Clockwise from left: Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in North By Northwest (Screenshot) and Daniela Bianchi and Sean Connery in From Russia With Love (Screenshot), Roger Moore in Moonraker (Photo: Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images) and Harrison Ford in Star Wars (Photo: Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images), Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight (Screenshot) and Javier Bardem in Skyfall (Screenshot)Graphic: Allison Corr
The arrival of No Time To Die marks the 25th entry in the James Bond film franchise, an onscreen run measuring nearly 60 years. To what can 007 attribute that longevity? The ability to pull a new actor into the role every few years helps. So does the moviegoing audience’s bottomless appetite for jet-setting, high-flying stunts, and outlandish villains.
Bond also endures because, like any good secret agent, his skillset includes mimicry and flexibility. The series that launched a wave of bed-hopping, gadget-equipped spies in the 1960s has shown no qualms about swimming in the wake of the action blockbusters that came after it, like Star Wars, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, or Indiana Jones. It can be shameless in the pursuit of a cinematic trend, like the Blaxploitation trappings adopted by Live And Let Die. Elsewhere, evolving tastes point toward the right fit at just the right moment—like the jumpy energy of the The Bourne Identity channeled into the early Daniel Craig Bonds.
As Carly Simon sings at the beginning of The Spy Who Loved Me, nobody does it better. It’s just that sometimes James Bond learned to do the things he does from other movies.
From Russia With Love: Alfred Hitchcock
The second film in the James Bond series introduced and/or solidified many of the tropes that would come to define it: beautiful women, exotic locales, elaborate action, droll one-liners, gadgets that come in handy in a third-act pinch, an in media res opening set piece, and a main theme. Yet even as the franchise was coming into its own, it was already borrowing from other sources, too. Looking beyond the 007-specific iconography, FromRussia With Love boasts the unmistakable influence of Alfred Hitchcock and his ’50s milestone hits. The plainest example is a late sequence, not included in Ian Fleming’s novel, in which Bond evades a dive-bombing helicopter; the scene was explicitly inspired by (some might say pilfered from) . Elsewhere, director Terence Young nods to the master through tense pursuits (with Bond stealthily maneuvering around pillars and hedges), a Grace Kelly-ish blond in a headscarf, and an extended, treacherous passage on a train. No future entries would nod quite as directly to Hitch, though the best ones would continue to work within his guiding principles of suspense. Meanwhile, Sean Connery would trade a Hitchcockian thriller for the real deal just one year later with a starring role in . [A.A. Dowd]
It always bothered me that they had the Thais in TMWTGG doing kung fu, instead of Muay Thai, even though they had krabi krabong as the opening act for Moore’s cheap kick…
I strongly suspect that the fight choreographer on a 70s James Bond movie was some silver fox with a questionable military background who found the term “Orientals” more than adequate.
I’d add in that with the casting of Michelle Yeoh and her awesome elaborately choreographed fight scenes, ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’ was a fairly obvious attempt to cash-in on Jackie Chan’s resurgence in the 90’s. Sure, as the careers of Steven Seagal and JCVD can attest, martial arts in movies had never really gone away in the 80’s but they tended to be fairly standard B-Movie fare with little in the way of spectacular choreography, stuntwork and use of the surrounding environment, Buster Keaton style.Tomorrow Never Dies however was hot on the heels of Rumble in the Bronx, First Strike and Supercop and managed to get in ahead of the pack before The Matrix, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Rush Hour took the West’s previous dalliances with Martial Arts in film and turned it into a long-term de facto relationship.
I loved it when it came out as I was heavily into Hong Kong cinema* in my teens back in the 90’s but you could never see any of it on the big screen. I’d also always loved Bond films and anything with good practical effects and legit, spectacular stuntwork so TND was a match made in heaven.I may also have had a bit of a crush on Michelle Yeoh. (Still do tbh) *ok, when I say Hong Kong cinema I really mean kung fu flicks and violent gangster epics. I didn’t watch a Wong Kar Wai film until my 30’s and I still think he could improve by giving his protagonists a pistol in each hand.
It’s a Bond movie I’ve always had a huge soft spot for. It was the first one I saw multiple times – first in the cinema and then again several times on a trip between Australia and the UK in 98.Goldeneye is my favourite Brosnan one but Tomorrow is close behind.
TND is pretty shallow and offers little new (other than Yeoh). But it’s also great fun! Michelle Yeoh! Falling from a skyscraper! The grumpy professional torturer! Rupert Murdoch as the villain! Grizzly death by rotating blades! Judi Dench AND Geoffrey Palmer! A touch of personal stakes, but not too much! Remote-controlled cars!It’s not the best ever, but it was a fine, fun, memorable follow-up to Goldeneye. It’s the next one where things went off-course…
I will still stand by the opinion that the Bond-Trevelyan fight in the dish at the end of the film is one of the best, if not the best, boss fight in the franchise. Martin Campbell knows how to film a fist fight.
The big problem with it is the villain’s plan. No tech-savvy media mogul would be chasing a century of broadcast rights in 1997. It would have been interesting if the movie itself addressed that — the villain is relentless and dangerous but his goal is worthless.
Here’s my way of putting it. My favorite Bond movie overall is From Russia With Love. But if someone asked me to give them only one Bond movie to capture the series, I’d say Goldfinger.
Unless that person told me they just weren’t up for watching a 60s movie (or they’d heard about the forced kissing scene and was out). Then I’d tell them to watch Tomorrow Never Dies.
It wasn’t the best. It wasn’t even the best Brosnan. But every single thing that makes this series good and great is there.
Yes! That is my favorite Brosnan one by a huge margin and is in my top 5 of all Bonds. One additional aspect that I think is really overlooked: It’s a short runtime. This Bond movie never drags and keeps the action and story moving. So many Bonds (and other movies) could do well to trim about 10 mins out. This one never feels bloated.
I could not agree more! While some movies (Apocalypse Now, Heat, Godfather etc) are worthy of the 2-3hr mark, it just feels bloated for 90% of movies. Especially popcorn fare like Bond films and comedies! (Seriously, Judd Apatow needs to be fed to piranhas, alligators, shot with a giant laser etc. for this shit)
For sure! Same could be said for most of Roger Moore’s movies and even Diamonds are Forever. I love OHMSS (despite Lazenby…fine, but not great) and it certainly could lose about 10-15. Even The Living Daylights probably could have trimmed some of the Afghan scenes a bit. Sometimes more is just more.
“But Sam Mendes’ first Bond movie has more in common with Christopher Nolan’s second Batman movie than just its villain, or the fact that it’s the obvious stand-out of a more generally mixed run of films.”This strikes me as being wrong. It’s generally accepted that Begins is excellent. TDKR is the standout in that it’s so much worse than either of the first two. Skyfall is definitely the standout of QoS, Skyfall, and Spectre, but Casino Royale was a huge critical and commercial hit, so that makes 2 of 4 Bonds that were good.
Begins was highly regarded at the time as the refreshing reboot that the Batman films needed, and it still holds up as a really good superhero movie, if one that maybe takes a bit too long for the superhero to actually show up. It’s really only because no film could live up to the sheer amount of, frankly, critical onanism that The Dark Knight received (yeah I’m going there, Dark Knight is still good but it’s become incredibly overrated) that it could ever be conceivably be conceived as “mixed”.The Dark Knight Rises is a definite cliff-drop, though.
I’d say Batman Begins is a better but less ambitious movie than TDK. TDK’s really good, and its highs are great, but it’s not as wall-to-wall consistent as Begins.
Yeah, great point. I’d say it’s trying to emulate the novelistic epic crime films of the past, but it doesn’t quite hit it, so it ends up feeling episodic.
I thought the one thing Rises had going for it was that stretched period of time. So many super hero movies are over in a day or two, kind of nice to see the passage of time for once. They just made too many “3rd movie in a trilogy” mistakes to be good.
Begins is also lot more distinctive. TDK runs through a lot of clichés, and pretty much dares the audience to say out loud how predictable (and at times nonsensical) it is. It’s the stupid person’s idea of a clever film. Begins took fewer shortcuts, and more risks.
Yeah, Begins could have been a disaster, but no one was expecting much after Batman & Robin. It managed to create a whole fresh look after a decade of Burton/Schumacher stuck in the public’s mind. People joke about the repeated killing of Thomas & Martha in media, but Begins was the first origin story for Batman in any major media – even Batman the Animated Series used it as backstory for Mask of the Phantasm which about on 500 people had seen by 2005. One of the biggest things Begins gets right is its use of villains – rather than do a Batman ‘66 style villain team-up, what if each one just has a specific purpose? You have R’az, Scarecrow, Zsasz, and Falcone and they all fit into the story. Looks like The Batman might be doing the same thing with its stacked cast.
Bond is a series that was incestuous with popular trends. I mean the psychedelic opening to Man With The Golden Gun is clearly cashing in on that trend. Albert Broccoli I believe was pretty up front about chasing trends, I’ll give him that.
