Category: REVIEWS

By Last Caress.

Continuing our rundown of all of the James Bond films, ranked in order from worst to first (Part 1 HERE):

16. Spectre (Mendes, 2015)

SPOILERS BELOW! IF YOU HAVEN’T YET SEEN SPECTRE AND WERE WAITING TO CATCH IT AT HOME ON DVD/BLU-RAY, YOU’LL WANT TO SPIN PAST THIS BIT.

Spectre, the 24th and most recent Bond movie to date isn’t a bad film, but it’s definitely the weakest of the Daniel Craig films. I wonder if, in calling it Spectre and having the glorious return of a major arch villain and in trying to tie the previous Craig movies together, it was trying to give itself too much gravitas in every single scene like it was the boss level of all boss levels, and whilst getting busy giving everything such dramatic heft Sam Mendes forgot to put any real action into the thing? Consider the scene where Oberhauser is holding court at the big Spectre meeting while our Jim is safely tucked up in the Gods amongst the lesser lights, happily incognito, watching the proceedings, and suddenly Ober says, “Hello, James!” It’s supposed to be tense, right? But it felt at arm’s length, as did the immediate car chase sequence as Mr. Hinx goes after Bond (incidentally, I thought Dave Bautista did very well with his wordless henchman role, up there among the more memorable henchmen). This distancing from the events seemed to happen all of the time, but I don’t even think that that was the worst thing about Spectre; The worst thing was the decision to retrofit the previous three movies into one cohesive lead-in to this movie. Clearly, the intentions of the previous three movies’ creators were not to have these four movies link together as one big narrative all along, and as a result it just came across as daft when Ober/Stavros proclaimed that everything since Casino Royale (Campbell, 2006) had been him all along, working to a masterplan specifically aimed at James Bond. “I really have put you through it, haven’t I?” Giggles Blowey in that effeminate German lilt of Christoph Waltz’s which made Colonel Hans Landa so terrifying and Dr. King Schultz so entertaining but which does little for Ernst. Um, no, you haven’t put Bond through anything really, you credit-claiming fuckbum!

But Daniel Craig’s Bond pictures have been the Bonds for the Selfie generation, the Big Brother generation, the TOWIE crowd, the Twitterati. They’re good films in and of themselves but, in trying to think about exactly how these Craig-era Bonds have differed from the others, I’ve decided that it’s in the way that they’re so much more inward-facing; all about Bond, having him look at himself. The other Bond pics had something bad happening – usually of global size and importance – which had to be stopped by Commander Bond of MI6. Bond wasn’t the catalyst. The catalyst was money, or power, or money and power. But what Spectre was suggesting was that everything that had happened for four movies, had happened because of Bond; leastways, because of Stavros’ weird – and pretty lame, let’s be honest – perceived “ostracized sibling” issues. This all means that, far from being the asset to Queen and Country he’s always been previously, James Bond has in fact proved to be a massive liability, unknowingly or not. All about him. And that just ain’t James, baby. And when I thought about it like that, even the way in which the franchise re-booted itself for the Craig-era pics began to rankle. Here is a character whose legacy carried directly – albeit with a f*cked-up Simpsons-like approach to the passage of time – from Dr. No (Young, 1962) to Die Another Day (Tamahori, 2002). Forty years. And all that, is gone. Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton and Brosnan all played the same character, the same James Bond. Craig, he’s a different Bond. I mean, of course I knew that Casino Royale represented a reboot to the franchise but I guess Spectre has helped bring home another angle to that. A more selfish angle, in a way.

Still, I’ve whinged enough. What was the “hot” and the “not” of Spectre? Well, I thought Dave Bautista was good in the Bond Henchman role as I mentioned earlier, I appreciated young Q a lot more in this one than I did in Skyfall, I liked the DB10 (but nowhere near as much as the DB5), I thought the pre-credits scene in Mexico was hugely entertaining (which I guess made the remainder of the movie feel all the more disappointing as a result), Ralph Fiennes is possibly a better M than the fantastic Dame Judi Dench, and I don’t care how old she is: What’s not to like about Monica Bellucci? Exactly. Even the polarising Spectre theme by Sam Smith isn’t all that bad, once you tune your ears into his pitch so they stop bleeding.

Christoph Waltz – well, he disappointed I’m sad to say. Could it be that all of the strength in his Tarantino movie characters came from the pen of Quentin rather than the performance of Christoph? Could it also be that Christoph can only do one character, just with different hats? I certainly hope that’s not the case but for me, he represented the worst Blofeld of the lot. And Daniel Craig… was he disinterested this time, or was it just that strange, distant directing style from Sam Mendes making him look that way? From Daniel’s craggy and unmoving face, it’s hard to tell. I’ll go further: I think that, overall, he’s been the worst Bond of the lot. The movies have mostly been excellent (the three which preceded this one certainly were), and he’s been very good indeed at what he’s done, but what he’s done is a completely different character; Bond in name only. The other Bond actors still felt like “James Bond”, despite offering very different takes on the character.

