Like Daniel Craig’s time as the character, Pierce Brosnan’s adventures as James Bond are pretty easy to rank in a way the vast majority of the IPs fans could agree on. The same can’t quite be said about the Roger Moore or Sean Connery years. With Connery’s tenure, From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, and Thunderball are all considered franchise highpoints while Dr. No, You Only Live Twice, and, especially, Diamonds are Forever have their fans and their detractors. With Moore, the former category is applicable to The Spy Who Loved Me while the latter applies to just about everything else (though For Your Eyes Only is an underappreciated gem once one gets past the silly opening sequence).
With Brosnan, though, there’s a clear winner for “Best Bond Movie.” Then there’s one film that is middle of the road and two that are typically low positioners on franchise rankings, which is where we’ll start.
4) Die Another Day
It’s hard to say the special effects in Die Another Day have aged poorly when they already looked preposterous back in 2002. These days, though, they’ll take you straight out of the movie even quicker than the elongated Madonna cameo. If there’s a compelling argument for Brosnan getting one more go as Bond now that Amazon holds the rights, it’s that Die Another Day is so awful that it’s almost disrespectful to him and his take on the character for it to remain his final adventure as the spy.
All that said, it’s not as if Die Another Day is entirely without merit. Halle Berry holds one of the more iconic Bond girl introduction scenes and it did quite a bit to expand Rosamund Pike’s profile. As Miranda Frost, she’s the villain a big-budget Bond villain deserves. Too bad she’s playing second fiddle to Toby Stephens cartoonish Gustav Graves. Toss in an ice castle set piece and a space laser and Die Another Day is impossible to take seriously.
3) The World Is Not Enough
There are elements of The World Is Not Enough that almost work. Robert Carlyle is a brilliant actor and was a natural choice to play a Bond villain. His Renard even has the interesting character detail of a ticking clock as a bullet gets nearer and nearer to his brain. But he’s given little screentime and not much of an arc, with the antagonist gig mostly going to Sophie Marceau’s Elektra King.
Given that Marceau is another talented performer, that should be fine, but King is written in a baffling manner. It’s supposed to be a surprise that she had her own father killed but it’s something the viewer sees coming from the first moment she’s on screen thanks to the script. This is also the point in Brosnan’s 007 tenure where the action sequences went from elaborate and bombastic to just plain silly. But that’s not the straw that broke the camel’s back for The World Is Not Enough. Instead, that’s Denise Richards playing a nuclear physicist. It’s hard to put the blame on Richards’ shoulders, as her casting was inevitably going to put her in over her head, but someone goofed up somewhere because not once is her character convincing and her character is on-screen quite often.
[RELATED: Former James Bond Pierce Brosnan Breaks Silence on Amazon Taking Over 007]
2) Tomorrow Never Dies
One must give Tomorrow Never Dies this: It has one heck of a 007 car in the BMW 750iL. It’s flashy and decked out with gadgets, which is ultimately what can be said about the film surrounding it. Unfortunately, there’s not much more than that.
On one hand, Tomorrow Never Dies has some of the best action sequences of Brosnan’s tenure, but thematically it’s pretty hollow and weak. Even still, it is night and day better than the two films that followed, grabbing the audience’s attention with the bombastic opening sequence of Bond intervening on an arms deal and holding it until the closing credits roll. It’s just that there is a difference between earning the audience’s attention, as GoldenEye did with compelling characters mixed in with the action and just holding it. Tomorrow Never Dies does the latter via set pieces such as the garage car chase leading into the motorcycle and helicopter chase into the final clash on villain Elliot Carver’s ship.
1) GoldenEye
What else was it going to be? GoldenEye isn’t just Brosnan’s best Bond adventure by a dozen country miles, it’s one of the best Bond movies, period. Sublimely paced and loaded with action sequences that both stand apart and are comparably exciting, it’s an absolute blast. And, for ’90s kids, its right up there with Mars Attacks!, Jurassic Park, Tremors, Space Jam, and Jumanji as one of the decade’s definitive genre films.
Director Martin Campbell may actually be the most important director in Bond history, even over John Glen, Guy Hamilton, Lewis Gilbert, and Terrence Young. It’s not an easy task to reboot the property years after it’s ended an era with a new actor and, to a degree, a new style. Campbell’s done it not once but twice including Casino Royale. But his airtight direction isn’t the only asset in GoldenEye‘s corner, as it’s buoyed by a note-perfect Brosnan, a Bond girl who actually gets a decent story in Izabella Scorupco’s Natalya Simonova, and a quartet of fantastic villains in Alec Trevelyan (Sean Bean), the iconic Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen), General Arkady Grigorovich Ourumov (Gottfried John), and Boris Grishenko (scene-stealer Alan Cumming).
Rent or buy GoldenEye, Tomorrow Never Dies, The World Is Not Enough, and Die Another Day on Amazon Video.
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