I always thought Skyfall had more in common with Dark Knight Rises tonally, but that’s all coincidence since they were released in the same year. There’s something about Skyfall’s tone and deliberate plotting that is very Nolan-ish. I have a hard time getting past the fact that Skyfall’s main plot points are such a mash-up of GoldenEye (rogue 00-agent) and The World Is Not Enough (attack MI6, personal vendetta against M). The finale is definitely unique, but I don’t think that means it’s necessarily good.
I LOVED how they would hold off on musical score back then. You wouldn’t get a theme until shit really got crazy. After a few mortar shells were lobbed from the boat behind. I always thought that the music-less action pieces were meant to say “this is Tuesday for Bond. You think he deserves music?”.
Oh, I wish I had the time to dredge up all of the shit I learned years ago about the studio looking on at The Bourne Identity and their realisation that “shit, we’re fucked”. I’ll say this now though: Bourne torpedoed the Bond franchise and it’s been sinking ever since. And what’s increasingly obvious as the years (decades!) roll by – The Bourne Identity and it’s two sister films still feel incredibly fresh compared to any of the Bond films.
Only in terms of fight scenes. Bourne was always single-person stakes. Bond movies have huge stakes. Bourne never had a helicopter fight, or went to a nice dinner, or checked into a hotel.
I’ve always found the Bourne films to be incredibly overrated. I barely hear anyone talk about them these days, so it’s weird to claim that they torpedoed a franchise that has thus far outlived them.
Babs Brocolli once gave an interview to Empire where she stated that the Bourne films caused worry because they were being received far better by non-UK audiences. Never underestimate the ability of the Bond franchise to associate the number of films they’ve made with “quality”. They’re time-capsules of the era in which they were made, often with shitty female sidekicks (Stacey Sutton, anyone, the Shrieking Nitwit from A View To A Kill? How about Christmas Jones?) ludicrous villains and ridiculous technology – and no, I’m not talking about the stealth car (good lord)…
Oh sure. I have no doubt that the Bourne filme caused some worry at the time, but their cultural relevance has waned while James Bond is still going strong as a brand. Which is the proper way to measure him since the movies have never been particularly artful. They’re fun trash that makes lots of money and that’s fine.
It was a weird time to make Bourne movies because the heyday of Ludlum’s Bourne books were the 1980s and 1990s — they used to be these thick books that you bought at the airport to read on the plane before we had phones and tablets to entertain us. Ludlum was actually dead a year before the first movie came out.
I liked it quite a bit at the time. Though I was never into the quick-cut action scenes where you can barely tell what’s going on. Mostly, I just got tired of people slobbering all over the original trilogy and acting like they were action masterpieces. They’re solidly enjoyable, but not anything special, in my opinion.
That… kind of seems backward to me. The Bourne Identity came out three years after the terrible The World is Not Enough, and the same year as the unspeakably execrable Die Another Day. The franchise had gotten itself on the wrong tracks. But they reset it, and the result has been a stunning success. Other than QoS, the Craig films have each been critically loved (they all have better RT and Metacritic scores than any Bond film since the original trilogy (except that Thunderball had a better RT score than NTtD)), and also hugely popular with audiences (in real, inflation-adjusted terms, the first Craig film did marginally worse than the last two Brosnan films, but otherwise the Craig films have had far higher grosses than any other Bond film).It’s hard to see a franchise enjoying its highest critical ratings AND blockbuster success as ‘torpedoed’ and ‘sinking’. Arguably Bourne was part of what gave the producers a much-needed kick to improve after the Brosnan era, but it hardly torpedoed them…
On the flip side of that, Bond has 5 times the films (yes, of wildly varying quality), and hasn’t tried to get Jeremy Renner to helm any of them. Hell, even Matt Damon’s fourth turn as Bourne wasn’t spectacular (probably a given, as you’ve only acknowledged the first three, which are absolutely great).If any franchise is putting pressure on Bond at this point, it’s Mission: Impossible.
The first Bourne film was pretty enjoyable. After that the nonsense shaky-cam action sequences were torture. I come to action movies, and Bond in particular, for good fight choreography. QoS chasing Bourne’s incoherent action sucked big time.
I know, right!? That’s why I can’t escape all these endless articles and arguments over whose going to play the next Jason Bourne! Is it going to be Idris Elba? Hugh Jackman?Should it be a woman? Good Lord, remember the absolute furore over the announcement that it was going to be Jeremy Renner, just because he was blond?!?!?
The Bond franchise managed to survive Bonnie and Clyde and the movement it started, literally called “New Hollywood.” Hell, I’m having trouble even finding an influence on the series, although for all I know a bunch of crew members died in the making of The Spy Who Loved Me (there’s a reason auteur/New Hollywood couldn’t make it out of the 1970’s).
I wouldn’t say that the Bourne franchise torpedoed Bond, considering that Bond have still raked in shitload of money.But I agree that Bourne films are still great and fresh comparing to several other contemporary action films (at least from Identity to Legacy, the most recent film Jason Bourne fell way short of greatness). It’s far more thrilling to watch these kind of kinetic actions that tries their best to beat down our heroes with realistic stakes.
They didn’t torpedo the Bond franchise, they just pushed their action sequences up a notch. Bourne films are basically a 95-minute chase sequence with paper-thin plot that are completely indistinguishable from each other.
Torpedoed? No. Thematically altered? Absolutely. The idea of Bond being strapped to a chair in a filthy underground storage room and having his nuts caved in with a knotted rope would have been unthinkable a few years prior, and that grit has been with the franchise since. I don’t think it had to be that way, since both the Bourne movies and every superhero franchise had the dark side of action film well covered and something more fun (if perhaps not as silly) as typical Bond flicks would probably have found a receptive audience.
I was just watching Octopussy and realised how strong the guy must be who crushes the dice into powder. I mean, imagine how much oressure you’d need to apply. He’d be stronger than machinery. Also Die Another Day is chasing a trend for awful films.
That scene isn’t that bad and it’s actually Liard Hamilton surfing. THE shitty para-surfing scene comes later in Iceland. The special effects on that shot are insanely bad.
I found it funny that it was trying to be like the Vin Diesel “James Bond + X Games” flick “xXx,” but that same year, “The Bourne Identity” came out and made them both look lame.
And this isn’t even taking into account the dangerous microplastics now in the environment thanks to his crushing. I bet the bad guy didn’t even consider this.
Now I’m imagining The Guy From Harlem as James Bond in Live And Let Die. “Really tough, burnt meat and shitty scotch. Shaken, not stirred.”“A man comes. He travels quickly. He has purpose. He comes over water. He travels with others. He will oppose. He brings violence and destruction but NOBODY EVER SEES HIM!”“You got ONE crocodile, I got TWO ways to disable one!”*during the boat chase scene* “🎶 Look at that boat, look at that boat, look at that boat, look at that boat, look at that boat goin’ byyyy… 🎶,
So what’s gonna be next? Game of Thrones: Bond dies two thirds into the movie. 24: Bond uses torture to get info. West World: The main villain is a robot manufacturer and his henchman a robot. John Wick: Someone kills Bond’s dog. Passenger 69: Bond and a bunch of hijackers bang a stewardess while his love interest has trouble passing airport security…
Frozen: Bond’s emotional detachment is due to his older sister not wanting to make a snowman with him as a child. But it turns out that said sister has ice powers that she was taught to be afraid and ashamed of!
Not bad, but I think the series should take a more arthouse turn instead.Bond has to hit on an escalating series of unlikely sports bets after getting himself in trouble by pawning one of Scottie Pippen’s championship rings.Bond, M, Q, and Moneypenny go on a mission to a nature-loving Scandinavian death cult. Bond dresses as a bear to seduce the newly elected May Queen.007 and 003 get stuck on an otherwise uninhabited island with a lighthouse on a stakeout. They both masterbate and fart a lot and Bond screws a mermaid.
Bond Club: Turns out James Bond has been a figment of Q’s imagination this whole time. The damage, destruction and rampant womanising however was all real. Theme tune by Pixies.
Game of Thrones: Bond dies two thirds into the movie.GoT obviously ripped that off from Goldeneye, where Sean Bean “dies” at the start the movie. I’m sure the big thing GRRM is trying to incorporate Ned’s decapitated head back into the narrative as a big bad named Janus, um, Two-Face? erm, Duo Countenance…
And the Bond Played On: 007 takes down a cabal of self-centered researchers scheming to perpetuate the AIDS epidemic in order to further their own careers.Cold War side-plots for additional flavor.
honestly, the john wick thing sounds pretty plausible. license to kill was ahead of its time in just putting james bond in a generic action revenge movie vaguely shaped like a bond movie.