15. Diamonds Are Forever (Hamilton, 1971)

The franchise said goodbye to Sean Connery – again – with Diamonds Are Forever and, whilst I agree that this movie represented Mr. Connery’s weakest effort individually – excluding the non-canon Thunderball remake Never Say Never Again (Kershner, 1983) – I nonetheless preferred this movie to You Only Live Twice. Yet another Blofeld, though? They can’t settle, can they? And even though his “space lazers” scheme felt once again more ambitious (ie increasingly f*cking sillier) in scope, the poor sod feels miles away from the threatening and shadowy “SPECTRE Number One” he used to be. Now he’s just some smarmy pillock in a nehru suit who’s number Commander Bond very much has. Lana Wood was quite sexy as Plenty O’Toole (!) and Jill St. John was very sexy as Tiffany Case. Hated the theme tune. In fact, I hated the Goldfinger theme as well. I know the Bassey numbers are iconic and arguably the tunes which people most easily associate with Bond but they’re… well, crap. An incredibly American movie, this one. Pressure from United Artists maybe? I’m not complaining, btw. I absolutely adored that Mach 1 Mustang.

14. The Spy Who Loved Me (Gilbert, 1977)

What is it with director Lewis Gilbert and Bond films in which big vehicles are eaten by bigger vehicles? I liked this movie considerably more than Gilbert’s previous outing You Only Live Twice although it treads a hugely similar path; maybe it’s because Moore suits the ludicrousness of it better than Connery. Still, Lewis Gilbert seemed determined to film a live-action Thunderbirds as opposed to a spy actioner. Got to love Stromberg’s underwater lair though, even though it comes straight out of Gerry Anderson’s playbook. It’s maybe my favourite lair of the lot so far. Talking of favourites so far, The Spy Who Loved Me features a pretty hot, seventies-centric Bond girl in Barbara Bach as Russian Agent Anya Amasova, but in a far-too-brief role, it also features Caroline Munro as ‘copter pilot/failed assassin Naomi, and since I have long believed Ms. Munro to be one of the hottest women ever to have lived, she tops my Bond Girl charts.

But no, overall I enjoyed this one, for all its goofiness. I said earlier that I only watched the Bond movies for the first time last year but I’ve got a feeling I saw this one before, years ago when I was a mere wee’un. Scene after scene evoked vague memories of a kids matinee double-bill at the long-demolished local theatre of my youth, and of being considerably more impressed by metal-mouthed giant imbeciles and submersible Lotus Esprits than I am today. Jaws remains a fun henchman, as silly as Oddjob really but pulls it off far better. He’s like Live and Let Die‘s Tee-Hee, but “more” so. Tee-Hee+, if you like. And catching hold of him by his metal gnashers using a f*cking big magnet – pure Batman (the TV show), that. Laughed out loud almost as much as I did when Kananga blew up in Live and Let Die. Arguably the greatest henchmanof the lot; certainly the most memorable. The Esprit though… I had toys of that car when I was a nipper, at a couple of scales, so I must have loved it once but, I dunno, it just looks really dated and silly now. I reckon Bond would’ve kicked Q right in the danglies if he’d really had to swap his DB5 for that f*cking thing.

13. Live and Let Die (Hamilton, 1973)

So, Live and Let Die. Or, Bond’s Gonna Git You, Sucka!, Sweet Jimmy’s Baadasssss Song, 007 the Hard Way or Super Spy TNT to give it one of its alternative titles. Probably. Without wanting to come across as having dropped a wildly racist pun, this is an incredibly colourful Bond pic, but there was some good and some bad in here. Firstly, it’s clear that Roger Moore is nowhere near up to the task of following in Sean Connery’s footsteps. That’s bad (or, as they might say on the set of Live and Let Die: Dat’s baaaaaaaaad, honky!). Also, Live and Let Die is infused with an injection of humour so large it threatens to turn the whole thing into an utter farce. Dat’s baaaaaaad too, mutha f*cka! But, Rog’s bemused/suave approach greatly suits the new, lighter approach to the character. Dat’s aaaall good, my brutha! The entire Blaxploitation vibe made the material feel as though the filmmakers were just using their franchise to keep up with (what was at the time) current trends instead of setting the trends as they did back in the Dr. No/From Russia With Love days. Dat’s baaaaaad! Still, any film which gives Yaphet Kotto an airing deserves kudos. Dat’s aaaall good! Also, the tailoring on some of those Harlem and N’Oarlins stereotypes was admittedly specf*ckingtacular; outfits I would wear myself in an instant. And the henchmen really came into their own on this one: Whisper, Tee-Hee and Baron Samedi, all superb. Double-good, brutha (I’m going to stop doing that, now).

But what was with the proto-Buford T Justice/Rosco P Coltrane sheriff? F*ck me, I half expected the General Lee to crash into view, hotly pursued by Clint Eastwood, Clyde the Orang-Utan, Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLuise. I mean, I know Live and Let Die predates those numerous 70s/80s hee-haws but we don’t expect (or want) them in a Bond film, do we? And the Bond girls, whilst good, weren’t as good as they’d been previously. Gloria Hendry was hot but she couldn’t. Stop. OVERACTING!, and her characterisation of Rosie Carver just came off as annoying as a result; and Jane Seymour was really a bit too childlike and helpless here in her role as Solitaire to truly stir the loins. Her seduction by the twice-her-age Bond just made old Rog look f*cking creepy.

