Die Another Day was meh, but I really didn't care for Skyfall and No Time to Die. The plots were too contingent on inorganic and out of character details. Q wouldn't be stupid enough to plug a USB drive into an MI6 networked device found on a known hacker supervillain. The convenience of the targeted DNA nanobots just magically being declared to have no solution without anyone doing any testing of theories was unbelievable and just revealed the obvious "we need to kill Bond in this one so come up with a reason for him to die nobly" pitch meeting pitch. It ruined the suspension of disbelief entirely. I feel like they just tried too hard to keep upping the stakes and outdo themselves that it just got ridiculous.
this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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What killed No Time to Die for me were the nanobots being declared unsolvable in the same movie that explicitly shows EMPs being used. I thought for sure that was a Chekhov's gun being set up but no, just bad writing.
EMP, MRI, or what about anti-nanobots? If you can program nanobots that kill people with particular DNA, couldn't you program nanobots that target other nanobots? I would assume they hadn't yet built in a self-defense protocol for the nanobots since they were cutting edge and not assumed to have any countermeasures yet. Anti-nanobots seem just as plausible as DNA targeting nanobots.
I maintain that USB plot point was a PSA they were forced to put in.
Casino Royale... no, not that one... the other one. :)
We don't talk about that one.
It's the only Casino Royale for me.
Thunderball.
It is the only Bond film I would call dull. It might just be that underwater fight scene at the end. But it doesn't work for me.
Say what you want about Moonraker and Die Another Day. I at least had fun watching them.
I guess the fight scene looked good on paper, but it was quite long and not very dramatic.
And it was expensive as hell! They’re not just going to shoot all those underwater scenes and not use them.
I had s bit of deja Vu with Moonraker 🙄🙄🙄
I actually watched them all back to back a couple years ago and ranked them as I went. Here's my complete list, from top to bottom:
- Casino Royale
- From Russia With Love
- Skyfall
- Goldfinger
- Dr. No
- On Her Majesty's Secret Service
- Thunderball
- For Your Eyes Only
- The Spy Who Loved Me
- GoldenEye
- The Living Daylights
- Tomorrow Never Dies
- Spectre
- Quantum of Solace
- No Time to Die
- You Only Live Twice
- Octopussy
- License to Kill
- The World Is Not Enough
- Never Say Never Again
- Moonraker
- Die Another Day
- Diamonds Are Forever
- A View to a Kill
- The Man With the Golden Gun
- Live and Let Die
Great list!
I’d move some around a bit but very close to what I remember when I watched them all like 5-6 years ago.
The George Lazenby one is truly underrated.
I'd go with overrated
The plot is good but the acting undoes everything
Yeah, you pretty much nailed it. I'd have shuffled a few around but not by much.
Now add also Woody Allen's casino Royale lol
Jokes apart I mostly agree with the whole list. But I'd put lazenby close to bottom and octopussy s bit higher
Someone doesn't like Roger Moore's Bond, huh?
I felt like they were just mostly OK. Not bad for the most part, but not as good as many others. I did feel his run was way, way too long.
I watched them all up to Spectre and would put View to a Kill at the bottom followed by Quantum of Solace.
Yeah, that's a good shout. VtaK is awful from top to bottom.
Octopussy and Moonraker are in the mix too.
Quantum could have been better, if they didn't piss off the writers, causing a strike.
Hey! I liked Die Another Day!
Angry typing noises
One from each, excluding Lazenby (who happened to make my favorite) and non-canon (Never Say Never Again):
Connery - Diamonds Are Forever
Moore - A View To A Kill
Dalton - License To Kill
Dalton - Die Another Day
Craig - (I'm about to commit sacrilege here!) Skyfall
Overall top worst:
Diamonds Are Forever - the tone change between On Her Majesty's Secret Service and this is jarring to the extreme, the fake-hip dialogue stinks to high heaven ("forget it, Charlie! You had your chance and you blew it!"), the mafia types were obsolete, quaint and flat cinematic caricatures, a deficiency amplified exponentially when The Godfather came out just a few months later.
Bonus negative points for an unfit and disinterested Connery, seemingly in constant self-amused form at how little effort he can get away with onscreen for a then record million-and-change dollar salary.
BUT...! There is another one, so much worse, but mercifully non-canon: 1967's spoof Casino Royale, with David Niven, Peter Sellers and Woody Allen. Oh my GOD is that thing unwatchably awful!
