening pre-title Day of the Dead parade in Mexico City that recalls and improves on the funeral parade in “Live and Let Die”
- the title sequence fortells the upcoming story as was the case in “Goldfinger,” with images of characters from the three previous films being visually tied to the prominent SPECTRE logo and even the board room meeting that introduces Blofeld
- a bulky, hulking villain who is reminiscent of Jaws in “The Spy Who Loved Me” and “Moonraker,” except far more graphically brutal befitting today’s cinematic trend
- a personal and flirtatious chat between Bond and his soon-to-be partner on a train dining car reminiscent of Bond with Vesper in “Casino Royale”
- a lengthy 2 ½-minute fist-fight aboard a train that is slightly less confined than the one in “From Russia With Love”
- a visit to a flashy secluded resort atop a mountain in the Swiss Alps that is similar but less spectacular and prominent than Piz Gloria in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”
- Bond driving a plane after knocking off its wings in an even more preposterous way than he did in “Live and Let Die”
- Blofeld getting a vertical scar across his right eye as he was depicted once before in “You Only Live Twice,” the first of that character’s previous appearances; all the others without a scar
Most of these scenes are dim reminders of their predecessors and take place in the first 75-minutes. And yet, unfortunately, these are about the only reasons to see this installment, which is otherwise a disappointment, especially coming on the heels of one of the two most critically-praised Bond films in 50 years and the top money-making episode ever, “Skyfall.” “Spectre” is not as bad as “Quantum of Solace” but also nowhere near as good as “Casino Royale.”
It opens with a very impressive single-camera tracking shot that doesn’t break for four minutes, beginning above a massive Dia de Muertos parade and descending down to follow Bond in skeleton costume walking with a woman through crowds to a hotel, into an elevator, up to a bedroom, out a window onto a ledge and across rooftops, all made to appear it was done without a single cut (not quite). This leads to the overdone three-minute helicopter sequence and then the titles set to Sam Smith’s theme song Writings on the Wall. The slow ballad featuring Smith’s vocals alternating in and out of his falsetto is a far cry from Adele’s more dynamic and powerful Skyfall, though both won Academy Awards for best song, the only two Bond movie songs to do so.
Bond is suspended yet again by his new boss (also still called M, introduced in “Skyfall” as an MI6 administrator called Mallory, played by Ralph Fiennes) just as M is involved in an internal political battle to save the 00-section from being shut down in favor of modern technological intelligence – field agents replaced by drones. No surprise that Bond goes rogue yet again and does some globe-trotting to find out who is behind a terrorist organization. It turns out the whole thing involves not only his nemesis in “Casino Royale” and “Quantum of Solace,” Mr. White (whom he treats with remarkable civility and compassion here after such hate towards him previously), but also a man named Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz). It is further revealed that Oberhauser is really Bond’s arch-enemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld from several of the Bond movies starring Sean Connery a half-century ago. Not only that, now we learn that all the villains of this and the past three movies were apparently working for Blofeld’s SPECTRE organization. And it gets even deeper than all that; it also turns out that Blofeld/Oberhauser is the son of a man who took Bond under his wing as a father figure for a couple of winters when Bond as a young boy was orphaned after a tragic climbing accident that killed his parents. When they finally meet nearly two-hours into the film, Blofeld tells Bond it was he who was behind all the villains Bond battled and who orchestrated his government’s elimination of the double-0 section as well as the deaths of the former M and his greatest love, Vesper. “It was all me, James. It’s always been me. The author of all your pain.”
>> Credibility issues
- While fist-fighting in the helicopter of the pre-title sequence, the chopper swoops, climbs, spins and even flies upside down endlessly above the crowds of Mexico’s annual Day of the Dead festival. It’s also far too long and ends without a big bang or even humorous conclusion.
- Bond and his lady (this time Mr. White’s daughter, Madeleine, played by Léa Seydoux) keep traveling globally first class with no indication of where the money is coming from, keep showing up in new and tailored suits and gorgeous outfits despite carrying no luggage, and keep – inexplicably — supplied with new guns.
- Blofeld drills two holes through Bond’s skull into his brain, immediately after which Bond escapes and acts as if the drills had no effect.
