Every James Bond film, ranked – British GQ

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In space no one can hear you scream, "When does this end?" The unparalleled revival Bond has undergone on Daniel Craigs watch stands in stark contrast to this godawful mid-period Roger Moore, a film of such unimaginable tedium its a wonder it didnt kill the franchise stone dead. The rationale behind Bonds journey into space, notionally to foil Hugo Draxs space shuttle hijack scheme, was simple: the success of Star Wars. This led Moonraker to jump the queue ahead of For Your Eyes Only. Big of budget but dim of brain, it now feels that the whole farrago was one extended build-up to the films rib-nudging pay-off ie, Qs commentary on Bonds zero-gravity copulation with Dr Holly Goodhead I think hes attempting re-entry, sir.

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A good gadget (the titular gun) and a good villain (Christopher Lee as the generously nippled assassin, Scaramanga) just about keep this energy-crisis-themed Bond outing afloat, but the Roger Moore honeymoon period was very much over when this debuted in a weary and dreary Britain after a year of three-day weeks, two general elections and one non-appearance at the World Cup. Moores tenure as Bond saw many films chase the latest box office success, hence the kung fu themes herein as a response to Enter The Dragon, but the standout moment is a low-speed car chase that culminates with Bond appearing to defy physics to leap a river with a barrel roll to the accompaniment of a swanee whistle. No Bond film is entirely without its pleasures, but this comes close.

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Time has not been kind to Pierce Brosnans final outing. And a recent poll that rated Madonnas contribution (with some justification) to be the worst Bond theme of all time only adds to the rancid aroma that has long hovered around this, the 40th anniversary outing. It doesnt help that Brosnan himself has disowned it. Dislike of the movie, which saw Bond journey to new enemy, North Korea, has rallied itself around two fateful words, invisible car, indicative of the films over-reliance on gadgetry (a familiar failing), CGI and, well, silliness. If the car was perhaps the biggest misstep in Bond history bar Steven Toasts ill-advised audition for the lead role in truth the movie opened to considerable critical acclaim and did excellent box office. Nevertheless, the stage was well set for the Year Zero reboot that was coming with Daniel Craigs Casino Royale.

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The original Casino Royale not to be confused under any circumstances with the Daniel Craig version was produced outside the official Bond franchise by the enigmatic lawyer-agent Charles Feldman, who had acquired the film rights to the novel years earlier and then spotted an opportunity to cash in. It is best understood as an unholy mess, although, incredibly, it was also a hit. In its defence it did earn an Oscar nomination for Bacharach and Davids beautiful The Look Of Love. But that needs to be set against a nonsensical plot featuring David Niven as Sir James Bond and a host of stars among them Peter Sellers, Woody Allen and Ursula Andress impersonating 007 and indulging in madcap adventures, culminating in a nuclear explosion. It was meant to be a comedy. Some saw it as a satire. But the film critic Roger Ebert probably nailed it when he called it a definitive example of what can happen when everybody working on a film goes simultaneously berserk. It was the Sixties. Lets move on.

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Late-period Moore is an acquired taste and one best enjoyed by those with an appetite for the cheesiest of dad jokes and the pacing of an ITV3 afternoon schedule. Roger Moore was 57 on the films release and the action sequences never his strong suit had become as sluggish as the airship piloted by the films villain, Zorin (Christopher Walken). Bonds climactic fight atop San Franciscos Golden Gate Bridge with the axe-wielding Walken, though ambitious in scale, could not have been worse had Moore sucked on a Werthers Original throughout. End of an era and not before time.

If Die Another Days problems were embodied by its invisible car, For Your Eyes Onlys found mechanical form in an all-too-visible but deeply un-Bondian Citroen 2CV. A car chase featuring this is perhaps what this would-be revenge drama is now best remembered for; in fact, its arguably the films highlight, but two horsepower would be a generous assessment for the levels of energy Roger Moore musters as he sleepwalks through another forgettable entry in his CV. After Moonrakers lukewarm reviews, this was an attempt to make Bond more serious, pitting him in a race against the Soviets to retrieve a submarine gizmo, but for a man whose very name is a double entendre, this was akin to asking a leopard for one more take, this time without the spots.

