Twenty-six films across fifty-nine years, six actors, and a formula that’s been abandoned and rebuilt at least four times. I’ve reviewed every one of them on this site and every rating below is the one that review carries.
The ranking is mine and it’s not the consensus. Casino Royale and Skyfall are the only two that deserve a 10, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service sits in the top four despite having the least popular Bond in it, and Die Another Day is a 3. What the full run shows, read in order, is a series that survives by periodically admitting it’s gone wrong. Every good Bond film arrives immediately after a bad one, and every bad one arrives after a hit that nobody wanted to change.
I care about this series more than I probably should, and most of that is irritation. Every time the producers find something that works, they run it into the ground, and every time they’re forced to strip it back, they make something I’d put against any thriller of its decade. I don’t rank these by nostalgia or by which actor wore the tuxedo best. I rank them by whether the film had the nerve to let Bond pay for something.
1. Casino Royale (2006)
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"The only Bond film that treats the license to kill as a cost, not a perk."
Casino Royale is first because it’s the only entry in fifty-nine years that treats killing as something that happens to the man doing it. The pre-title sequence is in black and white and shows the two kills that earn him the double-O, one of them a prolonged struggle in a toilet cubicle that neither party is good at.
That establishes the film’s whole method. The stairwell fight in Madagascar is a man who’s fit and untrained against a man who’s faster. The torture scene isn’t survived with a quip. Bond is beaten, poisoned, defibrillated in a car park, and the film lets the damage accumulate across the running time.
Craig was announced to open hostility from the fanbase, with a campaign website objecting to his hair, and answered it in twenty minutes. The performance understands that Bond isn’t charming, he’s effective, and the charm is a tool deployed on people he intends to use. It’s also the only film in the series where the romance means something, because Vesper is written with her own problem, her own debt and her own reasons, and not as an obstacle or a reward.
This is the Bond film I’d hand to anybody who thinks the series is silly.
I like how little it protects him. By the end he’s been beaten and poisoned, and the film never pretends any of it bounced off. My one grumble is the poker, which asks a lot of anybody who doesn’t play, and I still prefer a film that asks too much to one that asks nothing.
The film opens in black and white with Bond’s first two kills, establishing a man who has just qualified instead of one who has always been this.
The poker is played correctly and the film expects the audience to follow it. That’s unusual and is why the table sequences work. Craig was rejected loudly before release, with campaigns objecting to his hair, and the reception reversed completely within a week of opening.
2. Skyfall (2012)
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"Roger Deakins shot a Bond film and it shows in every frame."
Skyfall takes the other 10 on two counts. Deakins photographed it, which makes it the best-looking film in the series by a distance, and the Shanghai sequence fought in silhouette against a moving LED billboard is the single most beautiful thing in fifty-nine years of the franchise.
The second count is the villain. Silva wants one thing, from one person, for a reason the film states plainly and which turns out to be legitimate. M traded him and he survived it. That’s the only Bond antagonist whose grievance would hold up in an inquiry.
The structural move is stripping the apparatus. By the third act there’s no MI6, no gadgets, no support and no backup, and the finale is a siege of an empty Scottish house defended with a hunting rifle, a bag of nails and the housekeeper. Judi Dench’s M is the actual subject. The film is about an institution defending a decision it made, can’t admit to, and won’t apologize for, and it kills her for it in a chapel.
Skyfall hurts for M and for Silva at the same time, and I can’t think of another action film that pulled that off.
The service did something ugly and the film refuses to let anybody off for it. Deakins alone would get it into the top five. A film with something to say about institutions that bury their mistakes is what puts it level with Casino Royale.
Deakins shot it and the Shanghai fight staged entirely in silhouette against a moving advertisement is the best-photographed sequence in the franchise.
The subject is obsolescence, with a field agent and an analogue service being told they’re no longer required, and the film agrees for most of its length.
Bardem’s Silva is a former agent the service abandoned. That makes him the only Bond villain whose grievance is institutional and not financial.
3. From Russia with Love (1963)
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"The one that is actually a spy film, not an adventure film."
From Russia with Love is the most plainly excellent film in the series and it’s third only because the two above it do something it doesn’t attempt. Terence Young’s second Bond is a Cold War procedural about a defection and a decoder, with no scheme to hold the world hostage anywhere in it.
Robert Shaw’s Grant is the best physical antagonist the franchise has produced, and the reason is that he barely speaks. He follows Bond for half the film in silence, and the compartment fight on the Orient Express is close, ugly, short and fought with a garotte in a space neither man can stand up in.
The Orient Express fight is the reason I’d defend the early Connery films to anybody. Two big men in a space too small to stand up in, and it’s over before either of them looks good. My only gripe is that it’s third, and that’s about the two films above it more than anything this one gets wrong.
It’s the last film before the gadgets became structural. Q appears, Desmond Llewelyn’s debut, and supplies a briefcase with a knife and tear gas. That’s roughly the level of assistance a real agent might have carried.
No film in the run is less gadget-dependent, with a briefcase and a knife in a shoe, and the plot is a simple intelligence operation.
The train fight with Robert Shaw runs several minutes in a compartment too small to stand up in and was staged over weeks. Kennedy had named the novel among his favorite books. That’s considerably why the series reached American audiences at the scale it did.
4. Goldfinger (1964)
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"The template, and the film every later Bond is measured against whether it wants to be or not."
Goldfinger is the commercial breakthrough and the production that fixed the formula. That’s why it’s both essential and responsible for most of what went wrong afterward. Pre-title sequence, title song over graphics, gadget briefing, exotic location, a villain with a plan, a henchman with a gimmick. It cost about three million dollars and took roughly a hundred and twenty-four million. That’s the number that made everything later inevitable. Every convention the series later had to escape was either invented or perfected here. Gert Fröbe’s Goldfinger also does something later villains stopped doing, which is explain his plan once, correctly, and then proceed with it. The Fort Knox scheme is coherent, the irradiation and not theft is clever, and the film assumes the audience can follow it. Goldfinger assembles the formula: the pre-credit sequence, the gadget briefing, the henchman, the laser and the line everybody quotes.
The plot is unusually sound, since Goldfinger intends to irradiate the reserve and not steal it. That’s the only economically coherent scheme in the series. Gert Fröbe spoke almost no English and was dubbed entirely. Nobody notices, because the performance is physical.
5. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)
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"The best-written Bond film, in the one nobody watched."
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is fourth on this list and would be higher in almost anybody else’s, and the reason it was rejected for thirty years is that George Lazenby wasn’t an actor and made one film.
Of all the Fleming adaptations, this is the closest and the only entry that ends on a loss the character doesn’t recover from. Diana Rigg’s Tracy is the only woman in the series written as Bond’s equal instead of his problem, the marriage is played completely straight, and the last shot is a man holding his dead wife and telling a policeman they have all the time in the world.
That ending still devastates me. The series had spent seven years teaching audiences that nothing sticks to Bond, and then it let the one thing that mattered land with no cushion at all. Lazenby is the small complaint, and he’s a real one, because a better actor in that last shot would’ve made it the best film on this page.
The ski sequences and the bobsleigh finale are still the best action in the series, shot for real at speed by Willy Bogner skiing backwards with a handheld camera, and the editing rhythm in them was fifteen years ahead of anything else.
Lazenby had never acted and was cast on the strength of a screen test fight, and the film is the best in the run despite him and not because of him.
The skiing and bobsleigh sequences were shot at real speed with cameramen on skis, and one operator was seriously injured. The ending is the only one in the series with a consequence, and the film cuts to credits immediately instead of letting anybody recover.
6. GoldenEye (1995)
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"A Bond film that asks what Bond is for now that the Cold War has ended, and answers it."
GoldenEye arrived after a six-year gap caused by litigation, with a new actor, no studio continuity and no obvious enemy, and solved all of it with one decision: make the antagonist another double-O with identical training and a better reason. Sean Bean’s Trevelyan works because his grievance is specific and historical and not megalomaniacal. He’s a Lienz Cossack whose parents were handed to Stalin by the British, and he’s correct about that.
Judi Dench’s first scene as M calls Bond a sexist misogynist dinosaur and a relic of the Cold War. It’s the film pre-empting its own reviews and then spending two hours winning the character back. Famke Janssen’s Onatopp is the last henchman gimmick the series made unsettling. It arrived six years after the previous film, after a rights dispute, into a world where the Soviet Union no longer existed.
The film’s best decision is having M tell Bond directly that he’s a relic and a misogynist. The series had never let anybody say that.
The tank sequence through St Petersburg was shot with a real tank on real streets, with the damage to the buildings being set dressing built for it.
7. Dr. No (1962)
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"Fully formed in the first hour of the first film, which almost never happens."
Dr. No had a budget around a million dollars and invented the gun barrel opening, the theme, the introduction, the vodka martini and the tone, and almost nothing about the template needed revising afterward.
Connery is the reason. The performance carries a suggestion of real menace that the novels have and later Bonds traded for charm, and the scene where he shoots Professor Dent in a chair after letting him empty a revolver into a decoy isn’t the behavior of a hero. The production is small and it helps. Crab Key is a location instead of a set, the lair is modest, and the film is a detective story for most of its length, with Bond doing actual investigative work before anything explodes.
It was made for around a million dollars. That’s why Dr No’s base is largely a single room and the finale is over quickly.
Ursula Andress’s introduction is the image the franchise built sixty years of marketing on and was shot in a single afternoon. Joseph Wiseman plays Dr No as almost entirely still. That’s the correct choice and one the series abandoned immediately afterward.
8. The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
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"The best of the Moore run, and the one where the scale works instead of collapsing."
The Spy Who Loved Me is enormous and mostly controls it, which no other Moore film manages. Lewis Gilbert’s production has a supertanker that swallows submarines, the Lotus that drives into the sea, and the ski jump off the Asgard cliff with a Union Jack parachute, done for real by Rick Sylvester.
Barbara Bach’s Anya Amasova is a Soviet agent with her own mission and a personal reason to kill Bond, which the film keeps live into the third act instead of dissolving in the second.
Richard Kiel’s Jaws is the henchman the series never bettered and the reason is that he’s not funny yet. He’s a silent seven-foot problem who can’t be killed, and the comedy arrives in the next film and destroys him.
The Ken Adam supertanker interior was the largest sound stage set ever built at the time and required a new stage at Pinewood. Rick Sylvester performed the ski jump off the cliff in a single take with one chance and cameras on the mountain.
Barbara Bach’s Anya is the first Bond counterpart given equivalent competence and a personal reason to kill him, which the film then drops.
9. For Your Eyes Only (1981)
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"The correction after Moonraker, and it is a hard one."
For Your Eyes Only is a deliberate reversal of everything the previous film did, and it overcorrects. That’s the right instinct. John Glen’s first film as director has no space, no comic set pieces, and a plot about a sunken ship and a missing targeting system.
Moore is given material he hadn’t been asked for before, including kicking a car containing a man off a cliff, and he’s visibly uncomfortable with it. That works.
Revenge for her murdered parents drives Carole Bouquet’s Melina, and the film lets her keep it instead of talking her out of it. The climbing sequence at Meteora is the best suspense in the Moore run because it’s slow, physical and almost silent.
After Moonraker, it was made deliberately as a correction, stripping out the gadgets and returning to a simple retrieval operation. The pre-credit sequence disposes of Blofeld down an industrial chimney. That was a legal manoeuvre as much as a creative one.
The Corfu and Meteora locations are used properly, with the monastery climb performed with real rigging and real exposure.
10. The Living Daylights (1987)
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"Timothy Dalton played Fleming’s Bond and was punished for it."
The Living Daylights is the most underrated film in the series and Dalton is the most underrated Bond. He arrived with the novels in hand and played a man who’s tired, irritable, professionally cold and not enjoying himself.
That’s the character on the page and the audience of 1987 didn’t want it. The performance was received as insufficiently entertaining by people who had spent fifteen years with Moore, and Dalton got two films. The plot is a real intelligence story about arms dealing and a defector who’s not what he claims, and it holds together better than anything in the preceding decade. Maryam d’Abo’s Kara is a cellist instead of an agent, deliberately, and the cello case sledding down the Austrian border is the only levity the film permits itself.
Dalton got a raw deal, and he still doesn’t get the credit. He did the homework, played the man Fleming wrote, and an audience that wanted jokes punished him for it. My reservation is that the film around him doesn’t fully commit to his version, and the cello case sledding is where you can feel the producers checking whether anyone’s still smiling. Dalton played Bond as somebody who dislikes the work. That’s closer to Fleming than anything since Connery and wasn’t what audiences wanted.
The cello case toboggan is the one comic set piece and the rest of the film is a straight Cold War defection plot. The Afghanistan material has aged into something the production couldn’t have anticipated.
11. Licence to Kill (1989)
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"Bond resigns and goes after a drug lord, and the series briefly has stakes."
Licence to Kill is the darkest entry until Craig and the only one where Bond has no institutional backing at all. A shark maims Felix Leiter, his wife is murdered on their wedding day, Bond resigns and conducts a private revenge campaign in Central America.
MI6 opposing him makes it work. He’s hunted by his own side throughout. That removes the safety net the formula normally supplies and forces every problem to be solved without resources. Robert Davi’s Sanchez is the best-motivated villain of the pre-Craig era because his organizing principle is loyalty, and the plot turns on Bond weaponising that against him instead of outfighting him. This is the first film not to take its title from Fleming and the first to have Bond resign and work without sanction. Robert Davi plays Sanchez as a businessman whose only real value is loyalty, which the plot then uses to destroy him. Several territories required cuts for certification and its commercial underperformance effectively ended Dalton’s tenure.
12. Thunderball (1965)
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"Beautiful, expensive, and about forty minutes too long underwater."
Thunderball was the highest-grossing entry of the 1960s and is the least rewatchable of the Connery run. That’s a useful pair of facts to hold together.
The underwater photography was groundbreaking and won an Academy Award for visual effects, and the problem is the final battle. Two groups of divers in similar suits fight at length in blue water, and no viewer can tell who’s winning or who’s who. Adolfo Celi’s Largo and the SPECTRE hijacking of a nuclear bomber are a solid spine, and the Junkanoo sequence in Nassau is the best-shot material in the film. I want to like Thunderball more than I do. Largo is solid and the Nassau material looks great, but that underwater finale tests my patience, because once I can’t tell who’s who I stop caring who wins.
The underwater battle runs a long time and was difficult to shoot, using a large number of divers and a purpose-built rig. When adjusted, it was the highest-grossing film in the series, and the legal dispute over the story ran for decades afterward. The pace is the problem, since underwater photography slows everything and the film has a great deal of it.
13. You Only Live Twice (1967)
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"Ken Adam’s volcano set is better than the film around it."
You Only Live Twice abandons the novel entirely and replaces it with a rocket that swallows spacecraft and a hollowed-out volcano containing a monorail and a heliport. Roald Dahl wrote the screenplay. That’s the most interesting fact about it.
Ken Adam’s volcano cost around a million dollars, roughly the entire budget of Dr. No, and is the reason the film is remembered. It’s also the set every later lair in any franchise has been imitating.
Donald Pleasence’s Blofeld is the first time the character is seen and established the template for every bald cat-stroking villain since, including all the parodies. The sequence disguising Bond as a Japanese fisherman is where the series stopped worrying about plausibility and it never recovers.
Roald Dahl wrote the screenplay and has been open that he discarded almost all of the novel. The volcano base is Ken Adam’s most famous set and cost more than the entire budget of Dr No. The sequence disguising Bond as Japanese is the element the film can’t survive, and Connery had already decided to leave.
14. Live and Let Die (1973)
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"Moore’s debut, a McCartney theme, and a boat chase that goes on for a week."
Live and Let Die introduced Roger Moore by deliberately making the character lighter, wryer and less physically threatening. That was a correction away from Connery instead of an accident. Its engagement with blaxploitation is of its moment and hasn’t aged into anything comfortable. Yaphet Kotto’s Kananga is well played and the surrounding material isn’t consistently on his side.
The Louisiana boat chase is the sequence everybody remembers and Sheriff Pepper is the reason it runs twelve minutes longer than it needs to. Geoffrey Holder’s Baron Samedi is the best thing in it and the film has no idea what to do with him. Moore’s first film leans entirely into the blaxploitation cycle that was running. That’s the most dated decision in the series.
The boat chase through the Louisiana bayou held a world record for a jump and runs considerably longer than it needs to.
Paul McCartney’s title song is the best in the run, and the producers nearly rejected it because they wanted somebody else to re-record it.
15. Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
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"A media baron manufacturing a war, which was a better idea in 1997 than anybody realized."
Tomorrow Never Dies has the most prescient premise in the series. Jonathan Pryce’s Elliot Carver wants a war because he owns the channels that will report it, and the film is explicit about the mechanism instead of gesturing at it. Michelle Yeoh’s Wai Lin is the best-matched partner Bond has been given, arriving with her own agency, her own mission and better fight choreography than the lead. The handcuffed motorcycle sequence through Saigon is the strongest action in the Brosnan run. What holds it back is that the film keeps stepping away from its own idea. A sea drill kills a villain who fights with information, and the third act is a conventional siege on a stealth boat.
It frustrates me because it was so close. A villain who starts wars for ratings is a better idea than most of the scripts the series ever had, and Yeoh deserved her own film.
Then the writers panicked and reached for the drill. I enjoy it, and I also think it’s the clearest case of a Bond film being scared of its own premise.
Jonathan Pryce plays a media proprietor manufacturing a war for broadcast rights. That was a sharper idea in 1997 than anybody credited. Michelle Yeoh is the most physically capable counterpart in the series and performed her own stunt work. It went into production in a rush against a fixed release date and the screenplay was being rewritten during shooting.
16. Octopussy (1983)
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"A genuinely good Cold War plot with a clown costume in the middle of it."
Octopussy has a real story underneath it and sabotages itself in the last act. A rogue Soviet general plans to detonate a nuclear device on a US airbase in West Germany, disguised as an accident, to force European disarmament. That’s coherent and frightening.
Louis Jourdan’s Kamal Khan and Steven Berkoff’s Orlov are both playing it straight, the Indian sequences are well shot, and the pre-title Acrostar jet is among the best openings in the series. Then Bond puts on a clown suit to defuse the bomb, having earlier swung on a vine to a Tarzan yell, and the film destroys its own tension at the exact moment it needs it most.
Never Say Never Again opened against it in the same year. That’s the only time two competing Bond films opened together. The circus setting and the clown costume are the film’s low point and the Faberge auction is good.
Louis Jourdan plays Kamal Khan with actual charm, and the plot about a Soviet general acting without authorization is more interesting than the execution.
17. The World Is Not Enough (1999)
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"Sophie Marceau is playing the best villain in the Brosnan era and the film will not admit it."
The World Is Not Enough has an unusually good idea at its center and wastes it. Elektra King is a kidnapping victim who sided with her captor, and the reveal reframes the entire first hour into something unsettling. Robert Carlyle’s Renard can’t feel pain and is dying from a bullet migrating through his brain. That sounds like a gimmick and is played as a disadvantage he’s racing against. He’s losing his senses and knows it.
This one discards both. Denise Richards is cast as a nuclear physicist, the third act becomes a submarine set piece, and the character work of the first half is abandoned for the machinery the franchise expected.
Sophie Marceau’s Elektra is the first female principal antagonist in the series and the reveal is the best thing in the film.
Robert Carlyle plays a man who can’t feel pain. That’s a strong idea the film uses for almost nothing.
The casting of the nuclear physicist is the element the film is remembered for and not for any reason connected to the plot.
18. Quantum of Solace (2008)
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"The writers’ strike is visible on screen."
Quantum of Solace went into production without a finished script during the 2007 writers’ strike, with Craig and Forster rewriting on set, and the result is a ninety-six minute film that’s mostly chases.
It’s the only direct continuation in the series and the continuity with Casino Royale is the best thing in it. Bond is grieving, the film treats his competence as a symptom and not as an asset, and M’s line about not being able to tell the difference between a man doing his job and a man settling scores is the whole picture in one sentence.
Olga Kurylenko’s Camille has her own revenge plot handled decently, and the action editing is cut fast enough that several sequences are illegible.
I’m split on this one. The grief is real and the continuity with Casino Royale matters to me, but I shouldn’t have to squint to follow a chase, and too many of these are cut so fast they’re noise. It’s a good idea for a film that the writers’ strike never let anybody finish.
19. Spectre (2015)
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"The opening in Mexico City is superb and the rest is a retrofit."
Spectre opens with a single-take Day of the Dead sequence through a crowd, into a building, out of a window and along a ledge, and it’s the best four minutes in the Craig run.
Then it decides Blofeld is Bond’s foster brother and has been personally responsible for every loss in the previous three films. That converts three separate stories into one man’s grudge and diminishes all of them.
Christoph Waltz is given almost nothing to do with it. Dave Bautista’s Hinx is a good silent henchman in the From Russia with Love tradition and has about nine words, and the third act is a countdown in a building.
Mendes returned and the pre-credit sequence in Mexico City is a real long take through a crowd, a hotel and onto a roof. The retroactive connection of every previous Craig antagonist to one organization is the decision that damages it. The Day of the Dead parade in the film didn’t exist in Mexico City and the city created one afterward because tourists arrived expecting it.
20. Diamonds Are Forever (1971)
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"Connery came back for the money and it is on screen."
Diamonds Are Forever brought Connery back for a fee that made him the highest-paid actor in the world at the time, which he donated to a Scottish charity, and the disengagement is visible in every scene.
In the first act, the film disposes of Tracy’s death in a pre-title sequence and never mentions it again. That throws away the strongest thing the series had done two years earlier.
Las Vegas is the most dated setting in the franchise, Charles Gray is a third actor playing Blofeld with no continuity of characterization, and the moon buggy chase and the elephant at the slot machine are the level the film is pitched at. Connery returned for a single film for a fee that was a record at the time and donated it to a Scottish educational trust. The Las Vegas setting and the comic tone are a deliberate correction after the previous film’s ending, which the film ignores entirely. The moon buggy chase is the point where the series first becomes something it can’t easily stop being.
21. The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)
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"Christopher Lee is excellent and the film keeps interrupting him with a car horn."
The Man with the Golden Gun has Christopher Lee as Scaramanga, an assassin who considers himself Bond’s professional equal and charges a million dollars a contract, and a duel structure the film earns in its final sequence.
Everything around him works against it. Sheriff Pepper returns for no reason on holiday in Thailand, a slide whistle accompanies the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree corkscrew car jump, an impressive stunt calculated by computer, and the script writes Britt Ekland’s Goodnight as an embarrassment. The funhouse showdown on Scaramanga’s island is the film the rest of it should have been, and Lee was Fleming’s cousin.
Christopher Lee plays Scaramanga as a professional who admires Bond. It’s a good idea the film keeps interrupting with a slide whistle. The corkscrew car jump was computer-modeled in advance and performed in a single take, and the sound effect ruins it.
Hervé Villechaize’s Nick Nack and the returning sheriff character are the two elements the film can’t defend.
22. Moonraker (1979)
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"Bond in space, because Star Wars made money."
Moonraker exists because Star Wars had been released two years earlier. The end credits of The Spy Who Loved Me had announced For Your Eyes Only as the next film, and the producers changed it to chase a market.
Michael Lonsdale’s Drax has a repellent plan involving a nerve toxin and a selected master race repopulating the earth, and the film treats it with roughly the seriousness of a pantomime. Jaws returns, is given a girlfriend, and switches sides. That’s the point at which the series had nothing left to escalate to. The next film is For Your Eyes Only and the correction was total.
I have mixed feelings about Moonraker. Lonsdale deserved a film that took Drax seriously, and the free-fall opening is real work by real people. Everything built to chase Star Wars feels like a business decision wearing a tuxedo, and turning Jaws into a lovable sidekick is where I lose patience with it.
Star Wars is the reason it exists, which the producers have confirmed, and the novel has nothing to do with space.
The free-fall pre-credit sequence was shot across dozens of real parachute jumps with a cameraman filming in descent.
Michael Lonsdale plays Drax with real dryness and is the best thing in a film that ends in a laser battle in orbit.
23. Never Say Never Again (1983)
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"A legal artefact with Sean Connery in it."
Never Say Never Again isn’t an Eon production and exists because Kevin McClory held rights to the Thunderball material from a legal settlement. That’s why it’s a remake of that film and why it opened the same year as Octopussy. Connery returned at fifty-two and is the best thing in it, playing his age openly in a way the official series wouldn’t attempt for another thirty years. The title was reportedly his wife’s joke about his previous statement that he’d never play Bond again. Everything else is absent. No gun barrel, no Monty Norman theme, no Q as written, and a flatness to the production that Connery can’t cover. It’s the clearest demonstration that a franchise is a set of assets instead of a character. It exists because of the Thunderball rights dispute and isn’t part of the official series. That’s why it looks and sounds wrong throughout.
Connery was fifty-two and the film is honest about it, with the plot acknowledging that he’s been out of the field. Klaus Maria Brandauer is a unsettling Largo and the video game sequence is the strangest thing in any Bond film.
24. No Time to Die (2021)
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"An ending the series earned and a film that cannot decide what tone to reach it in."
No Time to Die runs a hundred and sixty-three minutes and is carrying fifteen years of continuity plus a new double-O, a daughter, a nanobot weapon and Blofeld in a cell. Craig is excellent and Linus Sandgren’s photography is the best in the run after Skyfall. The Matera opening and the Norwegian forest sequence are both first rate, and Ana de Armas is in the film for fifteen minutes and steals it entirely. The problem is tonal. The film alternates between outlandish and solemn without transition, and the ending, which is the boldest thing the series has ever done, is telegraphed far enough in advance to blunt it completely.
This is the one that hurts, because the pieces were there. Craig deserved an ending, and the film gave him a bold one and then spent an hour making sure nobody would be surprised by it. I’d happily watch the Cuba sequence again. I’m less eager to sit through the other two and a half hours to get to it.
It runs a hundred and sixty-three minutes, the longest in the series, and was delayed repeatedly across two years. The ending is the only one of its kind in sixty years and was the reason Craig agreed to return. Ana de Armas appears for about ten minutes in Cuba and is the best thing in the film. That’s a problem for the two hours around it.
25. A View to a Kill (1985)
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"Roger Moore was fifty-seven and the film pretends otherwise."
A View to a Kill is the worst-cast film in the series. Moore was fifty-seven, older than Tanya Roberts’s mother, is doubled in most of the action, and has said since that he was only about four hundred years too old for the part.
Christopher Walken’s Zorin is doing something interesting, playing a psychopath produced by Nazi medical experimentation with real unpredictability, and Grace Jones’s May Day has more presence than anybody else on screen. The Silicon Valley plot is coherent on paper, the Golden Gate finale is competently staged, and none of it survives the central miscasting. Moore knew and retired immediately afterward.
The sight of Moore being doubled through the action makes me wince. Walken and Grace Jones are doing interesting work, and the film wastes both of them on a hero it should’ve retired two films earlier. That failure belongs to the producers, who kept a formula running after the man at the center of it had aged out of it. Moore was fifty-seven and has said he was appalled to discover he was older than his co-star’s mother.
Christopher Walken plays Zorin as unhinged and is operating in a different and better film throughout. The Golden Gate finale is well staged and the Silicon Valley plot is the most dated premise in the series.
26. Die Another Day (2002)
► Read the full review of Die Another Day (2002)
"An invisible car, a CGI para-surf, and the end of a whole approach."
Die Another Day is the bottom of the series and the first forty minutes are good. Bond is captured, tortured across the titles for fourteen months, traded, and returned as a liability his own service won’t trust and immediately suspends.
That film is then abandoned entirely. What replaces it’s an invisible Aston Martin, a gene therapy plot that changes a character’s actor, an ice palace, a satellite weapon and a computer-generated sequence of Bond parasurfing a tidal wave that no viewer has ever defended. As the fortieth anniversary film, it was stuffed with references to every previous entry. That reads as a series with nothing left to say. Four years later the franchise rebooted completely.
This one is a squandered chance, and the first forty minutes are the reason. They had Bond broken, traded and distrusted by his own people, a premise good enough to carry a whole film, and they threw it in the bin for an invisible car. That’s a crap decision, and the people who made it had stopped paying attention to what their own series was good at.
The first forty minutes, with Bond imprisoned and traded, are the best material Brosnan was given.
The invisible car and the digital surfing sequence are the two elements that ended the era, and the producers have effectively acknowledged it.
This was the fortieth anniversary film and the density of references to previous entries is the clearest sign the series had run out.
Read top to bottom, this list tells me the Bond films are at their best when somebody in charge gets nervous enough to strip something out. From Russia with Love dropped the gadgets and Casino Royale dropped the invincibility. The bad ones all come from a room that kept adding, and after fifty-nine years that room keeps relearning the same lesson.