- Bond and Madeleine, who have just seemingly blown up Blofeld with an explosion under his chair and then the entire data complex detonating into a giant ball of fire, rush back to London to try to stop Blofeld’s network controlling nine government intelligence agencies from going online at midnight (even though the destruction of Blofeld and his data center would seem to have made that a mute issue). Somehow, Blofeld not only survives the explosions (just that vertical scar), but manages to get to London so much quicker than Bond and Madeleine that he has the time and takes the time to set up an elaborate timer explosive scheme at the old MI6 building and even post 8×10 photos in stalls of the now-vacated building of the people in Bond’s life whom he has manipulated or killed, somehow knowing Bond will walk past these. He’s positioned himself behind bullet-proof glass in a room he somehow knows Bond will walk to. He sets off a timer for the building to explode in three-minutes and tells Bond that Madeleine is tied up somewhere in the building (Madeleine having separated from Bond only minutes ago, deciding not to continue on with this lifestyle, something Blofeld also somehow knew in advance and was able to then kidnap her and get to the MI6 building before Bond got there.) And Blofeld also had the time to coordinate a helicopter to pick him up outside the building to hover in front of it while watching Bond struggle to beat the clock. I mean, c’mon, this is even too much for die-hard Bond fans.
>> Disappointments
There is still very little humor or just plain fun but rather a slow-paced, convoluted, and bloated story with a running time of nearly 2 1/2-hours, particularly the second half that drags as the location shifts to Tangiers and Bond confronts Blofeld at his massive data center and later back in London.
Waltz’s Blofeld is not maniacal or memorable enough, and the women are strong and compelling but not the strikingly beautiful or overtly and traditionally sexy Bond girls of old with memorable names.
There are also very few of the unique aspects of the character and elements that separate James Bond movies from all others. It’s only when the original Aston Martin DB5 makes an entrance in the final moments that the audience gets to enjoy a reminder of what attracts audiences to 007 movies. And that is done very well.
Finally, having Bond continue to be tortured about his childhood is growing wearisome, as is the repeated concept of having Bond go rogue in order to save the world – this time due to another tired premise of the 00-department threatened with elimination by new technology. We want to see Bond acting out the orders of his British agency with their full, if eye-rolling support of his tactics, not constantly at odds with his own people.
But, in the end it’s a Bond movie and all 007 movies have enough good moments to make them worth seeing at least once.
25. No Time to Die (2021)
After what was already going to be a 4 1/2-year gap between Bond movies turned into six-years, “No Time to Die” brought Daniel Craig back specifically to nicely tie up the end of his five-film, 15-year run as Bond, which it does more dramatically than anyone imagined.
Unfortunately it isn’t a great Bond movie, not even as good as Craig’s two best Bond outings, Skyfall and “Casino Royale.” But it is a good episode, quite noteworthy — even controversial, and therefore, well worth seeing. It’s better than two of Craig’s other two Bond movies, “Quantum of Solace” and “Spectre,” and despite its nearly three-hour running time, it has a broader audience appeal with its higher quotient of romantic and emotional elements. Craig delivers his most multi-dimensional performance of the series.
Notably, this is the first Bond movie to be converted to 3D and presented in limited theaters in the RealD 3D process, and the first Bond movie with scenes shot using IMAX cameras — 40-minutes worth, including the entire spectacular 23-minute opening that begins with the most eye-popping transition from the trademark gun barrel scene. As the camera pushes forward along the barrel, we begin to see reflections of snow and evergreen trees on the shiny inside of the barrel before we are through to the outside and looking directly down from an apparent drone over the trees in a Norwegian landscape. This sequence is even more breathtaking in 3D, where it feels like you are traveling through the gun barrel.
Later, the giant IMAX film frame that shows 26% more than any other, takes us over and through the cobblestone streets of beautiful Matera, Italy. In addition to being a much bigger screen overall — the image itself expands by about 13% above and another 13% below a normal screen (the typical theater aspect ratio of 2.40:1 expands to the taller 1.90:1 in most IMAX theaters, and by 40% to 1.40:1 in certain select IMAX locations worldwide).
