 |
| Poster Credit: Sean Longmore |
This month marks the 60th anniversary of the release of Dr. No, the first film in the James Bond series. Directed by Terence Young, the movie established not only one of cinema's most enduring heroes but the entire action movie genre.
In commemoration of
the series' beginnings, I'll be ranking all twenty-five films in the
main series. If you haven't read Part One yet, featuring the movies ranked 25-16, you can do so here. Spanning six decades and the tenures of
six actors, the films are as fascinating in their own right as they are
snapshots of the times in which they were made. One of the
many great things about the series is that it offers so many entry
points, with any one film having a wildly different tone to another,
that there can never be a conclusive list of the best Bonds. This
ranking is simply my own, and if you too are a Bond fan, you will
appreciate that disagreement is not just expected, but essential. Enjoy.
#15: For Your Eyes Only (1981)
An attempt to rein in the jokey tone which had pervaded the series since
Diamonds Are Forever produced mixed results in For Your Eyes Only, on
one hand delivering some standout action sequences, genuine tension and a
female lead whose story is tightly linked into the plot,
but can feel too serious for its own good and with a lengthy
stretch in Cortina which never gets out of second gear. Despite
his reputation as the most flippant of the Bonds, the comparatively serious tone
allows Moore to show some depth to his portrayal, hitting the
right emotional beats at key moments without losing the ease and charm
which defined him. His lack of chemistry with Carole Bouquet prevents
Bond and Melina's relationship from feeling as intimate as it needs to,
while the suite of villains, despite likeable turns from Julian Glover
as Kristatos and Topol as his rival, Colombo, is a little underwhelming.
Nevertheless, the car chase is the strongest of the series, forcing
Bond to rely on skill and invention rather than gadgets to survive, while the mountain ascent to Kristatos' lair is as tense as the
series has ever been. If the film lacks the lightness of touch of many of
Moore's entries and struggles to fully integrate its more serious tone,
there's still plenty of classic Bondian pleasures to go around.
#14: Moonraker (1979)
Moonraker is a completely ludicrous film on every level. Its failings are myriad, yet unlike Die Another Day or The Man With The Golden Gun, it leans so completely and with such unearned confidence into its tone that it somehow emerges as an enjoyable time, assuming you're able to disconnect any hint of critical capability and let yourself be carried along for the ride. It helps that its biggest strengths are some of the series' biggest strengths generally, giving it an inherent Bond-iness (an important scientific metric for determining how a film can be an objectively bad film yet a good Bond film at the same time) lesser entries struggle with. The action sequences are terrific, particularly the skydive in the pre-titles. It relishes putting every dollar of the budget on-screen and feels big and without a single corner cut. John Barry's score is exquisite, including Shirley Bassey's underrated song. Even the gags - the terrible, hammy gags - swerve so hard into dad joke territory that they become loveable. Michael Lonsdale's Drax has a deadpan wit for the ages and Q's quip at the end ('I think he's attempting re-entry, sir!') achieves immortality for its sheer filthy magnificence. Moonraker is simultaneously rubbish and brilliant, and all the more glorious for it.
#13: Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
Although the rankings of most of the Bond films shuffle around over time, few have shifted as significantly as Tomorrow Never Dies. Upon release and for many years after, I considered it a by-the-numbers actioner with an underdeveloped plot, unglamorous locations and little discernable Bond seasoning. Some of that remains true, particularly a final act which sees Brosnan's Bond shooting aimlessly into the middle-distance of a dark, enclosed set with a gun in each hand like the Terminator. The Bond secret sauce is a little lacking but over the time, the movie's nuances have carried it from near the bottom of my rankings to around the middle. Jonathan Pryce's villainous Elliot Carver serves as a canny modernisation of the traditional Bond meglomaniac, foreshadowing the amoral sensationalising of the 24-hour news cycle. Michelle Yeoh is one of the series' few leading ladies to completely convince in her action scenes and her martial arts give her big fight scene a welcome physicality, even if her chemistry with Pierce Brosnan, and the character's lack of definition beyond an East-West rivalry, doesn't quite land. The action does tip into generic nineties mindless-shooting-and-explosions territory but is impressive in its staging, and the chase around the Berlin car park is great fun. Even M's rivalry with an obnoxious Admiral is full of little treats. Tomorrow Never Dies isn't a classic but does what it needs to do with deceptive grace.
#12: Dr. No (1962)
Dr. No is in many ways the least typical of a series which can wildly span tones from one film to the next: indeed, it's only really with the Roger Moore era's descent into spoof that the series can be said to have acquired any real consistency, having previously been less like a single musician's album playlist than a DJ remixing familiar beats into brand new sounds. Dr. No is unsurprisingly one of the most old-fashioned films of the series, landing firmly in the same pulp thriller niche as Fleming's book. Exotic locations, Yellow Peril villain, torn-shirt masculinity, a female lead as naive as she is buxom, all present and correct, while the scale, polish and high culture trappings of later entries are more underplayed. Nevertheless, what's remarkable is how many of the key ingredients are already in strong fighting form, if a little shapeless at this early juncture. Despite its slower pace and smaller scale, the essence of the Bond films is to some extent even more irresistible in their unrefined state. The scene at Miss Taro's house is Bond at his most deliciously devious, having sex with Taro before having her arrested and coldly assassinating the man she arranged to come and kill him. Its roughness has a glee which would quickly get sanded down in later entries, but is sinfully fun to watch. Connery is an immediately perfect fit for the character from his famous introduction onwards and carries the film's drier periods on hard charm alone. Dr. No is a perfect bellweather for the series: an atypical but extremely robust middle-tier entry where any film bettering it is guaranteed to be a Bond experience of high calibre.
#11: You Only Live Twice (1967)
You Only Live Twice arguably marks the first time the Bond series discarded any trace of realism and went full throttle into fantasy. The plot makes very little sense, more concerned with finding excuses for visually thrilling spectacle than with such disposable inconveniences as storytelling. It might be more apt to call the film a series of loosely connected action vignettes, but those vignettes are staged with such flair and the connective tissue - the Japanese setting - is so rich in flavour that they transcend conventional criticism for how confidently the film delivers each step of the way, right down to Nancy Sinatra's series-best theme song (John Barry's score is typically excellent). Ultimately it makes little difference that Connery is largely checked out by this point, feeling underpaid and frustrated with the level of press attention the role was attracting, because Bond functions mostly as a vessel for transporting the audience from one set-piece to the next. That's not to say he doesn't get his moments, notably in his interactions with 'Tiger' Tanaka and unusually intimate relationship with Aki, whose death hits more powerfully than the film deserves (the main Bond girl, Kissy Suzuki, is so disposable as to not even be named in the film). It may be among the most factory-made entries to date but the machine is so slick and efficient at this point, it barely matters. It also marks the biggest deviation to date from the source material, being tonally opposite to Fleming's slow, meditative book. You Only Live Twice is Bond at its most blockbuster: undeniably shallow but served at just the right temperature.
#10: Casino Royale (2006)
Daniel Craig's Bond debut is often placed at the very top of fan rankings, particularly those who joined the series at the same time as the actor. That it marked the series' first complete reboot gives it a freedom and confidence to go back to Fleming's original text, pick and choose the ingredients to take forward and mix them into something feeling fresher and more exciting than the series had produced in well over a decade. As someone who finds reboots creatively lazy, I can't help but harbour a little resentment towards the film for discarding the character I grew up with, as loose as the Bond movies' approach to continuity has always been. Nevertheless, there's also no denying that Casino Royale has a spark and boldness which the Brosnan era often lacked. The film marks its intentions out of the gate with Bond's first kill depicted in stark black-and-white, followed by a parkour chase and later a particularly brutal stairwell fight, both among the series' strongest action sequences. Craig delivers the best single performance of any actor as Bond, while Eva Green is magnetic as his female foil, Vesper. It struggles most when it deviates from Fleming, notably a long section in the Bahamas and Miami which slips quickly from the memory, and a narrative structure which gives the first half in particular some rather choppy pacing. The dialogue, too, is a mixed bag: Craig and Green sell most of it, but the 'witty repartee' is clunky and the 'If all that was left of you was your smile and little finger...' line borderline inexcusable. Regardless, as far as the Bond series' many rebirths go, Casino Royale is one of its most successful.
#9: The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
Speaking of rebirths, The Spy Who Loved Me wasn't half-bad either, albeit coming a few films into an actor's tenure rather than at the beginning. Despite Live And Let Die being well-received, The Man With The Golden Gun had the Bond series on the ropes thanks to behind-the-scenes turmoil and the somewhat distasteful nature of much of the film itself (Christopher Lee's Scaramanga tactfully excluded, of course). With co-producer Harry Saltzman having departed, Albert R. Broccoli realised the need to go for broke to convince audiences that Bond was still relevant. From the moment the famous Union Jack parachute opens to the triumphant sound of the Bond theme, heading into a title sequence scored to a song aptly titled 'Nobody Does It Better', there can be no doubt that Broccoli's gamble paid off in spades. The Spy Who Loved Me is the beginning of the Roger Moore era in all the ways that count, throwing out any ill-fitting elements lingering from the past (notably Bond's violence towards Andrea Anders in Golden Gun) and refitting everything around the wink-wink charisma of its leading man. Despite a tepid main villain and some tonal inconsistency, Spy Who Loved Me is, as its song would suggest, Bond doing what Bond does best, a perfectly distilled blockbuster formula with endless flair, humour and eccentricity: think Richard Kiel's immediately iconic Jaws, or Barbara Bach's wonderfully dense 'Russian' accent disguising a somewhat ropey performance. It keeps the British end up, and then some.
#8: Octopussy (1983)
If You Only Live Twice is Bond as a hyper-efficient entertainment delivery system, Octopussy takes the same approach but delivers its fun with a little more warmth, a lot more humour and seasoned by one of John Barry's most evocative scores. I've long argued that you can take any ten minutes out of Octopussy and have the time of your life. The action is relentless and endlessly inventive, shifting from suspense to high action to smaller character moments while barely taking a breath. For all the cheesy jokes, it treats the appropriate parts of a somewhat labyrinthine plot seriously. Its non-stop momentum can get a little tiring, particularly once the sumptuous Indian locations (never has a poverty-ridden country looked so stunning) give way for the more muted palette of Cold War-era Germany, but the film finds so many different ways to deliver its thrills that it keeps pulling you back in. It helps to have a cast on such top form: Moore is at his peak, getting laughs out of one-liners the Carry On films might baulk at, while Maud Adams gives Octopussy a seductive mysteriousness and intelligence that makes her feel a more age-appropriate ally and lover for Moore's pensionable Bond (in reality, their age difference was still almost twenty years). Louis Jourdan is all pantomime smarm as villain Kamal Khan, counterbalanced by his mute but visually impactful heavy, Gobinda. In all the best ways, Octopussy is the perfect post-Sunday lunch movie: easy to phase in and out of, never less than supremely enjoyable.
#7: GoldenEye (1995)
A popular topic of discussion in Bond fandom is asking which actor would have been a perfect Bond but never got to play the part. My answer has long been Jason Isaacs, a fine actor with the ability to project charm over a hardened, cold interior. He even looks exactly like Ian Fleming's sketch of the character. Isaacs would have been the perfect age to take over the role around the time of GoldenEye's release, but the way I imagine him portraying Bond - in line with Dalton's complex Byronic hero - would not have been right at all for the series at the time. Coming off a six-year hiatus due to legal wrangling, the series needed someone to reintroduce audiences to the character at his most fun and digestible. Pierce Brosnan, all easy charm and deft with the one-liners, was the perfect man for the job. As a way of bringing audiences back into the Bond fold, GoldenEye gets almost everything right, a distillation of everything that makes the series fun and daring and sexy, yet modernised in all the right ways and never shy a wink and a smile. The villains are tremendous value, especially Famke Janssen's gloriously raunchy henchwoman, Xenia Onatopp. The stunts are astonishing, the action staged with flair and originality - the tank chase through St. Petersburg is as funny as it is exciting - and Isabella Scorupco gives a loveably grouchy performance as Natalya, a leading lady both integral to the plot and well-developed as a character. I'm even a fan of (most of) Eric Serra's maligned score, which gives the film a tangible post-Cold War, industrial identity. GoldenEye is not only one of the most enjoyable entries in the series, but one of the best for introducing newcomers.
#6: The Living Daylights (1987)
For all that Bond is the quintessential old-fashioned hero, the reason the movies have endured is a willingness to change with the times. The arthritic spoofery of A View To A Kill made it clear a change of direction was required and the producers turned to Timothy Dalton, a Shakespearian actor who had rejected the role as a young man, to take the character back to his roots. Although traces of the Moore-era remain - Bond drives a barn across a frozen lake at one point - visual gags which would have been the foundation of many of the preceding seven films are here amusing asides injecting welcome hints of silliness into a largely straight-faced Cold War thriller. The Living Daylights takes a short story from Fleming's eponymous collection and expands it into something wider and more dramatic, feeling in some respects like a spiritual successor to From Russia With Love. The first hour is arguably the best balanced in terms of tone, action, suspense and fun of the entire Bond series. Even once the overly-complicated, low-stakes plot and the lack of a distinct main villain begin to reveal the film's weaknesses - the portrayal of female lead Kara as a bit of a dimwit also underserves a key character - the spectacle, striking cinematography and a commanding central performance from Dalton are more than enough to carry the goodwill through to the end. Despite not quite fulfilling the promise of its first half, The Living Daylights at its best is the film which most cohesively ties together the series' sometimes contradictory tones, tropes and joys.