Still, I enjoy Live and Let Die as the piece of fluff it undoubtedly is, even if it doesn’t feel especially Bond-like until close to the end when we get to Kananga’s underground shark-tank-heavy lair. Roger Moore’s Bond debut presented fans with a startlingly different take on the role; a self-deprecating take, dryly aware of the absurdity of the world Bond inhabits.  But how else are you going to play Britain’s favourite homicidal sex-pest when you simply aren’t sexy enough to convince the audience that you really can f*ck/kill everybody else on the planet, as Mr. Moore’s predecessor undoubtedly was? Rog’s largely mediocre batch of movies would have scuppered the franchise had  he tackled that material with the grit of Dalton or the angst of Craig.  And whilst eyebrow-waggling bemusement will never be anybody’s preferred primary characteristic in Commander Bond of MI6, Roger Moore did it very well

12. GoldenEye (Campbell, 1995)

GoldenEye was a long time coming for Bond fans but, in the end, it was worth the wait. Sean Bean is a hugely charismatic actor and this was certainly evident in his performance as Alec “006” Trevelyan. Who knows, in another lifetime he may even have made a decent Bond. The movie opens magnificently and, whilst that opening spills into ridiculousness, it does so with a verve that makes it all okay. Pierce Brosnan made his debut as Commander Bond in GoldenEye and was actually not too bad at all, other than that I couldn’t really tear my eyes away from his “Play-Doh Barber Shop” hairstyle. I rather unfairly wanted to immediately dislike him and I just couldn’t. He was good. Judi Dench owned the few scenes she was in as one would expect and Q’s scene was genuinely familiar and funny, massively helping to ground our new Bond in the Bond world. The locations were rather dour by Bond standards – a brief stopover in Monte Carlo notwithstanding – but I liked them anyway; The whole movie had a bit of a Metal Gear Solid look to it. Alas, Miss Moneypenny has been downgraded from the saucy Caroline Bliss to the more ordinary Samantha Bond, although this was not as much of a distraction as Alan f*cking Cumming, who appeared to be performing in a different movie altogether, a farcical comedy called “Look Everyone! It’s Me! Alan F*cking Cumming!” or similar. But even more distracting than any of that was Joe Don Baker. Hang on! Weren’t you the villainous Whitaker only a couple of films ago in The Living Daylights?? I know he’s not the only actor to have been in a couple of roles within the franchise, but such a recognisable guy, in movies so close to one another? That was a mis-step, I feel.

Bond Girls? Well, Izabella Scorupco is undeniably lovely although she continues the unfortunate trend of “Girl-Next-Door”-style Bond Girls. However, all of that cutesy nicety is thankfully swept away by the carnal spectacle of Famke Janssen as the fabulously named Xenia Onatopp. Ms. Janssen is kind-of hard-faced but she’s incredibly sexy, she always seems even sexier when she’s playing a scoundrel, and here in GoldenEye she’s the very embodiment of sex, killing people as she does with them clutched ‘twixt her thighs. What a way to go!

11. The Living Daylights (Glen, 1987)

I know everybody likes to keep track of how many Bonds there have been, but is anyone paying any attention to the Felix Leiters? How many were we on by 1987? Seventeen, was it? Forty-six? A hundred-and-three? And still none of them had bettered Jack Lord. Still, The Living Daylights brought us to James Bond number four, and Timothy Dalton’s very good here in a movie that’s just shy of real greatness. Once again, gadgets were kept on the down-low but when they were utilised they were very good, the main one here of course being the tricked out V8 Vantage Volante, almost as sexy as the DB5 of old and starring this time in the perennial snowbound chase sequence where it also sadly meets its end. But of course it had to die, else we wouldn’t have been treated to Bond and Kara tobogganing down a mountain together in a cello case. I mean, who hasn’t tobogganed down a mountain in a cello case? There’s still a lot of improvement to be made on the Bond Girl front, though. Maryam d’Abo is lovely, but the character of Kara Milovy wasn’t a “sexy” Bond Girl, was she? This was a much more doe-eyed, Cupid’s Arrow type of a deal. Indeed, much of the middle of the film was a sort of Road Movie/Romance hybrid. I liked the henchman a lot though, and “Necros” is a top “henchman” name. And I liked Caroline Bliss as the new Moneypenny a LOT. Maybe they’ve sexed her up a bit TOO much, though; back when she resembled Christine Hamilton one could understand why Bond limited their interplay to the odd dirty limerick. Here though, I wondered why he didn’t just throw her atop a lab table, stuff his plums in her mouth and tell Q and his poindexters to do one for ten minutes while she hums the theme tune to Z-Cars. I couldn’t buy into Saunders however, chiefly because he was also Heimi Henderson the off-licence owner in The Comic Strip Presents… Mr. Jolly Lives Next Door. Hm, I wonder if The Living Daylights‘ screenwriters nicked the exploding milk bottle gag from the exploding tonic water gag in Mr. Jolly?