I’m hoping for some influence from The Americans: the entire film is Bond deep undercover (cast with a new actor so we don’t even find out who Bond is until they reveal their name in the final scene), randomly murdering ordinary people, and at the climax of the film we spend 8 minutes watching people digging a hole in silence…
That shot from License to Kill – is that Benicio D. Toro or Harry C. Junior? Also, I’m not sure what Skyfall stole from The Dark Knight that The Dark Knight didn’t already steal from Silence of the Lambs and about 20 years of ‘Thrillers” that came after.
I had no clue who del Toro was at that time, so that still stopped me cold. I wouldn’t have guessed he was old enough to play a meaningful role at that time.
You’re missing the 2 70s Bonds (LALD & TMWTGG, I think) that tried to cash in on the then popular good ol’ boy smash ’em up trend. There was that Southern sheriff that Bond encounters twice, who was clearly a forerunner of Roscoe P Coltrane.
I don’t know that the appearance of “Sheriff Pepper” in TMWTGG was really intended to run with the good ol’ boy smash ‘em up trend, so much as just trying to milk a character that audiences seemed to like — in the same way we tend to get 4 or 5 subsequent rehashings of a marginally successful Saturday Night Live sketch.
I feel like it preceded it. Smokey and the Bandit is pretty seminal there and it’s a few years later. And if you disagree with me I have to question your motivations by saying, “ON HOOOOOOOOO’S SAAAAAAHHHHDE?!?!”
White Lightning was released a year earlier and was at least a sleeper hit, enough to warrant a sequel. And Macon County Line and Dirty Mary and Crazy Larry were released the same year, which tells me there was something in the zeitgeist.
What do most of these movies have in common? They fucking suck.
From Russia With Love is the exception. That is actually one of the best Bond movies ever and it is the one they always name-check when they say, “We’ve gotten too far away from the spirit of Bond.”
Live and Let Die? Embarrassingly bad. Man with the Golden Gun? An absolute travesty of film Moonraker? Some fun camp, but the pew pew pew is hideous. Octopussy? This was a serious stretch on the slideshow’s part, tying that to Indiana Jones. But that’s a fun movie. Licence to Kill? A waste of Dalton’s talent and an incredible performance by Robert Davi. Quantum of Solace/Skyfall? One is the worst Bond movie and one is the most overrated.
Bond movie plots should be one of the three following: 1) An enemy spy agency wants something and Bond stops them from getting it (From Russia With Love; For Your Eyes Only; Casino Royale) 2) Someone wants to kill a lot of people/cause a lot of damage to blow up the world and start over or to make a lot of money (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Spy Who Loved Me, Goldeneye) 3) Someone wants to corner the market by eliminating competitors or damaging existing stock (Goldfinger, The Living Daylights, Tomorrow Never Dies, The World is Not Enough)
Most of the good movies, and a few of the bad (A View to A Kill is basically Goldfinger with microchips instead of gold and instead of a Connery at the top of his game, has Moore looking like his own wax figurine left out on a hot day) use those three plots.
They’re not wrong, though. To this day, I cannot fathom the regard given to Skyfall, the film that gives Bond daddy issues and ends with a riff on Home Alone.
Skyfall is falling down the charts. Try watching it a second time. It doesn’t hold up at all.
Arguably, you could say the same thing about The Dark Knight Rises. Also, I’ve noticed a phenomenon with Bonds whereby the new guy comes in being lauded as such a breath of fresh air and a return to form compared with the old guy, and then by the end of his run everyone talks about how the series has gone off the rails and needs to get back to basics. This holds most true with Brosnan and Craig. Dalton the first part holds, but his tenure brief enough and departure abrupt enough the second part not so much (though I do recall fans gushing over how Goldeneye was more like a “real” Bond film after the disappointing performance of L2K). As for Moore, the second part definitely holds. The first is kind of shaky, since Moore technically succeeded Connery (who returned after Lazenby’s single turn), and the vast majority of fans and critics consider Connery to be ever superior. However, upon rewatch Diamonds Are Forever is a rather creaky (though, admittedly, enjoyably campy) offering featuring an out of shape Sean Connery wearing a hideous toupee and phoning in his performance. Whatever Live and Let Die’s failings, at least it features a Bond who looks like he’s interested in being there.
The plot of a Bond movie is pretty incidental. It’s mostly about style. I think the mistake of the Craig years was in trying to get dark and gritty. Casino Royale mostly avoided this and is the best of the bunch for that reason. Bond should be going to exotic locales and meeting exotic women. He should face peril, but not ugliness. If this means making them period pieces, so be it.
Bond isn’t Bourne. They need to repeat that to themselves as often as possible.
Not only should the places be nice and the people pretty, but there really doesn’t need to be all that much connecting tissue from one movie to the next. And for the love of Blofeld’s cat, no one gives a fuck about Bond’s backstory.
At some point, I wish the producers would have realized that Matt Damon with Bourne, Tom Cruise with the MI series, Vin Diesel with XXX and even Mike Myers with Austin Powers, were all trying to be Bond.
Instead, they treated it like Bond had to be Bourne or Ethan Hunt.
Mike Myers with Austin Powers, were all trying to be Bond. You mean the comedies about a womanizing British secret agent whose best days were in the 1960s were referencing Bond? Who knew?
Many, many seconds and thirds on not caring about the backstory.I don’t mind if they want to hint at some backstory now and then, or even have some running character arc in the background between films so long as it doesn’t take away from the plot of each one. But pretending that Bond’s personal history is literally the most important thing in the world, as in Spectre, is just ridiculous. And, frankly, a betrayal of the premise of the series: part of the whole point of Bond is that he’s not some rogue hero, he’s an anonymous civil servant on a government salary. Bond can sometimes question whether sacrificing everything for Queen and Empire is really the right call, but if that’s not at least the expectation then it’s no longer Bond. Making Bond the focus, as in Spectre, fails to understand this.
Not to say that Casino Royale isn’t dark and gritty, it is, but only in certain spots: The intro, the stairwell fight, and the torture- Other than that, it’s mostly still a pretty stylish 007 flick, which I agree about. For whatever reason, the sequels doubled down on those few dark and gritty elements way to hard, way too much as the Craig era went on
Which of course makes it problematic since it can make Bond a dangerously unironic celebration of the colonial British mindset. This is why Skyfall is often cited as a good modern Bond; it’s the one that came closest to admitting that Bond is a tool of a dead empire desperately grasping for relevance.
As an aside, you might want to hit the dismiss button on Syfiqjaber of Mars. He’s a Snyder Cultist that uses marginalized people as props to frame Zach Snyder as a White Savior…
Octopussy? This was a serious stretch on the slideshow’s part, tying that to Indiana Jones. But that’s a fun movie. Think so? Watch the trailer from about 1:15 onwards:Ironically, Indiana Jones arguably went on to copy Bond in Temple of Doom, as both films feature a gross-out dining scene in an Indian palace.Also, I will defend License to Kill to the death. I rank it right up there with From Russia With Love, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and For Your Eyes Only as one of the few Bond movies that (1) has a story that stays mostly grounded in reality (with little flourishes of fantasy or outrageousness every once and a while to spice things up), and (2) characters with believable, plausible motivations, including Bond himself. In other words, more of an action movie for grownups than a live action cartoon.
Oh, how I long for the days when the franchise wasn’t afraid of embracing it’s Bond-ness. The theme, the beautiful women, the class and style, the fun, the gadgets, using the theme when 007 gets badassed, the gun barrel at the beginning. . . .
I’m with you on Licence to Kill. One change probably saves it.
Don’t make Bond go rogue. Keep the Leiter plot (yes, a fairly nasty fridging is involved); Keep the drug story. Keep the setting.
But it shouldn’t take terribly long for anyone to come up with a reason MI6 would be interested in taking out a South American drug kingpin.
Make going after Sanchez an official, sanctioned mission with a personal edge. That takes it out of the Steven Seagal knock-off and into a real and gritty Bond movie.
I’m honestly shocked that Temple of Doom came after Octopussy.Also, it’s hilarious that you can just hear the beginning of Bond saying “Sit!” to the tiger.
A big issue with Craig’s run is that the writers learned the wrong lesson from Casino Royale: it doesn’t always have to be personal to be interesting.Yes, Vesper broke though and gave us a hint of what makes Bond, Bond. But after that, just let Bond be Bond – an agent who foils the plans of evil secret organizations. Quantom of Solace (the only Craig movie where Bond doesn’t resign MI6, mind you) was on the right track by creating a new Spectre (Quantom). After Bond’s personal loss, Bond sees that the stakes are raised and there is a larger threat out there that even the main villain wasn’t above. Then Skyfall and Spectre went and made it a family affair again. They couldn’t have fumbled the reintroduction of Blofeld worse.
It should have been a fireable and perhaps jailable offense to so badly screw up getting to use SPECTRE and Blofeld for the first time in 45 years.