The music and sound
The already-Grammy-winning and chart-topping Billie Eilish title ballad No Time to Die is beautiful and powerful, but, sadly, instead of creating one of the potentially greatest opening title sequences, the images that coincide with her song are perhaps the least visually dynamic of any Bond film. That is, except for the 3D presentation, where the letters and the moving dots popped off the screen. The digitally animated snowflakes appear as if they are falling in the theater, and the gears, hourglass, pistols, and the shattering marble gun all appear as if they are suspended in mid-air within reach.
Hans Zimmer’s score sounds most clear and prominent in IMAX theater systems (as compared to a viewing of this film in a theater equipped with Dolby Atmos surround sound).
In addition to the seat-vibrating whoosh from the back of the theater, along the walls, and then to the front as we see Russian MiG jets enter the screen when they buzz Q’s control center airborne in a C-17, the sound system delivers the powerful and nostalgic swells of music cues during the poignant moments that are strong enough on their own to evoke tears. There are not a lot of memorable melodies in the score but there are several noticeable musical moments, including the instantly-rousing notes for a few seconds when the famous Bond Aston Martin DB5 reveals machine guns behind retractable headlights, and the few seconds of jaunty Cuban-influenced notes behind new Bond CIA partner Paloma (Ana de Armas) taking on several attacking bad guys in a night club. Perhaps most notable, especially to Bond fans, is Zimmer’s brief instrumental reprise of the love song We Have All the Time in the World from the 1969 Bond movie “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” during the Italy segment, which is a touching and warmly nostalgic homage. (Louis Armstrong’s vocal version from the earlier movie plays over the end credits, followed by other pieces of Zimmer’s score, including an enchanting short bit of Eilish vocalizing the theme song without lyrics.)
In another homage to the same film – the first and one of only two others that depict Bond in a deep romantic relationship — Bond (Craig) also resurrects the line of dialogue, “We have all the time in the world” at the beginning here, which was said by Bond (George Lazenby) at the conclusion of the 1969 movie after his newlywed was assassinated as she lay in his arms. Craig’s Bond then reiterates the line in a slightly modified way at the end, reflecting the new reality in that moment.
Action, stunts and cool vehicles
There are, of course, more terrific action scenes and stunts in “No Time to Die” (although this is literally one of those movies where all the best of those scenes are in the trailers and teasers we saw so many times for a year-and-a-half instead of the usual several months – Bond riding a motorcycle up a steep cement incline leading to a jump over a wall, grabbing a cable and jumping off a bridge, the DB5 spinning in circles as guns shoot from its headlights — these scenes don’t last much longer in the film than they do in the trailers, and director Cary Fukunaga doesn’t present them with the immediate and lasting impact they deserve). The return of the DB5 is cooler than ever with a switch that flings what looks like “mini-mines” (spiked ball-shaped grenades) from the car, and the return of the smokescreen. In the moments before the reveal of the amazing retractable headlights that are replaced with machine guns, Bond and Madeleine are surrounded and trapped, as men fire a seemingly absurd amount of bullets at close range into all the car windows for what seems like an eternity, with Madeleine screaming and pleading with Bond to do something. The 3D presentation of this scene significantly increases the intensity as it makes you feel as if you are inside the car as the bullets keep hitting the windows. (Continuity nitpickers will notice that after the DB5 is T-boned by a truck on the passenger door, there is no noticeable damage there as it spins and shoots. Also, in a tight shot from the door looking across the front wheel well as the car is doing 360-spins, it’s obvious that the tire is not turned at all even as the car is spinning.)
This time there is also the return of the classic Aston Martin V8 Vantage Saloon similar to the one first seen in the 1987 Bond movie “The Living Daylights” – Bond uncovers it in the same garage he dramatically revealed the DB5 to M in “Skyfall,” complete with a very lowkey and brief image of M’s familiar porcelain bulldog figurine, most prominently visible in the 3D version. (Interestingly, this movie pays homage to two former Bond films starring actors who did only one and two Bond movies each, Lazenby and Timothy Dalton.) And just as we have recently seen a new Aston Martin along with a classic one in most of Craig’s films, this time it’s the sleek new DBS Superleggera (2019 model; remember the movie was filmed two years prior to release), driven not by Bond but his replacement agent Noma (Lashana Lynch) — here we also get a glimpse of a second new one, the concept car Vahalla (which was due to be introduced in 2022) sitting in the background behind M at Q’s lab in a couple shots.