Anyway, I liked it. And I really liked Tim Dalton. I bought into him as James Bond from the off and I didn’t find my mind wandering back to other previous Bonds for comparison, either. The Mujahideen bit all seems a bit odd here in 2015 but what can you do? That was the world then and this is the world now. And the theme tune from A-ha is dated now but in the good way, like a Rubik cube. “The living’s in the waay, weeeeee, diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiieee!” Nope, didn’t make a lick of sense, that. Still, good stuff.

10. For Your Eyes Only (Glen, 1981)

Now, I don’t know how necessary the sequence with “Bald Villain in Wheelchair” was; I suppose they decided that they’d have to have some sort of closure with a villain of Blofeld’s calibre and, since they no longer (at that point) had the rights to use the name, they’d have to make it a quickie. Still, once that was out of the way what we had he was a story utterly befitting the means of a superspy; almost a From Russia With Love vibe going on, in a way; something at stake here – the ATAC – to which someone like Bond would be assigned. There were plenty of enjoyable action set-pieces to be found here, not least of which was the 2CV car chase down a mountain road with cars finding themselves upside-down, spinning around, moving backwards at speed and winding up stuck in the trees (I wasn’t sorry to see the back of the white Lotus Esprit, and I think I liked the red Esprit Turbo better). They likes their ski sequences in the Bond films though, don’t they? The one on offer here is an absolute belter however, with Bond on skis being chased by nutters on bikes down an entire Winter Olympic location including ski jump and bobsled run. All very silly once again, but “fun” silly this time. Locations were all beautiful as ever, Topol is always incredibly likeable IMO and that’s no different here, and although Bond wins out in every eventuality (of course; they are Bond films, ffs), it doesn’t feel quite like the foregone conclusion it really is. The Bond girls in For Your Eyes Only were undeniably very attractive without necessarily raising carnal temperatures, with Carol Bouquet’s “Melina” up at the classier end of the spectrum and Lynne Holly-Johnson’s “Bibi Dahl” down at the “wide-eyed naïf” end. Quite why a twenty-three year old girl would be interested in a sucked humbug like Roger Moore, God alone knows. But at least old Rog had the good grace to look suitably embarrassed by the attention. I had to laugh though watching him say to that pretend countess, “I’m a writer researching… um, smugglers. You don’t happen to know any, do you?” Straight out of the Homer Simpson book of subtle subterfuge, that one.

It didn’t look promising with the Blofeld intro and the insipid theme tune with Sheena Easton actually on the screen wailing away (the synth score went a bit hysterical from time to time, too), but it was indeed a minor classic, and maybe not such a minor one at that.

9. From Russia With Love (Young, 1963)

“That’s right, Bond. I’m not Nash. I’m Robert Shaw from off of Jaws, codename: Badly Bleachblonde. And we were only keeping you alive long enough for you to deliver us the Lektor encryption device. And now that you have, you’re expendable. And now that you’re expendable, and I have you unarmed and on your knees, with a silenced pistol aimed point-blank at your massive eyebrows, I’m going to tell you everything. You heard me Bond, everything. I don’t work for SMERSH. I work for SPECTRE. That girl in there? She thinks she’s bending you over for the Soviets, but we’re bending her over just as she’s bending you over. Double bond, Bend – I mean, double bend, Bond. Yes. You see, her boss also works for SPECTRE. How did SMERSH ever think they’d keep hold of their soldiers with a sh*tty acronym like that? See here Bond – an incriminating roll of film of you donkey-punching that silly bitch in there. And here, a threatening blackmail letter from her to you. And – hang on, I’m not done yet – I’ve jotted down the address of SPECTRE’s head office in Hemel Hempstead, with an accompanying hastily-sketched map of how to reach it by bus, train and pedestrian footpath. I’ve written it all on the back of a Polaroid of the SPECTRE front gate. Look, there’s our leader, known only as “Number One” – although his name’s Ernst Blofeld, he runs Abra-Kebabra on Dagenham Heathway – standing outside, waving. And now, Bond, I’m just going to open this obviously booby-trapped British Intelligence briefcase…”

From Russia With Love, the second James Bond movie, is a superior film to its predecessor, although I still prefer the more raw and less fully-formed charms of Dr. No. Or maybe I prefer the colourful shirts and Mango songs of the first film over tense steam train journeys across the Balkans. Things are taking shape though now. The concept of the Bond Girl was of course already up and running (and I’m afraid Tatiana Romanova doesn’t come anywhere close to Honey Ryder), but From Russia With Love introduces us to Q and his gadgets, although that briefcase was more like a pre-schooler’s impression of what a spy’s briefcase should be. “An ordinary briefcase, Bond, but inside – and here’s the clever part – there’s a f*cking big sniper rifle. Ingenious, hmm?” And the plot itself, whilst still not needlessly convoluted by any stretch, was pretty silly, in the good “Bond” sense of course. Connery though is better here than he was in the first movie, and he was pretty bloody good then. The quips and one-liners come thick and fast here yet we still buy into Bond as a dangerous, double-hard bastard. Silly catchphrases and funny lines are of course a staple of the action hero pic but it’s actually pretty difficult to ride that line without it coming across as… well, sh*t, but Connery could really do it.

Our rundown concludes with part 3 HERE. Spectre is out on DVD/Blu-Ray 22/2/2016.

By Last Caress.

“Bond. James Bond.”

With Sam Mendes’ Spectre (2015), the 24th movie in the James Bond series, about to be released on DVD/Blu-ray, BRWC thought it was time to send Agent Last Caress on a not-so-secret mission: To rank the all of the Bond movies, from worst to best. Now pay attention, L.C.!

24. Tomorrow Never Dies (Spottiswoode, 1997)

Despite an impressive opening scene (followed quickly by a fantastic theme tune from Sheryl Crow), Tomorrow Never Dies is undone by a ridiculous antagonist in Jonathan Pryce’s Eliot Carver, a Rupert Murdoch/Robert Maxwell hybrid trying to kickstart global warfare so that, somehow, he’ll have more dramatic headlines which will sell more papers or get a foothold in the lucrative Chinese market, or something (I stopped paying attention if I’m honest). Everything felt ridiculously overblown yet still not enough felt at stake, either. I mean of course a potential World War III is a lot at stake but I don’t think I bought for a second into Carver’s ability to make that happen, no matter how much Tomorrow Never Dies tried to present him as a Blofield-level supervillain. Perhaps they should’ve focussed more on Ricky Jay, whose Henry Gupta was a more interesting antagonist. Teri Hatcher’s attributes as a Bond Girl are obvious but she was all too brief, however Michelle Yeoh was a fantastic choice of Bond Girl, very sexy without overtly trying to be so, and she proved a capable sidekick for James too; all very Lara Croft. And I thought Pierce Brosnan himself was okay, despite his Mr. Whippy hairstyle; this film has 99 problems, but James Bond ain’t one. Ultimately though, some bizarre comment on the power wielded by our media moguls is simply not a satisfying issue for the attentions of Commander Bond of MI6, certainly not when it’s handled as poorly as this.

Oh, and how about that detonation countdown at the end while Bond and “Cardboard Cut-Out Blonde German Stereotype Henchman #561” Stamper are fighting? “T MINUS 40 SECONDS” (seventy seconds later) “T MINUS 20 SECONDS” (twenty seconds later) “T MINUS 10 SECONDS” – are they in the bloody Twilight Zone?

23. Moonraker (Gilbert, 1979)

-My God, what’s Bond doing?
-I think he’s attempting re-entry, sir…

Nope. Roger Moore was the supposed “fun” Bond but, in Moonraker, the joke’s not funny anymore. We’re a long, long way from underneath the mango tree of Dr. No now (and, regarding the “gag” above: I doubt Moore could manage “entry” at his age there, let alone “re-entry”). It’s not the same type of film at all at this point, and this movie is not in any discernible way, shape or form representative of the Bond I had enjoyed so often previously. Moore looks like a chewed toffee wrapped in an Alan Partridge double-breasted blazer, and yet we’re still expected to buy into all these women falling at his feet, although to be honest the Bond girls were well below par in this outing; I think Jaws’ squeeze Dolly (Blanche Ravalec) might’ve been the best one, and she looked intentionally goofy. And what exactly was Jaws doing in this picture? Drax the Dourface had only taken “perfect” people up onto his crappy sexship of love, I thought. EXCEPT for Jaws and his oddbod missus? That’s handy, once wrinkly James needed a bit of assistance up there. I understand that at this point there were issues surrounding Eon being able to use the characters/concepts of Blofeld or SPECTRE but the Blofeld-a-likes were becoming grating. Drax was a particularly wooden effort. Who would work for this bellend? Guys in yellow boilersuits and anti-windowlicking headgear, I suppose. And of course, he has to explain everything to Jimmy B, show him around the place et cetera. Yawn. And as a final ballbag-smacking coup de grace, Bassey hits us with not just her worst effort from three, but the entire franchise’s worst theme tune from the eleven up to that point.

Any good points at all? Hm, I suppose the opening sky-diving sequence was okay. The python fight in the pool had potential (although the scene failed to live up to it). Oh, and Q’s exploding bolas were pretty cool, if for no other reason than that they allowed me to make mention of “Q’s exploding bolas” just then. But no, not much at all here worth returning to ever again. All those spacemen floating about “lazering” each other. What a load of old bumsh*t! It all seemed as though, despite the outer space trappings, the budget had been cut considerably. Everything looked so cheap and nasty. And yet when I looked into it, I noted that Moonraker was up to that point by far the most expensive Bond movie ever made. Depressingly, I also noted that its $210m+ box office was also Bond’s highest, not just at that point but right up until Pierce Brosnan’s debut in Goldeneye (Campbell, 1995). Still, I’m going to credit that particular anomaly to George Lucas and the ripple effect of the Star Wars phenomenon rather than to Broccoli, Moore and director Lewis Gilbert.

22. Die Another Day (Tamahori, 2002)

Well! This is how the Brosnan era ends and, to paraphrase TS Eliot even further: Not with a bang, but a BANG! MASSIVE UNREALISTIC BAAAAAANG!!!