Here’s the other trouble. Lea Seydoux is a lovely and talented actress. But if you gave me the choice of watching Craig and Seydoux have actual sex in front of me and watching Craig and Eva Green talk to each other over coffee and asked me which one was sexier, I’d say it was Craig and Eva Green.
I also realize that the mid-2000s Bond is supposed to be a corrective of a kind to the 60s misogyny. But Fleming’s Bond took his experience with Vesper (and getting his balls whacked up to his throat) and became MORE of a sexist, misogynist pig.
Also, Seydoux is no Diana Rigg. They couldn’t find an actress who who could stand toe-to-toe with Craig? It makes the whole OHMSS-style ending fall apart, like he’s quitting and taking his hot young secretary with him during a mid-life crisis. Everyone at MI6 is like, “he’s done this before, he’ll be back on Monday.”
Seydoux is absolutely an actor on Craig’s level, if you aren’t familiar with her other work. Spectre didn’t make the best use of her, by any means, which is true of most of the cast.
Didn’t say anything about her ability to act, just that she is the wrong actress for the role. Swann is a child for Bond to save, maybe not to run off with. They tried to make her strong and resourceful to a degree, but Seydoux just doesn’t pull off the same stature of Rigg or Greene.
Yes. Wholehearted agreement with everything you just said. I cannot WAIT for a Bond movie where he just goes on a mission. “This time, it’s personal!” doesn’t work when it’s been “personal” for 5 straight movies.
Quantom of Solace (the only Craig movie where Bond doesn’t resign MI6, mind you)
I think this has become to Bond films what blowing up the Enterprise is to Star Trek movies. At first it was sort of, “OMG, how could they do that?!” but after the second or third iteration, it barely even merits mention.
I don’t know if chasing trends has led to weaker Bond entries or not, but amongst the library, these do tend to stand out because of it (for better or worse). From Russia With Love is the best by far, but I’m a personal fan of a few others. Tommor Never Dies is decent, and I like Roger Moore’s performance in Live and Let Die, more than I like the movie itself. For his debut, I think he was still trying to be a serious Bond before they lightned him up. Besides the clown shenanigans, I think Octopussy is actually good and underrated, and License to Kill is a straight up banger- like a proto-Casino Royale in its edgy tone)
Skyfall and Spectre, both by Sam Mendes, were about crazy nutcase targeting ONLY James Bond and not ending the world, and are the worst Bond movies ever.
I’ll never forgive the Bourne franchise for infecting Bond with shaky-cam in Quantum of Solace. The action in that movie is completely incomprehensible.
Oh god, was that the one that had the brilliant idea to dress both Bond and his opponent all in black and then shoot the scaffold fight in long shots where you couldn’t tell which combatant was which?
I think the saddest thing about the Craig Bonds is bending to the other franchises that were riding on Bond’s coattails – Austin Powers and Bourne. Bond is a fucking leader to these movies, not a follower. Bond is the OG. Adapting to the imitators is kind pathetic.
Right!? In the 70’s the Bond filmd were surfing trends, to be sure. But the producers have to understand that Bonf sets the standards, they have no need to chase trends.
I hadn’t thought about it until now – but even the classic Bond opening title sequence (graphical silhouettes, abstract shapes, the spiral gun barrel) owe a LOT to Saul Bass’s iconic title sequences to Hitchcock (Vertigo, Psycho, NNW etc).
Two things. First, while Silva does have a lot of TDK Joker in him, Skyfall also has a good bit of the plot of TDKR in it, with Bond quitting, being too old and physically shot to come back. So I just wonder if Nolan had a meeting with the Bond people before TDK…Also surprising that this inventory misses Never Say Never Again ripping off War Games and/or the Last Starfighter, with Largo’s “Come play my video game in this casino!” scene.
Never Say Never Again isn’t considered a canonical “broccoli” James Bond movie, that’s why it’s not on the list. Same thing with the original Casino Royale movie.
NSNA isn’t the best Bond film, but it’s definitely the best Bond parody.So much scenery gets chewed, and so many winks at the camera, and Babara Carrera is fucking delightfully batshit.
Ha. This was neat. I wouldn’t have noticed some of these if they weren’t pointed out, and now I’ll never be able to not see it. But some were obvious, of course. The most egregious to me is Moonraker, a movie I truly, completely dislike because the influences are so obvious. Sometimes these things can make an interesting fit for 007. Other times, not so much. Like it’s amazing just how poorly James Bond and Jason Borne mesh together, when you’d think it’d make for a great combination
“the influences are so obvious” The thing with Moonraker is, it’s very self-aware. The influences are obvious on purpose, it’s not trying to fool anyone. I mean, the security keypad plays the Close Encounters tune. The foxhunt trumpeter plays Also Sprach Zarathustra.
I get that the themes don’t have to exactly match the actual film, but I’m still SMH that the allegedly blaxploitational Bond film, Live and Let Die, didn’t have a funk soundtrack; instead, they went with Paul McCartney and Wings. It’s still a great song, but obviously a tribute from one British icon to another.
I hope that Daniel Craig returns for a Bond video game. This way they can create a compelling story without all the budgetary issues.Daniel Craig needs to go to Marvel for a role. ION Productions can license Bond to Marvel, too, even if they recast.
Daniel Craig needs to go to Marvel for a role. ION Productions can license Bond to Marvel, too, even if they recast.Fuck. No. Just no. Don’t need Bond in a shitty Disney film.
With no survey done, but i would say that GOLDFINGER is universally the most liked and notable to fans. The painted gold woman (Jill in the movie) is so iconic, that when she died earlier this year, it was newsorthy is telling of that movies popularity. the plot is absurb viewed through today’s lense, but in its time up until the social media age, this is hands down the best and most enduring. Give me NON-PC Bond.
also, Specter is clearly inspired by Mission Impossible with the concept of the “Bond team/family”. I am excited for the No Time to Die, but from reviews it sounds like this one is also running (hehe) with the Mission Impossible themes.
I always forget how Moonraker has some of the best Bond music. TBS (I think) had just started doing their Bond marathons in the mid-80’s, and pre-teen Rogue loved it. Even then I knew Moonraker was cheesy as hell, but whenever Jaws was on screen it was pure gold. I’d love to see a breakdown of what cliches the first Austin Powers movie stole specifically from Bond films.
Live and Let Die will always be one of the most baffling Bond films to me, especially considering it was Moore’s first outing. You already have to sell people on a new actor playing Bond, and now you’re throwing him in a genre that’s completely out of his element. And thanks to Baron Samedi you have actual fucking magic to boot!
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It always bothered me that they had the Thais in TMWTGG doing kung fu, instead of Muay Thai, even though they had krabi krabong as the opening act for Moore’s cheap kick…
I strongly suspect that the fight choreographer on a 70s James Bond movie was some silver fox with a questionable military background who found the term “Orientals” more than adequate.
I’d add in that with the casting of Michelle Yeoh and her awesome elaborately choreographed fight scenes, ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’ was a fairly obvious attempt to cash-in on Jackie Chan’s resurgence in the 90’s. Sure, as the careers of Steven Seagal and JCVD can attest, martial arts in movies had never really gone away in the 80’s but they tended to be fairly standard B-Movie fare with little in the way of spectacular choreography, stuntwork and use of the surrounding environment, Buster Keaton style.Tomorrow Never Dies however was hot on the heels of Rumble in the Bronx, First Strike and Supercop and managed to get in ahead of the pack before The Matrix, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Rush Hour took the West’s previous dalliances with Martial Arts in film and turned it into a long-term de facto relationship.
Tomorrow Never Dies is super underrated. It’s got some incredibly memorable sequences, villains and setpieces.
I loved it when it came out as I was heavily into Hong Kong cinema* in my teens back in the 90’s but you could never see any of it on the big screen. I’d also always loved Bond films and anything with good practical effects and legit, spectacular stuntwork so TND was a match made in heaven.I may also have had a bit of a crush on Michelle Yeoh. (Still do tbh) *ok, when I say Hong Kong cinema I really mean kung fu flicks and violent gangster epics. I didn’t watch a Wong Kar Wai film until my 30’s and I still think he could improve by giving his protagonists a pistol in each hand.
It’s a Bond movie I’ve always had a huge soft spot for. It was the first one I saw multiple times – first in the cinema and then again several times on a trip between Australia and the UK in 98.Goldeneye is my favourite Brosnan one but Tomorrow is close behind.
TND is pretty shallow and offers little new (other than Yeoh). But it’s also great fun! Michelle Yeoh! Falling from a skyscraper! The grumpy professional torturer! Rupert Murdoch as the villain! Grizzly death by rotating blades! Judi Dench AND Geoffrey Palmer! A touch of personal stakes, but not too much! Remote-controlled cars!It’s not the best ever, but it was a fine, fun, memorable follow-up to Goldeneye. It’s the next one where things went off-course…
I will still stand by the opinion that the Bond-Trevelyan fight in the dish at the end of the film is one of the best, if not the best, boss fight in the franchise. Martin Campbell knows how to film a fist fight.