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Its worth remembering when looking back at certain routine Bond films (and Octopussy certainly was that) that, for all their flaws, they were insanely profitable. Years before Jason Bourne, Jack Bauer, Ethan Hunt and even Austin Powers, they simply rolled along, good, bad or indifferent, and made a shedload of money. Octopussy, for example, grossed $188 million on a budget of $27.5m. It also won a rare box office duel by defeating the renegade Sean Connery vehicle Never Say Never Again, which came out later that year. Job done. But can you imagine asking Daniel Craig or Sean Connery to dress up as a clown? For Roger Moore, it was all in a days work, along with crocodile submarines, identical twin villains and ageing tennis stars (Vijay Amritraj).

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Its said of wealthy families that the first generation make it, the second spend it and the third blow it. Bond films sometimes seem to imitate this trajectory, although A Quantum Of Solace metaphorically skipped a generation and promptly blew much of the good work and goodwill that had been carefully accrued by Casino Royale just two years earlier. In its defence, the movie came out in the middle of the Hollywood writers strike and started shooting without a finished script or, some would say, a finished title. This led to a palpable sense of drift in the films second half a shame, as the opening section with Bond in vendetta mode after his Casino Royale betrayal, hinted at what the film could have been. Production company, Eon, however, cried all the way to the bank as the film was the second highest-grossing Bond of all time on release.

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One of the trickiest things that Craig-era Bond has got right is the ability to mesh a contemporary look across the cast with the timeless values Bond represents. By contrast, the perfect storm of the wrong look on the wrong people came together in Pierce Brosnans penultimate outing with Denise Richards (already slightly implausible as a shorts-sporting nuclear physicist), Robbie Coltrane and Goldie among others all just looking, well, wrong. Maybe it was a 1990s thing. Robert Carlyle as the mutilated archvillain, Reynard, impervious to pain and fearless of death due to a bullet lodged in his brain, looks faintly embarrassed, but Brosnan keeps everything running smoothly, if seldom spectacularly.

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When M meets Bond (Timothy Dalton, in his second and final outing) at Ernest Hemingways former house in Key West and asks him to hand in his weapon, the ex-RSC actor is forced to utter the line, I guess its a farewell to arms. A line that would have rolled off Roger Moores tongue without a second (or possibly first) thought, seems to cause Dalton actual physical pain and, in retrospect, perhaps that is the moment when he knew he had to quit. Dark and dour in his grittier debut, The Living Daylights, Dalton seemed just about able to carry the whole thing off, but in the sunshine of the Caribbean (Bonds natural habitat) on the trail of evil druglord Sanchez, Dalton looks confused, ill at ease and as unhappy as its possible for any globe-straddling, Talisa Soto-bedding secret agent to be. Credit to Timothy Dalton. He knew it was time to go and he did.

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All films are a product of their time, but deep in Bonds DNA is Ian Flemings ugly, imperialist world-view, a major component of which is the white colonialists superiority over the savage black native. Naturally, this received full expression in Live And Let Die with its ridiculous occult/voodoo-driven plot. But that all said, its impossible to deny the raw power this film could summon, best captured in the opening sequence when the Wings theme tune explodes into operatic hyperspace as a womans face transforms into a burning skull. As Skyfall and Spectre director Sam Mendes, who made his Bond viewing debut with this, told GQ, It was an overwhelming experience: just so sexy, weird and dark.

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Although three years younger than Roger Moore, who was at the time the official Bond, there still seemed something odd about Sean Connery returning for this non-canon retread of Thunderball some 12 years after he quit the franchise and almost two decades after he had made the original so memorable. But while NSNA had its share of longueurs, particularly towards the climax, Connery proved he still had it what took, benefitting from a retooling of Bond as an older, more world-weary secret agent, a direction Moore was never allowed to explore. As a bonus, it seemed to launch Connery into a career upswing, which saw him land the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for The Untouchables in 1987.

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The New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane said it best, as usual, when he wrote, I can see no point in going to a Bond film unless there is a corner of your soul that is still eleven years old. There can be few eleven-year-old boys who saw this last (legit) outing for Sean Connery and did not learn some deep devotion to the franchise given its febrile mix of gadgetry, guns and girls even though the franchise, like its star, is, at this point, visibly running out of steam. The films sexual politics were off-the-scale wrong, with gay assassins Wint and Kidd exemplifying the prevailing view that to be homosexual was to be ineffectual, while female objectification didnt come much more obvious, or preposterous, than Lana Woods Plenty OToole victor in the hotly contested huge cleavage competition. Then again, not many eleven-year-old boys then or now are going to complain about that.