Has a movie ever been made before in which every single line of dialogue is a smug, pithy comeback? It has now! And the gadgets – sh*tting crikey! Every scenario contained a gadget to put Bond in the sh*t, a gadget to be misappropriated/pressed into service as something else, and a gadget to get Bond out of whatever sh*t the first gadget had put him in to begin with. This Bond movie didn’t require James Bond. Anyone from Batman to Mr. Bean would’ve done, since every single event was created by a macguffin and resolved by a deux ex machina. Sillier and sillier it got (I’m talking about the gadgets and the lines of dialogue now, for clarity). Pop-up machine-guns and rockets and anti-rocket rockets and ejector seats are now pretty much standard on all cars in the James Bondiverse, it seems, so what next? Ah – the invisicar! The Aston Martin Van-ish. Brilliant! See what they did there? A guy who’s face refuses to reject the foreign bodies lightly embedded in them? Okay! A smarmy-arse Korean who’s now an even smarmier-arse English dude? If you say so! A satellite with a f*cking big sun-gun on it, ploughing through the Korean DMZ without so much as a “Boom shanka!” from f*cking ANYONE?!? Oh, why not? By the time Jimmy B had reconstituted a land speed vehicle into a parasurfing kit in order to beach-boy his way out of certain death by ice block/sun-laser combo, I’d long stopped finding it all a bloody great distraction. Screaming “Turn them off or I’ll only be half the woman I used to be!” when tied down and in real mortal danger of being sliced to pieces by wildly gyrating and out-of-control lasers (what is it with lasers in this film??) doesn’t only sound unreal, it sounds absolutely ludicrous, except that in the world of Die Another Day, it just seems… typical.

And that’s the thing. Die Another Day took a swan-dive off of reality more than any other Bond film, which of course is saying something. More outlandish even than the f*ckawful Moonraker. The real stunts which, as mentioned above, always give the Bond films a measure of integrity no matter how one feels about them, had largely been binned for cgi hocus-pocus. It’s as though the Bond creators had all been given computers for the first time ever, and they’d all gone mental. The scriptwriter appeared to have been shanghaied from his previous position as the Gold Blend ad writer, so strong was the cheese in each and every verbal exchange. M’s character veered wildly from “Bursting-with-pride mother” to “Bond’s personal nemesis” randomly and with nary a glance at any reasoning behind why. John Cleese’s credentials as a comedy actor are beyond reproach but here, replacing the late Desmond Llewelyn, the obligatory Q scene was jarring, out of place (perhaps to my mind this new quartermaster hadn’t earned the stripes to be lipping Commander Bond in the way the previous Q did? I dunno). Madonna’s shoehorned cameo was more shameless than all of BMW’s product placement throughout the previous half-dozen or so movies. Almost everything in this movie that wasn’t deeply improbable, was deeply unlikeable. But Die Another Day pushed the incredulity so far, it stopped mattering. And, as a result, some universal law of physics snapped somewhere, and Die Another Day ceased being as hateful as it really should’ve been by all previously-held tenets. I mean, it was still rubbish, of course. How could it not be? But I’m afraid it’s like this: I found Die Another Day – one of the most ridiculous films I’ve ever seen – to be preferable to Moonraker and Tomorrow Never Dies. In fact, I could see myself watching it again some dreary Sunday, when the drugs haven’t quite flushed out yet and I’m all out of pornography.

21. Octopussy (Glen, 1983)

(Straightaway, let’s just take the cocking dreadful Coolidge number All Time High as the pile of auld spunkfling that it is, so we don’t have to dissect it any further, cool? Cool)

The quite hideously-titled Octopussy, then. The movie was appropriately Bond-sized in its reach, the gadgets started creeping back in again but were, for the large part, fairly low-tech (floaty croc-a-float thing) or, at least, fairly low-key; the plane out the horse’s @rsehole was probably the “Bond”est of gadgets and it was over and done with before the opening title credits hit (No, we’re not discussing All Time bloody High. We agreed that), the locations in the sub-continent were beautiful as one would expect, the tone – with some glaring exceptions – was largely serious and befitting of the franchise as I appreciate it, and tennis player Vijay Amritraj, who I thought would balls everything up, didn’t. He was quite good really, all things considered and despite the heavy-handed tennis gags.

Still, it’s far from top-tier stuff. Why? Well it’s hard to put my finger on it since much of what I dislike about Bond had been jettisoned for this outing. I think that the most obvious things to which I can point are that a) it’s almost certainly a good half-hour too long and b) it’s… well, it’s just a bit dull, really. Beautiful, but dull. Like a Bond girl! Talking of which: Maud Adams (Octopussy), Kristina Wayborn (Magda) – nah. You can keep the pair of ’em. Stephen Berkoff unabashedly screaming his head off and chewing the scenery non-stop simply kept pulling me out of the proceedings. I was sure he was trying not to corpse throughout his performance. I know he was playing a Russian but he kept reminding me of either Ade Edmondson or Ken “Reg Holdsworth” Morley in their comedy turns as German military officers in Blackadder Goes Forth and Red Dwarf VII respectively. I read that critics and fans alike were unimpressed by James Bond being made to dress up in a clown outfit but that didn’t bother me. No, if he’s a spy, he needs to be undercover, in whatever outfit is appropriate. What did grate though was the “Tarzan” ullulation as Commander B swung from a vine, and also agent Vijay attracting Bond’s attention as he stepped ashore with a blast of the Bond theme on his pungi. Needlessly kept pitching the movie – and by association, the entire franchise – back into daft light comedy territory.

20. The Man With the Golden Gun (Hamilton, 1974)

See, now I could see myself vegging out to this on a lazy Sunday afternoon, yet I still think it’s fair to say that I didn’t think it was much good. It’s just that it was so lightweight, “not much good” is still plenty acceptable by its own low standards, if that makes any sense. If Connery or Lazenby had been in this it would’ve been an absolute debacle but Moore… well, he’s a bit of a clown really, isn’t he? Comedy Bond. I can’t believe they shoehorned that bloody sheriff back into the proceedings! What was that all about? I quite liked Christopher Lee – then again, I always likes me a bit of Christopher Lee, he’s the Lord of Darkness – although I reckon I could’ve done without the third nipple. By which of course I mean Nick Nack. I mean, I like Hervé Villechaize, who doesn’t? He was great in exactly the same role opposite Ricardo Montalban in Fantasy Island. But who had him down as a quality henchman? I suppose the idea was that Scaramanga doesn’t need a henchman in the way Blofeld might since he, Scaramanga, is the badass, but still: Hervé Villechaize?? And poor old Scara’s end-of-the-pier-style lair was like something off of 60-Minute Makeover, covered as it was in crappy woodchip props and boards, and shop mannequins. Oh dear! Is that a tuppence-ha’penny second-hand crapper of an exercise bike that that yank gangster just walked past, the likes of which you’d find on any boot fair in the land on an overcast Sunday morning? Yes, it is. And what was Lulu caterwauling about? Possibly the worst Bond tune of the lot so far, worse than Bassey.

Still, it remained low-key enough for it to retain at least a core of plausibility (inasmuch as, say, You Only Live Twice really required the f*cking Avengers to sort it out, never mind DoubleOhSeven), I liked Scaramanga as previously mentioned (you’ve got to love these megalomaniacs gleefully explaining absolutely everything to Bond, including a full tour of the facilities, right?), I liked the Thai setting and the limited chop-socky action, and I enjoyed the car chase despite the gimp sheriff and the f*cking slide-whistle noise as Bond made the twisty bridge jump (and despite all the cars in this movie being utter bumwipe). And of course, as stupid and irritating as Mary Goodnight most assuredly was, she’s still an in-her-prime Britt Ekland and, as such, storms up to the Bond Girl summit alongside Diana Rigg and Ursula Andress.

That golden gun’s a piece of crap, though.

19. The World is Not Enough (Apted, 1999)

Right, I’m calling it:

Pierce Brosnan is not a bad Bond.

This third Brosnan film – not as good as GoldenEye by any measure, not as bad as Tomorrow Never Dies either – has convinced me that if there were problems with the Brosnan age – and there were – it’s not the man himself. It might be his hair, but it’s not him. In fact, I don’t think there’s been a genuinely bad actor in the Bond role, but I digress. What about The World is Not Enough?

Well, the opening speedboat chase down the Thames to the Millennium Dome was kind-of the story of The World is Not Enough in microcosm: Spectacular here and there but patently ridiculous and, too often, just daft. Did Q say that that was his retirement fishing boat? Didn’t it have homing missiles on it? What was he fishing for? How much in public funds was he diverting to make a retirement fishing boat complete with homing missiles? Sounds like a job for James Bond…

The plot? Blah blah pipelines, blah blah murdered billionaire, blah blah don’t make this personal, Bond, blah blah sexy girl turning Jimmy B over, blah blah implausible bad guy. Blah. I know the Bond franchise needs to retain some staples and The World is Not Enough manages to keep things reassuringly familiar, but… ah, it’s becoming tiring now. What was all that hoo-hah about the bullet in Robert Carlyle’s head? It’ll eventually kill him but, meanwhile, it’s making him stronger and stronger by removing his senses as it goes? Wha? Is this a Marvel film, now? Not that I mind an improbable happenstance which turns an individual into a superhuman instead of killing them stone dead as one would imagine, but are we in The Incredible Hulk territory now, or what? I like Robert Carlyle but I think he’d have made a decent foil for Bond without the bullet thing. Less can be said though for Goldie. I think Goldie is a uniquely gifted musician and artist, I really do. But he’s not an actor, bless him.

The shame of it though is that I thought The World is Not Enough had quite a few things going for it: A greater dollop of plot for Judi Dench’s M had been overdue since she took the role, the Bond Girls were in fine form – Sophie Marceau was gorgeous and Denise Richards was still sexy even though a) her character was of that deeply irritating Scrappy-Doo spunky sidekick-with-attitude variety, and b) the poor cow couldn’t give a convincing performance if her vacuous life depended on it, Brosnan remained effective and even likeable throughout yet another rather doughy script, John Cleese’s turn as Q’s eventual replacement wasn’t nearly as distracting as I feared it might be and was actually rather warm (sad to note that this was Desmond Llewelyn’s final appearance as Q before his death in a car crash), and I even found myself giving a toss when Robbie Coltrane’s Zukovsky met his end. Oh, and I really liked Bond’s x-ray specs. Sod the gadgetry, they just looked cool.