“A crush on Michelle Yeoh” actually sounds like a Bond-quality pun, since she could literally crush any of us.
That’s really more Famke Janssen’s thing.
The big problem with it is the villain’s plan. No tech-savvy media mogul would be chasing a century of broadcast rights in 1997. It would have been interesting if the movie itself addressed that — the villain is relentless and dangerous but his goal is worthless.
Here’s my way of putting it. My favorite Bond movie overall is From Russia With Love. But if someone asked me to give them only one Bond movie to capture the series, I’d say Goldfinger.
Unless that person told me they just weren’t up for watching a 60s movie (or they’d heard about the forced kissing scene and was out). Then I’d tell them to watch Tomorrow Never Dies.
It wasn’t the best. It wasn’t even the best Brosnan. But every single thing that makes this series good and great is there.
Yes! That is my favorite Brosnan one by a huge margin and is in my top 5 of all Bonds. One additional aspect that I think is really overlooked: It’s a short runtime. This Bond movie never drags and keeps the action and story moving. So many Bonds (and other movies) could do well to trim about 10 mins out. This one never feels bloated.
I could not agree more! While some movies (Apocalypse Now, Heat, Godfather etc) are worthy of the 2-3hr mark, it just feels bloated for 90% of movies. Especially popcorn fare like Bond films and comedies! (Seriously, Judd Apatow needs to be fed to piranhas, alligators, shot with a giant laser etc. for this shit)
Spectre and Skyfall could each shave off a good 30 minutes and lose nothing…
For sure! Same could be said for most of Roger Moore’s movies and even Diamonds are Forever. I love OHMSS (despite Lazenby…fine, but not great) and it certainly could lose about 10-15. Even The Living Daylights probably could have trimmed some of the Afghan scenes a bit. Sometimes more is just more.
Apparently Yeoh brought in her own stunt team from Hong Kong so she’d have folks in the scenes that could keep up with her.
“But Sam Mendes’ first Bond movie has more in common with Christopher Nolan’s second Batman movie than just its villain, or the fact that it’s the obvious stand-out of a more generally mixed run of films.”This strikes me as being wrong. It’s generally accepted that Begins is excellent. TDKR is the standout in that it’s so much worse than either of the first two. Skyfall is definitely the standout of QoS, Skyfall, and Spectre, but Casino Royale was a huge critical and commercial hit, so that makes 2 of 4 Bonds that were good.
Begins was highly regarded at the time as the refreshing reboot that the Batman films needed, and it still holds up as a really good superhero movie, if one that maybe takes a bit too long for the superhero to actually show up. It’s really only because no film could live up to the sheer amount of, frankly, critical onanism that The Dark Knight received (yeah I’m going there, Dark Knight is still good but it’s become incredibly overrated) that it could ever be conceivably be conceived as “mixed”.The Dark Knight Rises is a definite cliff-drop, though.
I’d say Batman Begins is a better but less ambitious movie than TDK. TDK’s really good, and its highs are great, but it’s not as wall-to-wall consistent as Begins.
Dark Knight is a lot more episodic and sort of feels like a condensed tv season, Rises feels the same way.
Yeah, great point. I’d say it’s trying to emulate the novelistic epic crime films of the past, but it doesn’t quite hit it, so it ends up feeling episodic.
I thought the one thing Rises had going for it was that stretched period of time. So many super hero movies are over in a day or two, kind of nice to see the passage of time for once. They just made too many “3rd movie in a trilogy” mistakes to be good.
Begins is also lot more distinctive. TDK runs through a lot of clichés, and pretty much dares the audience to say out loud how predictable (and at times nonsensical) it is. It’s the stupid person’s idea of a clever film. Begins took fewer shortcuts, and more risks.
Yeah, Begins could have been a disaster, but no one was expecting much after Batman & Robin. It managed to create a whole fresh look after a decade of Burton/Schumacher stuck in the public’s mind.
People joke about the repeated killing of Thomas & Martha in media, but Begins was the first origin story for Batman in any major media – even Batman the Animated Series used it as backstory for Mask of the Phantasm which about on 500 people had seen by 2005. One of the biggest things Begins gets right is its use of villains – rather than do a Batman ‘66 style villain team-up, what if each one just has a specific purpose? You have R’az, Scarecrow, Zsasz, and Falcone and they all fit into the story. Looks like The Batman might be doing the same thing with its stacked cast.
I think they are speaking broadly about DKR and QoS & Spectre as the “mixed”.
Can we get a “10,000 times movies chased Bond” write up as well.
That’s a long slide-show..
but think of all the sweet sweet clicks!
Kinja would implode.
Bond is a series that was incestuous with popular trends. I mean the psychedelic opening to Man With The Golden Gun is clearly cashing in on that trend. Albert Broccoli I believe was pretty up front about chasing trends, I’ll give him that.
“The Spy Who Loved Me” had a big ocean motif and a guy with metal teeth named “Jaws” fighting a shark 2 years after “Jaws” came out.
I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say Skyfall was chasing The Dark Knight because… it also had a memorable villain and was a good film?
They both have the bad guy covertly dressing as a police officer to blend in and launch a part of their plan?
they have very similar plot beats and i’m pretty sure even at the time of release people were making that comparison.
Both villains had messed up mouths.
If it borrowed from any film franchise, the Bond family manor defense sequence is more reminiscent of Home Alone than TDK.
I always thought Skyfall had more in common with Dark Knight Rises tonally, but that’s all coincidence since they were released in the same year. There’s something about Skyfall’s tone and deliberate plotting that is very Nolan-ish.
I have a hard time getting past the fact that Skyfall’s main plot points are such a mash-up of GoldenEye (rogue 00-agent) and The World Is Not Enough (attack MI6, personal vendetta against M). The finale is definitely unique, but I don’t think that means it’s necessarily good.
That jungle chase scene from Octopussy is so clunky and boring with no musical score to accompany it and it goes on for nearly 5 minutes.
I LOVED how they would hold off on musical score back then. You wouldn’t get a theme until shit really got crazy. After a few mortar shells were lobbed from the boat behind. I always thought that the music-less action pieces were meant to say “this is Tuesday for Bond. You think he deserves music?”.
When’s Bond gonna cook meth in his tighty-used-to-be-whiteys?
Breaking BondWe already had Better Call Bond with Bob Odenkirk. El Camino Royale?
Oh, I wish I had the time to dredge up all of the shit I learned years ago about the studio looking on at The Bourne Identity and their realisation that “shit, we’re fucked”. I’ll say this now though: Bourne torpedoed the Bond franchise and it’s been sinking ever since. And what’s increasingly obvious as the years (decades!) roll by – The Bourne Identity and it’s two sister films still feel incredibly fresh compared to any of the Bond films.
Only in terms of fight scenes. Bourne was always single-person stakes. Bond movies have huge stakes. Bourne never had a helicopter fight, or went to a nice dinner, or checked into a hotel.
I’ve always found the Bourne films to be incredibly overrated. I barely hear anyone talk about them these days, so it’s weird to claim that they torpedoed a franchise that has thus far outlived them.
Babs Brocolli once gave an interview to Empire where she stated that the Bourne films caused worry because they were being received far better by non-UK audiences. Never underestimate the ability of the Bond franchise to associate the number of films they’ve made with “quality”. They’re time-capsules of the era in which they were made, often with shitty female sidekicks (Stacey Sutton, anyone, the Shrieking Nitwit from A View To A Kill? How about Christmas Jones?) ludicrous villains and ridiculous technology – and no, I’m not talking about the stealth car (good lord)…
Oh sure. I have no doubt that the Bourne filme caused some worry at the time, but their cultural relevance has waned while James Bond is still going strong as a brand. Which is the proper way to measure him since the movies have never been particularly artful. They’re fun trash that makes lots of money and that’s fine.
It was a weird time to make Bourne movies because the heyday of Ludlum’s Bourne books were the 1980s and 1990s — they used to be these thick books that you bought at the airport to read on the plane before we had phones and tablets to entertain us. Ludlum was actually dead a year before the first movie came out.
The first Bourne film is genuinely quite good! [the sequels, not so much]
I liked it quite a bit at the time. Though I was never into the quick-cut action scenes where you can barely tell what’s going on. Mostly, I just got tired of people slobbering all over the original trilogy and acting like they were action masterpieces. They’re solidly enjoyable, but not anything special, in my opinion.
“Bourne torpedoed the Bond franchise”Hahahahahahaha, no.
