With the 24th James Bond movie, Spectre, about to come out, the media has been full of features where people name “The Best” this and “The Worst” that. Never wanting to hold on to two cents when I can throw it, here are my picks.
Best Bond: Right out of the shoot I am going to make the most controversial, hate-mail inspiring choice that can be made: Pierce Brosnan. For those who rank Brosnan as one of the worst Bonds, let me say that he did have the worst material to work with. Roger Moore was easily the worst Bond (mainly because, at 41, he was too old when he started and he stayed on until he was well past qualified for AARP), but his tenure produced a couple of gems, such as For Your Eyes Only and the popular The Spy Who Loved Me. Brosnan’s best turn was probably Tomorrow Never Dies, which was buoyed by the presence of Michele Yeoh as the most self-reliant “Bond Girl” ever and Jonathan Pryce as a Rupert Murdoch clone ready to nuke the world to sell newspapers; good, but hardly top ten. But I think Brosnan best exemplified both sides of Bond: the handsome, seductive ladies’ man, and the gritty paid killer. Connery always struck me as looking like a truck driver (Ian Fleming’s opinion was similar), Dalton was too humorless, Moore too effete (he admitted he looked silly throwing a punch), Lazenby was too insubstantial, and Craig is . . . too dour. It’s a shame that Brosnan never had any A material to work with, but just had to make do with the remnants of Moore’s cartoonish stint.
Best Villian: I suppose for the series you’d have to go with Ernst Stavros Blofeld, best portrayed by Donald Pleasance in You Only Live Twice. But his presence is weakened by lesser actors in the role (Telly Savalas, Charles Grey) and in the end he is just a Dr. Evil prototype. I am tempted to go off book and choose Christopher Lee’s Scaramanga from Man With the Golden Gun, but that is more for the performance than the character. Let’s go old school and say Auric Goldfinger, who has a cool name, a cool henchman, and a truly lunatic scheme: he doesn’t want to start a nuclear war or anything so prosaic, he just wants his gold to be worth more money. An Honorable Mention to Robert Davi’s Sanchez in License to Kill as another more grounded, but still scary, bad guy.
Best Henchman: I won’t make waves here and pick the only henchman who came back for more, Jaws played by Richard Kiel in Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker. The performance could have been one-note, but Kiel somehow conveyed Jaws’ humanity under his imposing visage and metal teeth. And let’s face it, he was the one foe Bond never did defeat.
Best “Bond Woman”: They broke the mold when they cast Ursula Andress as Honey Ryder in the first Bond film, Dr. No. Jaw-droppingly gorgeous, fierce, yet vulnerable. Later Bond love interests might have been better actors (most were worse), but none had the impact of Andress rising out of the surf in that bikini. My personal favorite was probably the least conventional “Bond Woman,” Michele Yeoh in Tomorrow Never Dies. She showed less skin and had less, um, physical contact with Bond during the film, but she was his equal as a spy and was sexier dressed up than many Bond Girls were half naked.
Best theme song: Nobody Does it Better from The Spy Who Loved Me by Carly Simon. This has become the unofficial theme song for the entire Bond series. A lot of other theme songs are excellent, but this is the only one that distinguishes itself and comments on Bond himself, not the movie at hand. Honorable mentions to Goldfinger, Live and Let Die, View to a Kill, and You Know My Name from Casino Royale.
Five Best Bond films: 5) Man with the Golden Gun. Stay with me on this—I know this is usually considered one of the worst Bond films, but consider: it had not one but two great Bond Women, Britt Ekland and Maud Adams; it had a great actor playing the Sacramange, Christopher Lee (who would have made a great Bond in 1960); it had a great henchman in Herve Villechaize’s Nick Nack; and it had a signature Bond stunt, the car that rotated 360 degrees as it jumped over a river. That’s enough to make me forget the two 12 year old girls beating up an entire dojo, the return of Clifton James’ cracker southern sheriff, and a plot about the energy crisis that sounds so 1974.
4) You Only Live Twice. Script by Roald Dahl, the best writer in the Bond series until Paul Haggis contributed to the second Casino Royale. The aerial battle with Little Nellie. The fight onboard the tanker at the Kobe docks. The assault on Blofeld's encampment in the volcano. Donald Pleasance as Blofeld, in all his cat-stroking glory. Yes, disguising Sean Connery as a Japanese fisherman was silly, but again you have to give a little.
3) Casino Royale. You don’t realize how much the Bond franchise orbited around mediocrity through the Lazenby, Moore and Brosnan years until Daniel Craig came in and the franchised was re-energized. The opening action sequence is both brilliantly staged and acts as a metaphor for the new James Bond; his quarry nimbly leaps and hops through windows while Bond bulldozes through walls. He is not a scalpel, he is a blunt instrument who will win at all costs.
2) From Russia With Love. Whatever inabilities Danielle Bianchi had as an actress were more than made up for by her looks, as she stands out among Bond Girls even among the likes of Halle Berry, Teri Hatcher and Eva Green. Rosa Kleb and Red Grant were worthy adversaries for James Bond and the film had a real world verisimilitude absent until Casino Royale.
1) Goldfinger. A perfect analogy: Goldfinger is to From Russia With Love as Fast and Furious 7 is to the original Fast and Furious; the prior film was a quasi-realistic look at a small part of the world, while the latter is a globe-hopping extravaganza that swings for the fences and connects. Goldfinger’s mad scheme to irradiate the world’s gold supply is more believable than the more elaborate plots to rule the world, and throw in characters liked Odd Job and Pussy Galore (“I must be dreaming.”) and you have the blueprint for the Bond franchise that was never quite equaled.
Worst Bond film: Die Another Day. Invisible cars? Wind surfing on icebergs? Brosnan starting to look like Roger Moore at the end of his reign? Just stop already.
Worst theme song: Die Another Day by Madonna. Wow, nothing else is even close.
Worst Villain: Michael Lonsdale as Hugo Drax in Moonraker. Completely lifeless and lacking menace.
Single Worst Performance in any Bond Film: Denise Richards as Dr. Christmas Jones in The World Is Not Enough. Denise Richards can be a good actress, in something trashy like Wild Things or campy like Starship Troopers, but she cannot pull off playing a nuclear physicist no matter how many pairs of glasses she puts on.
Most overrated Bond Film: The Spy Who Loved Me. The first two Roger Moore vehicles, Live and Let Die and Man With The Golden Gun, were both box office disappointments, threatening to kill the franchise. So producer Cubby Broccoli went all in and made Moore’s third film, The Spy Who Loved Me, the biggest, most expensive Bond film yet. It worked. Why, I don’t know. Yes, there is the exhilarating opening sequence (the theater audience I was with broke into applause when Bond survived skiing off a cliff), and the Carly Simon theme song, and the addition of Jaws to the Bond oeuvre. But the film has a lackluster villain with a silly plan for world domination, and a blah Bond Woman in his supposed Soviet counterpart played by Ringo Starr’s wife Barbara Bach. For Your Eyes Only and Man With the Golden Gun are both far superior; I’d even rank this below Octopussy.
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