Still, the bottom line though is that story is king, and this story veered too often from silly to boring. For the most part I didn’t care about what was happening, or to whom. And too many silly bits felt shoehorned in, like the hologram of Renard’s head to explain to us dumb viewers how the bullet in his brain was affecting him, or Bond’s outdated little tête-à-tête with Dr. Warmflash (!), or indeed Denise Richards’ entire character, as sexy as she was. This wasn’t the most f*ckawful Bond I’d ever seen, but it was maybe the most “meh”, and in some ways that’s even worse.

Oh, and the theme tune, by Garbage: Too easy to say “It was ‘Garbage’”, ha-bloody-ha, but… well, it was. I’d never rated Garbage even back when I couldn’t switch on the bloody radio without having them blaring out at me. They did one half-decent track as far as I can recall, and it certainly wasn’t The World is Not Enough.

18. You Only Live Twice (Gilbert, 1967)

The most parodied of all the Bond pictures, You Only Live Twice was the movie I feared all Bond movies were before I’d ever seen any (prior to 2015, I’d never seen one of them, presuming them all to be… well, pretty-much like this one). It’s all of the excesses of the world of James Bond piled on top of the overcomplicated story which makes little sense on the face of it and is out-and-out stupid looked at any closer. Well, I guess that’s true of all of them, but many of the other movies in the franchise had kept me interested enough not to want to pick away at the holes). I liked the Japanese setting, I liked the styling of Blofeld’s volcano lair*, and that was it really. Oh, the ninjas. It’s hard to dislike an army of ninjas.

*Which contractors do you call in if you want something like that? “We’ll need stairs up to the top of the volcano there, spaceship launch/landing combo pad over there, the collapsible footbridge over a piranha pool just there, with the mini-monorail just behind it over there.” That smug talking ballbag on Grand Designs would have a field day.

17. A View to a Kill (Glen, 1985)

A View to a Kill isn’t great – very little from the Moore era is – but it isn’t terrible by any stretch and is even quite fun here and there. As a film it’s overlong and needlessly convoluted; Fiona Fullerton was a top lass in her day but that entire tape-swap fake-out sequence could have and should have been snipped out of the picture. And the globetrotting nature of the Bond films felt laboured this time somehow, as though the writers identified Ascot, Paris and ‘Frisco as locations first and then built the story backwards from there. And for all I know maybe that’s how they build all the Bond films, but it felt engineered this time. Racetracks, restaurants in observation towers, Silicone Valley – the entire story could’ve taken place in California. Still, Christopher Walken is always a great watch and that’s no different here. For pantomime-style scenery chewing, there is none finer. Well, maybe the late, great Alan Rickman. Eon missed out in never having him as a Bond villain. But I digress. Grace Jones is surprisingly good as a Bond villain henchman, even if the lifting-a-bloke-over-her-head trick looked like the sort of gag you’d see in a comedy. But she certainly looks the part; she has always typified the ludicrous excesses of the eighties but she’s always also managed to carry that off well. And Patrick Macnee looked like a natural fit as a Bond character even if he was starting to resemble a blancmange by 1985. It felt as though he’d been playing the part for a while and it was a shame they killed him off here as IMO Sir Godfrey Tibbett could’ve provided a decent light-hearted foil for Bond in at least another couple of pictures. A great theme tune from Duran Duran, though; don’t know if it felt particularly like a “Bond” theme but it was (and remains) a decent number. Not that I’d imagine anyone would “dance into the fire”, except for Norman Wisdom, possibly.

A View to a Kill saw the Roger Moore era all squared away (it was also Lois Maxwell’s final turn as Miss Moneypenny. Good job too; her and Moore were becoming indistinguishable). There had been a few highs (For Your Eyes Only, elements of Live and Let Die and The Spy Who Loved Me to a lesser extent). There had been a few lows (Moonraker, Rita Coolidge, the issue of Moore’s advancing years which were a slight concern the moment he debuted and which had become a colossal elephant in the room by the time of his departure), but probably not as many as I’d suspected there would be. But what there was in abundance was a whole lot of “Meh”. Too silly for the nature of the character and his world but not amusing enough to get away with it, not enough courage in its convictions to present anything with any honesty but expecting us to buy into Roger Moore f*cking and Kung-fu-ing his way around the planet when he looks in dire need of a shopmobility scooter, a blanket over his legs and a nice nap. In many ways – and rightly so – the entire Bond franchise has maintained certain defining characteristics as any brand should, but at the same time the Moore films felt like a very different experience than the Connery/Lazenby films which preceded them, and not in a good way. If Moore had preceded Connery instead of succeeding him, I reckon I’d have quit watching Bond inside three films. Old Rog was nowhere near as offensive as I thought he was going to be but unfortunately for the most part he and his movies never had quite enough about them to be anything more than the sort of fare to which one can nod off on a lazy bank holiday afternoon, which explains exactly why ITV always put them on at those times.

Our rundown continues with part 2 HERE and part 3 HERE. Spectre is out on DVD/Blu-ray 22/2/2016.