That… kind of seems backward to me. The Bourne Identity came out three years after the terrible The World is Not Enough, and the same year as the unspeakably execrable Die Another Day. The franchise had gotten itself on the wrong tracks. But they reset it, and the result has been a stunning success. Other than QoS, the Craig films have each been critically loved (they all have better RT and Metacritic scores than any Bond film since the original trilogy (except that Thunderball had a better RT score than NTtD)), and also hugely popular with audiences (in real, inflation-adjusted terms, the first Craig film did marginally worse than the last two Brosnan films, but otherwise the Craig films have had far higher grosses than any other Bond film).It’s hard to see a franchise enjoying its highest critical ratings AND blockbuster success as ‘torpedoed’ and ‘sinking’. Arguably Bourne was part of what gave the producers a much-needed kick to improve after the Brosnan era, but it hardly torpedoed them…
On the flip side of that, Bond has 5 times the films (yes, of wildly varying quality), and hasn’t tried to get Jeremy Renner to helm any of them. Hell, even Matt Damon’s fourth turn as Bourne wasn’t spectacular (probably a given, as you’ve only acknowledged the first three, which are absolutely great).If any franchise is putting pressure on Bond at this point, it’s Mission: Impossible.
Yeah. I agree that the Mission: Impossible films are a much bigger rival at this point.
The first Bourne film was pretty enjoyable. After that the nonsense shaky-cam action sequences were torture. I come to action movies, and Bond in particular, for good fight choreography. QoS chasing Bourne’s incoherent action sucked big time.
I know, right!? That’s why I can’t escape all these endless articles and arguments over whose going to play the next Jason Bourne! Is it going to be Idris Elba? Hugh Jackman?Should it be a woman? Good Lord, remember the absolute furore over the announcement that it was going to be Jeremy Renner, just because he was blond?!?!?
The Bond franchise managed to survive Bonnie and Clyde and the movement it started, literally called “New Hollywood.” Hell, I’m having trouble even finding an influence on the series, although for all I know a bunch of crew members died in the making of The Spy Who Loved Me (there’s a reason auteur/New Hollywood couldn’t make it out of the 1970’s).
I wouldn’t say that the Bourne franchise torpedoed Bond, considering that Bond have still raked in shitload of money.But I agree that Bourne films are still great and fresh comparing to several other contemporary action films (at least from Identity to Legacy, the most recent film Jason Bourne fell way short of greatness). It’s far more thrilling to watch these kind of kinetic actions that tries their best to beat down our heroes with realistic stakes.
They didn’t torpedo the Bond franchise, they just pushed their action sequences up a notch. Bourne films are basically a 95-minute chase sequence with paper-thin plot that are completely indistinguishable from each other.
Torpedoed? No. Thematically altered? Absolutely. The idea of Bond being strapped to a chair in a filthy underground storage room and having his nuts caved in with a knotted rope would have been unthinkable a few years prior, and that grit has been with the franchise since. I don’t think it had to be that way, since both the Bourne movies and every superhero franchise had the dark side of action film well covered and something more fun (if perhaps not as silly) as typical Bond flicks would probably have found a receptive audience.
I wasn’t expecting the new one to be so heavily inspired by Metal Gear Solid, I must admit.
Haven’t seen it yet. But the nanomachine things sound like FOXDIE
You’re right, it is like that, and there’s a few other similarities too.
I’d be cool with Daniel Craig fighting a walking nuclear battle mech.
Well I don’t want to spoil the film by confirming or denying that.
Thank you
Because the release date kept us waiting?
Huh.
Hideo Kojima writing a Bond Flick? Talk about License to Homage.
Well, someday you walk through the rain, and someday you feed on a treefrog.
Metal Gear has borrowed from James Bond as well so turnabout is fair play.
Oh absolutely, I just wasn’t expecting it!
I was just watching Octopussy and realised how strong the guy must be who crushes the dice into powder. I mean, imagine how much oressure you’d need to apply. He’d be stronger than machinery. Also Die Another Day is chasing a trend for awful films.
Die Another Day did chase one particular trend: bullet time!
Also, extreme sports Bond surfing into North Korea!
Also, pretending Madonna was British!And could act!
That scene isn’t that bad and it’s actually Liard Hamilton surfing. THE shitty para-surfing scene comes later in Iceland. The special effects on that shot are insanely bad.
I found it funny that it was trying to be like the Vin Diesel “James Bond + X Games” flick “xXx,” but that same year, “The Bourne Identity” came out and made them both look lame.
Yep. Now I’m trying to remember when Austin Powers came out…
I remember next to nothing about Octopussy except Maude Adams and a to-this-day disbelief that a movie with that title could ever see wide release.
Octopussy is one of the few Bond movies I haven’t seen. Can’t get past the title.
I would expect tens of thousands of pounds of pressure. For reference, a great white shark has a bite force of 4000 PSI.
And this isn’t even taking into account the dangerous microplastics now in the environment thanks to his crushing. I bet the bad guy didn’t even consider this.
Now I’m imagining The Guy From Harlem as James Bond in Live And Let Die. “Really tough, burnt meat and shitty scotch. Shaken, not stirred.”“A man comes. He travels quickly. He has purpose. He comes over water. He travels with others. He will oppose. He brings violence and destruction but NOBODY EVER SEES HIM!”“You got ONE crocodile, I got TWO ways to disable one!”*during the boat chase scene* “🎶 Look at that boat, look at that boat, look at that boat, look at that boat, look at that boat goin’ byyyy… 🎶,
“The man has an 18 inch white top-hat, white face-paint, a walking cane, is 6 foot 6…but no one has ever SEEN THE MAN!”
So what’s gonna be next?
Game of Thrones: Bond dies two thirds into the movie.
24: Bond uses torture to get info.
West World: The main villain is a robot manufacturer and his henchman a robot.
John Wick: Someone kills Bond’s dog.
Passenger 69: Bond and a bunch of hijackers bang a stewardess while his love interest has trouble passing airport security…
Frozen: Bond’s emotional detachment is due to his older sister not wanting to make a snowman with him as a child. But it turns out that said sister has ice powers that she was taught to be afraid and ashamed of!
Up Bond’s Creek: The Bond family fortune disappears and James has to move into a Winnebago with his wacky family.
Ted Lasso: Bond saves the day with kindness, dad-jokes, and homemade biscuits.
Not bad, but I think the series should take a more arthouse turn instead.Bond has to hit on an escalating series of unlikely sports bets after getting himself in trouble by pawning one of Scottie Pippen’s championship rings.Bond, M, Q, and Moneypenny go on a mission to a nature-loving Scandinavian death cult. Bond dresses as a bear to seduce the newly elected May Queen.007 and 003 get stuck on an otherwise uninhabited island with a lighthouse on a stakeout. They both masterbate and fart a lot and Bond screws a mermaid.
Arthouse? Say no more! I know just the movie.
Bond cuts another agents hand with broken glass jealous of her success, then pisses his pants in public.
M, Moneypenny, Q, etc. all get Netflix series that tie into the main continuity.
Bond Club: Turns out James Bond has been a figment of Q’s imagination this whole time. The damage, destruction and rampant womanising however was all real. Theme tune by Pixies.
Auteur version of Bond just trying to make it on his own in NYC, a la: Louie, Master of None, Ramy, etc. etc.
Game of Thrones: Bond dies two thirds into the movie.GoT obviously ripped that off from Goldeneye, where Sean Bean “dies” at the start the movie. I’m sure the big thing GRRM is trying to incorporate Ned’s decapitated head back into the narrative as a big bad named Janus, um, Two-Face? erm, Duo Countenance…
And the Bond Played On: 007 takes down a cabal of self-centered researchers scheming to perpetuate the AIDS epidemic in order to further their own careers.Cold War side-plots for additional flavor.
honestly, the john wick thing sounds pretty plausible. license to kill was ahead of its time in just putting james bond in a generic action revenge movie vaguely shaped like a bond movie.
I’m hoping for some influence from The Americans: the entire film is Bond deep undercover (cast with a new actor so we don’t even find out who Bond is until they reveal their name in the final scene), randomly murdering ordinary people, and at the climax of the film we spend 8 minutes watching people digging a hole in silence…
“Game of Thrones: Bond dies two thirds into the movie.”GoldenEye already covered this when they killed Sean Bean.
Spectre borrowed from Goldmember.
That’s sadly true.
I’m Dougie!
That shot from License to Kill – is that Benicio D. Toro or Harry C. Junior? Also, I’m not sure what Skyfall stole from The Dark Knight that The Dark Knight didn’t already steal from Silence of the Lambs and about 20 years of ‘Thrillers” that came after.
Benicio.
I had no clue who del Toro was at that time, so that still stopped me cold. I wouldn’t have guessed he was old enough to play a meaningful role at that time.
It’s Benicio. Earlier in the film, he gives an extremely bizarre line reading involving the word ‘honeymoon’:A sign of things to come, perhaps.
You’re missing the 2 70s Bonds (LALD & TMWTGG, I think) that tried to cash in on the then popular good ol’ boy smash ’em up trend. There was that Southern sheriff that Bond encounters twice, who was clearly a forerunner of Roscoe P Coltrane.