And there is a nifty glider plane called a “Stealthy Bird” that Nomi pilots with Bond as her passenger, with the wings unfolding in flight and then collapsing as it dives in the ocean to be propelled underwater into the missile silo that is Safin’s island lair.
Supporting characters and humor
The movie also features interesting new and returning characters – Armas is a knockout in her surprisingly all-too-brief segment of 12-minutes in Cuba near the beginning (also enhanced significantly by being shot with IMAX cameras). Her Paloma character is giddily excited to team up with Bond, banters with him quite cutely and humorously while helping him into a tuxedo, and then takes down as many bad guys as Bond with her high kicks (in a slinky, floor-length black formal gown with a deeply plunging neckline) and gunning down three foes while lying on the floor and spinning.
Paloma is sexy but it’s so much more than that; her personality is instantly cute – momentarily seeming like a flirtatious airhead, but then it’s quickly clear that she is savvy and physically powerful and an expert fighter and shooter, set up well as a fun surprise with her saying she has had three weeks of training as if she thinks that’s a lot of time. After seeing her handle herself with aplomb, Bond smirks and says, “Three weeks of training, really?,” to which she responds, “More or less.” Also brilliantly written and directed is the two of them stopping suddenly amidst their fast-paced mayhem to have a drink at the bar for two seconds (this is shortly after Bond flings a round metal drink tray disc at another bad guy Odd Job-style).
Stepping outside in an effort to respond to Bond’s request to find a getaway car, Paloma brazenly gets into a classic ’57 Chevy and drives it with strategic abandon across the street into a wooden scaffolding to knock that scientist down from the top level onto the hood of her car. She even has the wherewithal and thoughtfulness to pick up a new cigar off the seat to give to Bond so he can gift it to Felix. Ana’s energy and bubbly manner is evident instantly in her initial introduction to Bond at a bar when she says “vamos” after chugging a vodka martini (shaken, not stirred, of course), and a few minutes later when they part ways with her saying, “This is my stop, next time stay longer” with a sex kitten look in her eyes, followed by handing Bond the cigar as she says “Ciao!” This section with Ana’s charismatic Paloma character is a quintessential Bond movie element, the perfect flirtatious Bond woman with whom he has his trademark interaction and banter.
There are some mildly amusing moments of humor in other parts of the movie as well, particularly when Bond and Moneypenny crash Q’s home as he is preparing dinner for a date (Bond teases Q about his hairless cat, “They make those with fur now”), but too many lines intended for humor fall flat, including the clever way Bond is forced to say his signature “Bond, James Bond” line to a guard at an MI6 check-in desk who doesn’t recognize him — somehow in Fukunaga’s direction and editing, it doesn’t get the laughs it deserves. Other times Craig tries to deliver the kinds of lines we heard too often from Roger Moore’s Bond as well as Pierce Brosnan’s, and Craig doesn’t pull them off, such as when he uses the watch Q gave him to kill Safin henchman Primo/Cyclops by sending a short circuit/electrocution through Primo’s bionic eye, then tells Q that he showed the watch to Primo and “It blew his mind.”
New 007 agent Noma gets some giggles when she learns in a meeting in M’s office that Bond has been reinstated as a 00-agent. “Double-Oh what?” she asks, worried that he will get his 007 number back from her. She gets no reply, and moments later, after she answers another question, she reiterates, “Double-Oh what?” The concern of some fans that the movie would end with a female 007 gets at least momentarily resolved later in the film when Nomi unselfishly tells M she wants Bond to have his 007 number reinstated.
Fukunaga and the writers don’t give Lashana Lynch much to sink her teeth into – her character is almost negligible, but she does fine with what she has to work with.
Meanwhile, Léa Seydoux and her writers deserve the award for most-improved, as her Madeleine character is imbued with much more life and dimension compared with her rather dour portrayal in her first outing in “Spectre.”
David Dencik’s scientist Valdo Obruchev is played for mild amusement as a sniveling self-absorbed man who kind of blows with the wind. When pushed down an elevator shaft as an escape near the beginning he panics while falling until he gets how the set-up worked to bring him to a quick stop at the bottom, and says simply, “Magnets.” During the initial attack on Safin’s island lair near the end, as Bond and Nomi are destroying everything, Obruchev whines a seemingly natural thing to say to Bond under the circumstances until we later realize it was a subtle tell/foreshadowing: “You have to know this is a suicide mission; you will never get off this island alive.”