Quantum of solace
Anything with Timothy Dalton. It was like they made James Bond out of wet tagliatelle
Wow, whey I was doing a Bond Marathon many years ago, The ones with Dalton was the ones I most enjoyed. I think it was more action packed than the other ones
Funny you should mention whey, as that's exactly like his pallor
I don't think they were bad movies, and I don't think Dalton was bad in them.
They just weren't Bond. More a before their time Bourne clone. They were a massive tonal shift from the cheesy Moore era and people weren't ready for it.
They weren’t cheesy Cinematic Bond. They were realist Book Bond.
That said, they said the same thing about Daniel Craig in Casino Royale.
Connery had a bit of Dad-Joke cheese, especially in the later movies. Lazenby had slightly less cheese, but he only got the acting role because he was such a good con-artist/actor. Moore had all the Cheese and all the Camp. A few wheels short of Niven/Austin Powers. Dalton bought it back to the hard gritty roots, with a few jokes to dull the violence. Brosnan was a good balance between Moore and Dalton, primarily action/espionage with a bit of Cheese to appeal to the Moore fans. Craig removed all the cheese and went back to gritty. Almost like Dalton but with honest reality-based action.
If you like Craig but don’t like Dalton, ask yourself what is more realistic, an Aston Martin rolling without the help of a hydraulic ram or a Mack Truck pulling a “mono” on eight wheels?
Craig was after The Bourne Identity and it's many sequels. I think that's the key difference. Maybe Craig sells the brutality a little better than Dalton. Got more physicality to him. And if you don't count Quantum of Solace, he also had much better movies.
Dalton just felt like the Andrew Garfield of Bonds. Let down by the movies not really knowing what they wanted to be, rather than his performance. He's superb in Hot Fuzz, to the point I now think of him as a local supermarché owner than as James Bond.
Perfect description why I do not care for Bond movies involving Dalton or Craig.
To me, they do not incorporate the cheesieness and suave/arrogant amused attitude that made James Bond interesting.
I had never watched them until now., the first was more standard bond template but with a serious bond.
No, I beg to differ. Much as I detested the Moore reign, which got sillier and sillier movie after movie, I felt the Dalton Bond films were just plain dull and generic. You say Bourne clone, I say yawn. I will say that it wasn't Dalton's fault (I thought he made for a competent Bond) but the scriptwriters' and cinematographers' fault.
Haven't quite watched them all yet but from the sizeable sample range that I have seen, A View to Kill would probably be the worst.
Die Another Day was one of the silliest in more recent years (If you can still call that recent) but the ludicrous plot and stupidity of it didn't detract from the enjoyment so I don't think it would deserve to be at the bottom. It wouldn't have occurred to me from watching it that it would be a popular candidate for worst Bond movie. I also really liked Brosnan as bond and probably because of my age, to me he is the archetypal bond with actors before and after being variations.
say what you will about View to a Kill, but we have to agree that it has the best song. I've seen every single movie, more than once, and nothing is as painfully rad and 80s as Duran Duran's contribution to the series.
To me watching them in sequence Die Another Day felt like a callback to the earlier Roger Moore (or even some Connery) Bond Movies. Tonally it was quite a shift from the previous couple of movies.
I don't have a full ranking personally, and I there's some I haven't seen, but the first thing that popped into my head when reading the question was quantum of solace
Lazenby
The Brosnan ones were some of my least favorites. The Connery Bond films were campy and silly fun, but you didn't need to take them seriously. The characters and gadgets were the fun parts. But then we get to the Brosnan ones and the FX wrap the needle past silly fun to just ridiculous, like the helicopter chopping its way down the street. I also found the pacing off and the sequences seemed really choppy, so it was just bad storytelling, too. Next least favorites were the Dalton/Moore films, but I quite enjoyed Walken as the villain.
I'm mixed over the Craig Bond. I really like the refresh; the more serious tone, the more brutal face of these films. This Bond is much more cynical, unhappy, and troubled. Unfortunately the humor isn't there anymore, and the introspective parts of the character can be helpful as much as they are unnecessary sometimes.
Casino Royale. Not the Daniel Craig one, the old one
Having seen all of them, I’d probably agree with Die Another Day.
I was going to say "the one where he's a rapist", but weirdly that only narrows it down a bit. 🤮