I don’t know that the appearance of “Sheriff Pepper” in TMWTGG was really intended to run with the good ol’ boy smash ‘em up trend, so much as just trying to milk a character that audiences seemed to like — in the same way we tend to get 4 or 5 subsequent rehashings of a marginally successful Saturday Night Live sketch.
I feel like it preceded it. Smokey and the Bandit is pretty seminal there and it’s a few years later. And if you disagree with me I have to question your motivations by saying, “ON HOOOOOOOOO’S SAAAAAAHHHHDE?!?!”
White Lightning was released a year earlier and was at least a sleeper hit, enough to warrant a sequel. And Macon County Line and Dirty Mary and Crazy Larry were released the same year, which tells me there was something in the zeitgeist.
What do most of these movies have in common? They fucking suck.
From Russia With Love is the exception. That is actually one of the best Bond movies ever and it is the one they always name-check when they say, “We’ve gotten too far away from the spirit of Bond.”
Live and Let Die? Embarrassingly bad.
Man with the Golden Gun? An absolute travesty of film
Moonraker? Some fun camp, but the pew pew pew is hideous.
Octopussy? This was a serious stretch on the slideshow’s part, tying that to Indiana Jones. But that’s a fun movie.
Licence to Kill? A waste of Dalton’s talent and an incredible performance by Robert Davi.
Quantum of Solace/Skyfall? One is the worst Bond movie and one is the most overrated.
Bond movie plots should be one of the three following:
1) An enemy spy agency wants something and Bond stops them from getting it (From Russia With Love; For Your Eyes Only; Casino Royale)
2) Someone wants to kill a lot of people/cause a lot of damage to blow up the world and start over or to make a lot of money (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Spy Who Loved Me, Goldeneye)
3) Someone wants to corner the market by eliminating competitors or damaging existing stock (Goldfinger, The Living Daylights, Tomorrow Never Dies, The World is Not Enough)
Most of the good movies, and a few of the bad (A View to A Kill is basically Goldfinger with microchips instead of gold and instead of a Connery at the top of his game, has Moore looking like his own wax figurine left out on a hot day) use those three plots.
Bond movies should also be fun. The same goes for superhero movies.
Plus villains and henchmen in James Bond movies should all die in the most painful way possible.
Quantum of Solace/Skyfall? One is the worst Bond movie and one is the most overrated.Try not to cut yourself on all that edge.
They’re not wrong, though. To this day, I cannot fathom the regard given to Skyfall, the film that gives Bond daddy issues and ends with a riff on Home Alone.
Skyfall is falling down the charts. Try watching it a second time. It doesn’t hold up at all.
I’ve watched it a few times. It’s not perfect, but it’s not as bad as you’re making it out to be.
You’re both right: Skyfall ISN’T a bad film… but it’s ALSO wildly overrated. Or at least it was when it came out.
That’s fine by me.
Skyfall is falling down the charts. Try watching it a second time. It doesn’t hold up at all.
Arguably, you could say the same thing about The Dark Knight Rises.
Also, I’ve noticed a phenomenon with Bonds whereby the new guy comes in being lauded as such a breath of fresh air and a return to form compared with the old guy, and then by the end of his run everyone talks about how the series has gone off the rails and needs to get back to basics. This holds most true with Brosnan and Craig. Dalton the first part holds, but his tenure brief enough and departure abrupt enough the second part not so much (though I do recall fans gushing over how Goldeneye was more like a “real” Bond film after the disappointing performance of L2K).
As for Moore, the second part definitely holds. The first is kind of shaky, since Moore technically succeeded Connery (who returned after Lazenby’s single turn), and the vast majority of fans and critics consider Connery to be ever superior. However, upon rewatch Diamonds Are Forever is a rather creaky (though, admittedly, enjoyably campy) offering featuring an out of shape Sean Connery wearing a hideous toupee and phoning in his performance. Whatever Live and Let Die’s failings, at least it features a Bond who looks like he’s interested in being there.
I said overrated, not bad. It was rated like it was the greatest Bond movie ever and one of the greatest movies ever. That’s not the case
I guess when I hear someone say “It doesn’t hold up at all.” I assume that person doesn’t like it and thinks it’s bad.
exactly, one of them is craig’s second-best movie and the other one is fucking skyfall
He’s not wrong. Skyfall is mediocre at best and Quantum of Solace is pretty shit.
The plot of a Bond movie is pretty incidental. It’s mostly about style. I think the mistake of the Craig years was in trying to get dark and gritty. Casino Royale mostly avoided this and is the best of the bunch for that reason. Bond should be going to exotic locales and meeting exotic women. He should face peril, but not ugliness. If this means making them period pieces, so be it.
Bond isn’t Bourne. They need to repeat that to themselves as often as possible.
Not only should the places be nice and the people pretty, but there really doesn’t need to be all that much connecting tissue from one movie to the next. And for the love of Blofeld’s cat, no one gives a fuck about Bond’s backstory.
At some point, I wish the producers would have realized that Matt Damon with Bourne, Tom Cruise with the MI series, Vin Diesel with XXX and even Mike Myers with Austin Powers, were all trying to be Bond.
Instead, they treated it like Bond had to be Bourne or Ethan Hunt.
Mike Myers with Austin Powers, were all trying to be Bond.
You mean the comedies about a womanizing British secret agent whose best days were in the 1960s were referencing Bond? Who knew?
Many, many seconds and thirds on not caring about the backstory.I don’t mind if they want to hint at some backstory now and then, or even have some running character arc in the background between films so long as it doesn’t take away from the plot of each one. But pretending that Bond’s personal history is literally the most important thing in the world, as in Spectre, is just ridiculous. And, frankly, a betrayal of the premise of the series: part of the whole point of Bond is that he’s not some rogue hero, he’s an anonymous civil servant on a government salary. Bond can sometimes question whether sacrificing everything for Queen and Empire is really the right call, but if that’s not at least the expectation then it’s no longer Bond. Making Bond the focus, as in Spectre, fails to understand this.
Exactly. Blofeld shouldn’t know who the what the hell a James Bond is, nor should he care, let alone spend any energy trying to ruin his life.
Not to say that Casino Royale isn’t dark and gritty, it is, but only in certain spots: The intro, the stairwell fight, and the torture- Other than that, it’s mostly still a pretty stylish 007 flick, which I agree about. For whatever reason, the sequels doubled down on those few dark and gritty elements way to hard, way too much as the Craig era went on
Which of course makes it problematic since it can make Bond a dangerously unironic celebration of the colonial British mindset. This is why Skyfall is often cited as a good modern Bond; it’s the one that came closest to admitting that Bond is a tool of a dead empire desperately grasping for relevance.
As an aside, you might want to hit the dismiss button on Syfiqjaber of Mars. He’s a Snyder Cultist that uses marginalized people as props to frame Zach Snyder as a White Savior…
Octopussy? This was a serious stretch on the slideshow’s part, tying that to Indiana Jones. But that’s a fun movie. Think so? Watch the trailer from about 1:15 onwards:Ironically, Indiana Jones arguably went on to copy Bond in Temple of Doom, as both films feature a gross-out dining scene in an Indian palace.Also, I will defend License to Kill to the death. I rank it right up there with From Russia With Love, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and For Your Eyes Only as one of the few Bond movies that (1) has a story that stays mostly grounded in reality (with little flourishes of fantasy or outrageousness every once and a while to spice things up), and (2) characters with believable, plausible motivations, including Bond himself. In other words, more of an action movie for grownups than a live action cartoon.
Oh, how I long for the days when the franchise wasn’t afraid of embracing it’s Bond-ness. The theme, the beautiful women, the class and style, the fun, the gadgets, using the theme when 007 gets badassed, the gun barrel at the beginning. . . .
I’m with you on Licence to Kill. One change probably saves it.
Don’t make Bond go rogue. Keep the Leiter plot (yes, a fairly nasty fridging is involved); Keep the drug story. Keep the setting.
But it shouldn’t take terribly long for anyone to come up with a reason MI6 would be interested in taking out a South American drug kingpin.
Make going after Sanchez an official, sanctioned mission with a personal edge.
That takes it out of the Steven Seagal knock-off and into a real and gritty Bond movie.
I’m honestly shocked that Temple of Doom came after Octopussy.Also, it’s hilarious that you can just hear the beginning of Bond saying “Sit!” to the tiger.
Licence to Kill is great, it’s a great companion to OHMSS since Bond finally exacts revenge on a dead bride. And Cary Lowell is super underrated.
A big issue with Craig’s run is that the writers learned the wrong lesson from Casino Royale: it doesn’t always have to be personal to be interesting.Yes, Vesper broke though and gave us a hint of what makes Bond, Bond. But after that, just let Bond be Bond – an agent who foils the plans of evil secret organizations. Quantom of Solace (the only Craig movie where Bond doesn’t resign MI6, mind you) was on the right track by creating a new Spectre (Quantom). After Bond’s personal loss, Bond sees that the stakes are raised and there is a larger threat out there that even the main villain wasn’t above. Then Skyfall and Spectre went and made it a family affair again. They couldn’t have fumbled the reintroduction of Blofeld worse.