The convoluted set-up
But then there is the rest of the somewhat bloated movie (it could easily have been at least a half-hour shorter) that follows another unnecessarily convoluted plot in which a man called Safin (Rami Malek), who saw his parents and entire family mass murdered as a child by Mr. White (from Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace and Spectre) under orders from Blofeld, is now out for revenge against Blofeld (now in a London maximum security prison) and his SPECTRE terrorist organization. As an adult, Safin goes to the home of Mr. White in Norway seeking revenge wearing a disturbing white mask, but only finds Mr. White’s wife and their pre-teen daughter. He kills the mother but the daughter shoots Safin at close-range at least 8-10 times by my count, with at least some of the shots clearly hitting him as evidenced by bullet holes in his jacket. This whole opening scene plays out like a horror movie with Safin seeming like the hockey-masked murderer Michael Myers from “Halloween.” After getting shot and falling from the second floor, landing flat on his back, then getting dragged through the house and his head banged down on each step outside the house, Safin just suddenly opens his eyes, sits up, and starts walking towards the fleeing girl as if nothing had happened to him, just like Myers in “Halloween.” (I suppose it’s possible he was wearing a bullet-proof vest and was only momentarily stunned, but even that wouldn’t explain the lack of injury from the fall he took.) The girl runs across a lake that is covered in thin ice and falls in. The 3D effect here makes it look as if you are right above the ice and could maybe reach out and grab young Madeleine as she flails in the water trying to get out. Inexplicably, Safin saves her (years later he reverses this act of kindness, also for reasons unclear).
We immediately learn (as we suspected) that little girl grew up to be psycho-therapist Madeleine Swann, who was Bond’s love interest in “Spectre,” and is again at the beginning of this movie. While relaxing in Italy, Madeleine tells Bond he must create closure of his relationship with Vesper (she died in “Casino Royale” after betraying Bond) by going to Vesper’s grave and forgiving her so that Bond and Madeleine can move on with their relationship. But when Bond goes to Vesper’s tomb a few minutes later, he sees a business card from his long-running nemesis organization SPECTRE moments before a huge blast comes from the tomb, inches in front of Bond. There is a nice use of sound here for a few moments to simulate the hollow, in-a-tunnel-type ambient noise as it must sound to Bond’s ears following the explosion (this effect is repeated near the end when an explosive goes off near Bond in a stairwell of Safin’s lair). Bond clears his head and immediately suspects that Madeleine has betrayed him to SPECTRE, especially when, during the ensuing chase, henchman Primo/Cyclops tells Bond that “Blofeld sends his regards” and that Madeleine is “a daughter of SPECTRE” (it’s never clear how SPECTRE knew Bond would be at the tomb at that moment, though Blofeld later tells Bond that he knew Bond would eventually go visit the grave, and only had to wait for Madeleine to lure him there). While fleeing in the DB5, Bond picks up a call to Madeleine’s cell phone and hears Blofeld tell her, “Your father would be so proud.” Bond puts Madeleine on a train and tells her she will never see him again (in a subtle plot-point tell, as Madeleine reacts to this news, she makes a seemingly slightly odd gesture of putting her hand on her stomach area – we later learn she was likely pregnant at this moment). Well, we all know Madeleine will indeed see Bond again.
Five years later, Madeleine has a daughter and Safin has developed an instantly-fatal virus that spreads through nanobots to specific victims determined by their DNA. The biological weapon intrigues M at MI6, so he secretly tries to help develop it under the leadership of double-dealing scientist Obruchev who is quietly more loyal to Safin. Meanwhile, Safin wants to use his virus on Blofeld, but the only way to get to Blofeld is through Madeleine, who happens to be the only person Blofeld will speak to in prison. Safin threatens Madeleine’s daughter if Madeleine doesn’t apply the virus to her skin and spread it to Blofeld by touching him so he will be exposed and die instantly. Meanwhile, Blofeld is inexplicably able to organize his entire SPECTRE team from inside the prison using a remote-controlled camera in a “bionic eye” that he somehow managed to come up with while in prison without anyone noticing he’s filled his empty eye socket from “Spectre” or that he is, incredibly, sending and receiving audio and video messages from deep inside a prison to Primo/Cyclops, who also has a reciprocal bionic eye. (Bond smashes Primo’s head so hard into a wall back at the beginning of the movie shortly after the explosion at Vesper’s tomb that Primo’s bionic eye pops out of its socket and rolls down the cobblestone road, but minutes later the one-eyed Primo is shooting point-blank at Bond and Madeleine in the DB5.)
Down in Jamaica, where Bond is now retired and doing a lot of sailing and fishing, this all starts coming to a head when the CIA gets wind of MI6’s ill-advised involvement with this new virus weapon and their misplaced trust in the scientist Obruchev, who is heading to Cuba for a secret gathering of every SPECTRE agent to celebrate Blofeld’s birthday remotely. Both MI6 and the CIA try to bring Bond out of retirement to help out. M sends Bond’s replacement agent Nomi to Jamaica to help sway him, but after initially refusing both offers, Bond, for no obvious reason, suddenly decides to go with his old CIA buddy Felix. Felix has a seemingly goofy partner from the State Department along with him (Bond asks Felix about his overly-smiley, fresh-faced, White partner, “Where did you find the Book of Mormon?”). This man, Logan Ash, also turns out to be a double-agent, and also loyal to Safin. Stretching credibility, all these people, as well as the guy with the fake eye, are all hanging out at the same small dive bar in Jamaica on the same evening.
Then they all wind up in Cuba for the meeting of all the members of SPECTRE to celebrate Blofeld’s birthday, where Primo/Cyclops — still with that empty eye-socket five years later — believes he has arranged with the Obruchev to get Bond’s DNA in the virus, which he will spray in a gas form when Bond sneaks into the gathering of SPECTRE members, killing Bond in a most satisfying way while SPECTRE members watch while circled around Bond (including Blofeld, who watches through Primo’s bionic eye being carried around on a pillow by some SPECTRE sycophants). But Obruchev has switched the DNA to target all SPECTRE members instead, who then all die in front of Bond (Primo finally grabs his bionic eye back when it falls on the floor in the chaos — it’s not clear why Primo is not affected by the gas), while Obruchev and the turncoat Logan Ash try to flee to get back to Safin.
This is an awfully lot to follow and at this point we’re only about 45-minutes into the movie.
The next two-hours is filled with far too many characters who are double-agents – the scientist Obruchev, the State Department guy Logan Ash, the guy with the bionic eye Primo aka Cyclops, and there is far too much shooting as everyone is trying to get to Safin in his island lair, where he is now plotting to unleash his nanobots virus globally (this desire is also not explained), while Bond and Madeleine try to work together regarding Blofeld as Bond tries to figure out whether he trusts Madeleine and then re-develop their relationship.
15-years of changes and finale blow-out of the Bond formula
In addition to the first-ever options of seeing a Bond movie in 3D and/or IMAX, “No Time to Die” is filled with all manner of firsts and unprecedented elements for the franchise, starting with the running time of 2-hours and 43-minutes, which is 15-minutes longer than the previous longest Bond movie, which was the previous film, “Spectre.”
First warning!: Every surprise in No Time to Die is discussed below starting five paragraphs from now… (this film cannot be properly or fully reviewed without discussing these elements)
Before we start listing those trope-dispensing twists in “No Time to Die,” let’s be clear, the Daniel Craig Bond movies have been upending the cinematic James Bond 007 movie formula since his introduction in “Casino Royale” in 2006 (to be fair, from the beginning in 1962, the movies also greatly embellished the original Ian Fleming books that had little humor, gadgets or cool cars, and far less womanizing by Bond). In addition to Craig being the first blonde and stocky Bond of the films (although Roger Moore’s hair was close to blonde and died darker to be brown for his Bond films), there was no traditional through-the-gun barrel turn-and-shoot opening in “Casino Royale,” no Moneypenny or Q, almost no humor and few gadgets, not even any sign of the James Bond theme music until the last few seconds. In fact, Craig said what attracted him to take the part was when he read in the script where Bond dismisses the option of a vodka martini shaken or stirred with, “Do I look like I give a damn?”