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Although it took its title from the Ian Fleming novel, not much else bar the Japanese setting remained as most of the plot was jettisoned by screenwriter Roald Dahl. But it was another RAF vet, Ken Adam (allegedly the only German to fly in the RAF in the Second World War), who stole the show with his monumental design of Blofelds spectacular volcanic lair. This was supposed to be Connerys swan song and the films finale, which can hold its own against any in the series, would have been a fitting way to bow out. Nevertheless, its easy to see why Cubby Broccoli was desperate for Connery to return, as by now his grasp of a role he had grown to despise, and his easy way with gadgets, one-liners, action and whatever else it demanded, was effortless.

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The drawback of Bond operating in the real world is that it can date quickly. Timothy Daltons debut as 007 came at a time when Mujahideen freedom fighters in Afghanistan were very much our pals and Art Malik (who else?) as Kamran Shah plays a Bond ally whos probably a bloody good bloke into the bargain. At times, The Living Daylights is closer to Le Carr than Fleming in tone, but the series needed to get serious after Roger Moores tenure and as a necessary corrective cut-back on one-liners and sight gags while the AIDS epidemic contributed to making Bond almost monastic. Dalton looked the part, but a sense of over-seriousness present in The Living Daylights was something he found hard to shake.

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Despite a production budget equal to one of Dr Evils ransom demands (one million dollars), the first James Bond film hit the ground running thanks to the inspired casting of Sean Connery one of the most incredibly beautiful men ever to grace a cinema screen as producer Barbara Broccoli described him to GQ and the statuesque presence of Ursula Andress as Honey Ryder, seen emerging from the sea in the most alluring fashion since Aphrodite stepped out of her outsized scallop shell. An incredible amount of the Bond architecture arrived fully formed in this first instalment, from the theme tune and gun barrel opening to the casting of long-standing rep players such as Bernard Lee as M and Lois Maxwell as Moneypenny. The dialogue was crisp, the locations exotic. The legend was born.

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No Bond has announced his arrival with greater lan than Pierce Brosnan with his swallow dive from the edge of the Locarno dam in GoldenEyes opening scene. A one-take stunt requiring huge courage, it was emblematic of the bravery behind this Bond relaunch under Martin Lawrence, which ended a six-year hiatus brought about by complex rights litigation featuring notorious Italian businessman Giancarlo Paretti, whose colourful lifestyle provided the inspiration for the film Get Shorty. It was both the first outing of the franchise since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the first to make M female in the form of Judi Dench. Brosnan (who missed out to Timothy Dalton almost a decade earlier) makes the most of his second chance and twinkles his way through proceedings, displaying a strong rapport with the treacherous Sean Bean. All Bond box office records were shattered. Bond really was back.

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Good Bond films pick up cultural baggage as they age, so its impossible now to evaluate Roger Moores third outing without simultaneously thinking of Alan Partridges unsurpassable deconstruction of its opening sequence. Nevertheless, this was Moores best effort as 007 and a return to form for a series that some felt had reached the end of the road after The Man With The Golden Gun. It was Cubby Broccolis first outing as a solo producer and he went all-in, ordering Ken Adam to build the vast "007 stage" at Pinewood, spending $250,000 on the parachute sequence alone and introducing Richard Kiels human golem Jaws. It might not deserve Partridges generous appraisal as the greatest film ever made, but its still one of the best Bonds and the Union Jack parachute remains one of the series most iconic moments.

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As the Bond franchise has grown, it has often felt overwhelmed by the weight of expectation and the unyielding, contradictory demands of its fan base (a phenomenon with which Star Wars is now all too familiar). Should Bond be funny, serious, sexy, sexist, realistic, escapist, gadget driven or hands-free? The questions grow alongside the boxes that require ticking. And in the post-Cold War era, where do you find your villains? Here, Jonathan Pryces Murdoch-like media magnate, Elliott Carver, reflects this lack of world threat (happier times things could only get better, remember?), but, in all other regards, this was the moment in Brosnans reign when these questions were most cogently answered as he pressed ahead to save the world from nuclear disaster. Brosnans best effort then, but the impending decline could be seen in Desmond Llewellyns garishly orange jacket.

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One of the more brutal entries in the canon, the follow-up to Dr No is best remembered now for the thrilling and realistic fight between Bond and Red Grant (the imposing Robert Shaw) aboard the Orient Express. Something of a primer in pacy editing, the fight mirrored the no-frills, straight-ahead dynamism of the film itself, with director Terence Young adding more essential Bond furniture with the pre-credit sequence, a hit title song and credits played out over the torso of a gyrating belly dancer. It also saw the introduction of the great villainess Rosa Klebb, she of the comfortable if deadly footwear, played to perfection by Mrs Kurt Weill herself, Lotte Lenya.