It should have been a fireable and perhaps jailable offense to so badly screw up getting to use SPECTRE and Blofeld for the first time in 45 years.
Here’s the other trouble. Lea Seydoux is a lovely and talented actress. But if you gave me the choice of watching Craig and Seydoux have actual sex in front of me and watching Craig and Eva Green talk to each other over coffee and asked me which one was sexier, I’d say it was Craig and Eva Green.
I also realize that the mid-2000s Bond is supposed to be a corrective of a kind to the 60s misogyny. But Fleming’s Bond took his experience with Vesper (and getting his balls whacked up to his throat) and became MORE of a sexist, misogynist pig.
Also, Seydoux is no Diana Rigg. They couldn’t find an actress who who could stand toe-to-toe with Craig? It makes the whole OHMSS-style ending fall apart, like he’s quitting and taking his hot young secretary with him during a mid-life crisis. Everyone at MI6 is like, “he’s done this before, he’ll be back on Monday.”
Seydoux is absolutely an actor on Craig’s level, if you aren’t familiar with her other work. Spectre didn’t make the best use of her, by any means, which is true of most of the cast.
Didn’t say anything about her ability to act, just that she is the wrong actress for the role. Swann is a child for Bond to save, maybe not to run off with. They tried to make her strong and resourceful to a degree, but Seydoux just doesn’t pull off the same stature of Rigg or Greene.
Yes. Wholehearted agreement with everything you just said.
I cannot WAIT for a Bond movie where he just goes on a mission. “This time, it’s personal!” doesn’t work when it’s been “personal” for 5 straight movies.
Completely agree.
Quantom of Solace (the only Craig movie where Bond doesn’t resign MI6, mind you)
I think this has become to Bond films what blowing up the Enterprise is to Star Trek movies. At first it was sort of, “OMG, how could they do that?!” but after the second or third iteration, it barely even merits mention.
Did someone force you to watch these movies or something? Sounds like, and call me crazy, this might not be the franchise for you.
I don’t know if chasing trends has led to weaker Bond entries or not, but amongst the library, these do tend to stand out because of it (for better or worse). From Russia With Love is the best by far, but I’m a personal fan of a few others. Tommor Never Dies is decent, and I like Roger Moore’s performance in Live and Let Die, more than I like the movie itself. For his debut, I think he was still trying to be a serious Bond before they lightned him up. Besides the clown shenanigans, I think Octopussy is actually good and underrated, and License to Kill is a straight up banger- like a proto-Casino Royale in its edgy tone)
Live and Let Die is begging for a remake. The drug plot especially, in light of Breaking Bad, Narcos and Ozark, could be an interesting take.
Just don’t do the redneck sheriff. Or the virgin losing her powers after getting fucked. Or the bad guy BLOWING UP!!!!
Can they still do the Voodoo related stuff like make the villain basically be the Voodoo god of death Baron Samedi?
I love that idea. They can drop the voodoo nonsense, too. But keep the song
me i think movies shouldn’t just be limited to a handful of pre-written plot points, but maybe i’m a bit unorthodox
Skyfall and Spectre, both by Sam Mendes, were about crazy nutcase targeting ONLY James Bond and not ending the world, and are the worst Bond movies ever.
Well that’s insane since Skyfall is often referred to as an example of a good Bond movie.
I’ll never forgive the Bourne franchise for infecting Bond with shaky-cam in Quantum of Solace. The action in that movie is completely incomprehensible.
Oh god, was that the one that had the brilliant idea to dress both Bond and his opponent all in black and then shoot the scaffold fight in long shots where you couldn’t tell which combatant was which?
I think the saddest thing about the Craig Bonds is bending to the other franchises that were riding on Bond’s coattails – Austin Powers and Bourne. Bond is a fucking leader to these movies, not a follower. Bond is the OG. Adapting to the imitators is kind pathetic.
Right!?
In the 70’s the Bond filmd were surfing trends, to be sure. But the producers have to understand that Bonf sets the standards, they have no need to chase trends.
And Spectre was inspired by a lobotomy
I hadn’t thought about it until now – but even the classic Bond opening title sequence (graphical silhouettes, abstract shapes, the spiral gun barrel) owe a LOT to Saul Bass’s iconic title sequences to Hitchcock (Vertigo, Psycho, NNW etc).
Two things. First, while Silva does have a lot of TDK Joker in him, Skyfall also has a good bit of the plot of TDKR in it, with Bond quitting, being too old and physically shot to come back. So I just wonder if Nolan had a meeting with the Bond people before TDK…Also surprising that this inventory misses Never Say Never Again ripping off War Games and/or the Last Starfighter, with Largo’s “Come play my video game in this casino!” scene.
Never Say Never Again isn’t considered a canonical “broccoli” James Bond movie, that’s why it’s not on the list. Same thing with the original Casino Royale movie.
NSNA isn’t the best Bond film, but it’s definitely the best Bond parody.So much scenery gets chewed, and so many winks at the camera, and Babara Carrera is fucking delightfully batshit.
Ha. This was neat. I wouldn’t have noticed some of these if they weren’t pointed out, and now I’ll never be able to not see it. But some were obvious, of course. The most egregious to me is Moonraker, a movie I truly, completely dislike because the influences are so obvious. Sometimes these things can make an interesting fit for 007. Other times, not so much. Like it’s amazing just how poorly James Bond and Jason Borne mesh together, when you’d think it’d make for a great combination
“the influences are so obvious”
The thing with Moonraker is, it’s very self-aware. The influences are obvious on purpose, it’s not trying to fool anyone. I mean, the security keypad plays the Close Encounters tune. The foxhunt trumpeter plays Also Sprach Zarathustra.
I get that the themes don’t have to exactly match the actual film, but I’m still SMH that the allegedly blaxploitational Bond film, Live and Let Die, didn’t have a funk soundtrack; instead, they went with Paul McCartney and Wings. It’s still a great song, but obviously a tribute from one British icon to another.
🎶 Who’s the spy who has his martinis shaken, not stirred?BOND!That Bond is one bad mutha-SHUT YO MOUTH! 🎶
I hope that Daniel Craig returns for a Bond video game. This way they can create a compelling story without all the budgetary issues.Daniel Craig needs to go to Marvel for a role. ION Productions can license Bond to Marvel, too, even if they recast.
Daniel Craig needs to go to Marvel for a role. ION Productions can license Bond to Marvel, too, even if they recast.Fuck. No. Just no. Don’t need Bond in a shitty Disney film.
what fucking budgetary issues these movies cost like 400 million dollars each.
Speaking of secret agents, the Archer intro theme is totally chasing the Chuck intro theme.
They all copied the Cowboy Beebop intro which came out in 1998
Huh? Secret agents? Nobody mentioned secret agents. Where’d you get that from?
With no survey done, but i would say that GOLDFINGER is universally the most liked and notable to fans. The painted gold woman (Jill in the movie) is so iconic, that when she died earlier this year, it was newsorthy is telling of that movies popularity. the plot is absurb viewed through today’s lense, but in its time up until the social media age, this is hands down the best and most enduring. Give me NON-PC Bond.
Glad I wasn’t the only one who noticed.
Bond is an incel fantasy. And a car commercial.
also, Specter is clearly inspired by Mission Impossible with the concept of the “Bond team/family”. I am excited for the No Time to Die, but from reviews it sounds like this one is also running (hehe) with the Mission Impossible themes.
I always forget how Moonraker has some of the best Bond music. TBS (I think) had just started doing their Bond marathons in the mid-80’s, and pre-teen Rogue loved it. Even then I knew Moonraker was cheesy as hell, but whenever Jaws was on screen it was pure gold. I’d love to see a breakdown of what cliches the first Austin Powers movie stole specifically from Bond films.
Casino Royale was mostly made to go against modern spy Bourne movies… but its 10x better than all those films together.
Don’t forget the Living Daylights cashing in with the West’s 80’s love of the Mujahideen…which probably played off Stallone’s Rambo Part III.
Live and Let Die will always be one of the most baffling Bond films to me, especially considering it was Moore’s first outing. You already have to sell people on a new actor playing Bond, and now you’re throwing him in a genre that’s completely out of his element. And thanks to Baron Samedi you have actual fucking magic to boot!
What about Die Another Day? Bond in that movie seemed to be inspired by Poochie, considering he surfs his way into North Korea.
DIE ANOTHER DAY was stealing from James Bond films.
And No Time to Die is Logan.
Also Die Another Day followed the CGI overdose trope of stuff like The Mummy Returns, Mortal Kombat and Spawn.