We dismissed all that as being because it was an origin/reboot story, and because “Casino Royale” is a terrific movie, but the follow-up entry, “Quantum of Solace,” continued most of that bucking of form while adding a couple unprecedented components: a Bond movie that continued the storyline from the previous movie — picking up immediately where “Casino Royale” left off — and by killing off a longtime continuing character, Bond’s French MI6 colleague René Mathis.
The third entry, “Skyfall,” brought back the music, the humor, and Moneypenny and Q with terrific new actors. But it also killed off another iconic Bond actor, Judi Dench, who played Bond’s longtime boss M for 17 years across seven films.
The fourth one, “Spectre,” re-introduced Bond’s arch enemy of the 1960s, Blofeld, but took another out-of-the-norm step of reverse-engineering the storylines of the previous three movies by tying Blofeld to everything and everyone bad in all those films as well as in “Spectre.”
Last warning!: Every surprise in No Time to Die is about to be discussed immediately below…
But “No Time to Die” feels like the producers (and Daniel Craig is a co-producer) willfully and with glee decided to burn down almost all the remaining franchise lynchpins, as someone who is being forced to turn over their business to someone else might do just before the handoff (note, at the time of this release, Amazon was proposing to buy MGM, the studio that distributes Bond movies – which it wound up doing, but it would not get any control of Eon, which produces the movies), or as if Eon principles, the children of Bond movies co-creator Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, daughter Barbara Broccoli (61 years old at the time of this release in 2021) and Michael G. Wilson (79 years old in 2021) are planning not to produce any more Bond films (Broccoli has said repeatedly that she cannot imagine anyone else playing Bond after Craig, and she was producing a play with him right in 2021, and has been pursuing other stage and cinema productions – no one knew what their plans were at this point but Broccoli and Wilson later said they are proceeding with work on the next Bond movie).
But let’s go through some of the Bond movie formula departures they threw at us this time, in order of their occurrence:
- A horror movie-type opening scene in which Bond does not appear.
- The longest-ever opening sequence by more than 10-minutes; this one goes nearly a half-hour into the movie (23-min).
- For the first time, the opening gun barrel sequence does not end with blood dripping down after Bond shoots at the camera.
- Time-jumping, not once but twice, opening when Madeleine is a child, then jumping ahead at least 15 years to when she and Bond are lovers in Italy (all before the opening titles), then jumping ahead another five years (Bond was already looking and talking about how old he was getting in “Spectre,” which took place five years earlier — how old must he be now?)
- The first female and non-White agent 007.
- The killing of another major long-running character, Felix, of the CIA, who has been Bond’s closest work ally and friend since the very first film, “Dr. No,” in 1962. – In 3D, it seems as if you are underwater with Bond and Felix as the boat is sinking, as if you could almost reach out to help.
- Of the more than a half-dozen actors to play Blofeld, Christoph Waltz is the first to do so in more than one Bond film.
- The killing of yet another major long-running character, Blofeld, Bond’s arch-enemy since “Thunderball” in 1965, and he doesn’t go out in very spectacular fashion befitting such an icon.
- Bond’s serious relationship with a woman — Madeleine — carrying over to the next movie.
- Bond having a child, Mathilde, daughter of he and Madeleine.
- And, of course, Bond being killed at the end, which, once this decision was made, is handled as well and with the level of emotion one would want to see, bringing many to tears – every close-up is more powerful in the 3D version, particularly Daniel Craig’s in scenes like this final one and in his face-to-face confrontation with Safin. But killing off the centerpiece of your franchise does not appear to be a smart move at first glance. It will be years before we learn the ultimate outcome of this radical decision and strategy.
All of this adds up to “No Time to Die” feeling not so much like a Bond movie (especially the last two hours) but more like any number of big-budget action films with a leading man who has not been a cinematic icon for nearly 60 years.
As sadly moving as the ending is for some viewers — primarily those who were not angry about his demise or not particularly invested in Bond as a character and a franchise — everyone seemed to be stunned by it. Those who stay through the credits are initially relieved to see those familiar words, James Bond Will Return, but are left to ponder how that will be possible and in what way or form, let alone when.
We never really learn why the movie is called “No Time to Die,” unless it was intended to refer to Bond being killed; if so, perhaps it should have been called “No Time for Bond to Die,” which is the truth.
— By Scott Hettrick