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The film that really got Bond up and running. The pre-credits sequence alone is a superb distillation of the franchises core values: tongue-in-cheek humour (Connery sporting a duck on the helmet of his diving suit), massive explosions, gargantuan Ken Adam set, dinner-jacketed savoir-faire, treacherous females, casual sex, casual violence, effortless superiority (he is an old Etonian remember) and a post-murder quip, Shocking. Positively shocking. Throw in the Fort Knox heist plot, a first-rate henchman in Oddjob, a classic Bond girl in Honor Blackmans Pussy Galore and the most famous near-death experience in the entire series with the laser adjacent to the Connery cojones and its accompanying line, No, Mr Bond. I expect you to die, and Goldfinger eases itself unquestionably to the front rank of the franchise.

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Spoiler alert: she dies. Bond movies have many virtues, but given the tight formula and franchise demands, dramatic surprises are not high on that list. So when Bonds new wife, Tracy (the excellent Diana Rigg) is bumped off by Irma Bunt, its a rare emotional gut punch in a series where tales of the unexpected are at a premium. Everything about OHMSS is different, from the stripped-down, gadget-free, sticking-to-the-source-novel approach of new director Peter Hunt to the Australian ex-chocolate model, George Lazenby as 007 and even a brief breaking of the fourth wall when Lazenby remarks with a glance to camera, This never happened to the other fella. It has the best-ever Bond tune in Louis Armstrongs "We Have All The Time In The World", a superior plot featuring a search for Blofeld and averting biological disaster and visual style and panache to spare. But it failed (relative to previous outings) at the box office and Lazenby (no thesp, to be honest) was axed. Had they held their nerve, who knows?

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Sam Mendes second outing in the directors chair was generally viewed as a slight step down from Skyfall, but a measure of the franchises rude health (apart from the obvious box office) could be seen in the strength in depth of the cast he had by now assembled (Christoph Waltz, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Whishaw, Rory Kinnear, etc) the frenzy that greeted the release and the fact that the film actually required audiences to pay attention, not something that had been particularly necessary prior to Daniel Craigs arrival. Stylish, funny, sexy (how could it not be with Monica Bellucci and La Seydoux in attendance?) and supremely confident, ahead of No Time To Die, Bond hasnt been in a better place since Thunderball.

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After the misfire of A Quantum Of Solace, this was a back-to-Bond-basics exercise and it succeeded admirably, with Javier Bardem parlaying his No Country For Old Men menace into one of the franchises best villains of recent years, Silva, while new director Sam Mendes enabled Alfred, Lord Tennyson to make his belated debut in the franchise. Mendes was also given the unenviable job of terminating a much-loved national treasure. And as well as blowing up the Aston Martin DB5, he also killed off Judi Dench. Commercially, this is the most successful Bond of all time, even when adjusted for inflation, but it is also beautifully shot and hugely satisfying.

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Firstly, its important to understand that there has never been, nor ever will be, a better name for a yacht than Disco Volante. Nor a more coveted gadget than the Bell jetpack. So, to business. Thunderball, as any Bond diehard will tell you, would have been the first of Flemings novels to hit the big screen had it not been for the Jarndyce-esque lawsuit involving the authors former collaborators, Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham, who claimed film rights to it. But perhaps the pair unwittingly did producers Broccoli and Saltzman and the classic tale of stolen atomic bombs a favour by delaying its release until early snags in the series had been ironed out and the budget dramatically increased. Thunderball is arguably peak Connery and peak Bond New Yorks Paramount cinema had to screen it 24 hours a day to cope with demand. The following year, Rex Garvin and The Mighty Cravers, testifying to Bonds all-conquering grip on the cultural zeitgeist, released the single Sock It To Em, JB (later covered by The Specials) in Thunderball. He most definitely did.

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Given the excesses of Die Another Day, the four-year layoff and the controversial casting of a blond Bond in Daniel Craig, there was intense anticipation for Casino Royale and it did not disappoint. This was the grittiest reboot of Bond since On Her Majestys Secret Service and, thanks to Craigs slow-burning charisma, not to mention his swimming trunks, it did not go the way of George Lazenbys sole effort. The Bourne and Bauer influences were obvious, but the commitment exhibited in Craigs buff frame was matched by a series of memorable set-pieces, the adrenalised pace of editing and a love story that actually felt real. For the first time in a long time, Bond felt like it mattered.

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Original post:
Every James Bond film, ranked - British GQ

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero