which is the best James Bond movie?

Daylights was my last one til the Craig Royale. I should try Licence to Kill, I guess.

actually only recently saw A View to a Kill. just horrifically bland, besides delightful Walken delivery in this scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCmgle7Q5eU

xp you might wanna avoid Licence Morbs, unless you really, really like generic B-action. it's the closest to a Stallone/Norris movie that Bond ever came

everybody has different opinions! I hate that.

I dunno. What's the diff b/w Bond and Norris -- tuxes and martinis? This is why I'm not a Bond fan.

Invasion U.S.A. is a more entertaining movie than all but like 5 or 6 Bonds so I really do not know

RAVES coming in for Skyfall.

License To Kill is a good 80s action movie.

Never Say Never Again surprised me! I expected a smug Sean Connery but his quiet weariness is exactly right for the part -- one of his subtler performances. The shark sequence (which I remembered watching on cable as a kid at a friend's house) is quite well shot.

A thousand curses on Kim Basinger. Is there a role she didn't scream for help through?

love her in Nadine actually

she didn't deserve Jeff Bridges.

I remember seeing Connery on Johnny Carson when NSNA came out, talking about putting his hairpiece on to play Bond again.

I liked it more than Thunderball for sure

!

shorter, less waterlogged + Max von Sydow

It's 2-hours-plus and drags after Brandauer walks away though.

One of the more disappointing truths of my adulthood has been learning that Thunderball pretty much sucks.

this shit is relative, Thunderball is weak but outweighs 20-odd years of bollocks that comes after it

cd argue the same about the books, Fleming slid downhill from Casino Royale on but they're all better than say Lee Childs

sonofagun, it seemed shorter... also forgot Brandauer was in it!

I had the Thunderball game.

http://jamesbondboardgames.grrgh.com/2010/10/25/thunderball/

Thunderball second worst of the EON Connery Bonds. Diamonds are Forever obviously the worst.

still love Diamonds above Thunderball, which is leaden as fuck.

the two henchman dudes in Diamonds were a portent of things to come.

taking your point but there's nothing in the worst non-Roger Moore movie that's more offensive than Live and Let Die

I just rewatched For Your Eyes Only, and was surprised how lean and stripped-down it was for a Moore Bond. (Though unlike many others, I do love a lot of the Moore era comedy stuff, especially in Octopussy.) There's no grandiose world-conquering schemes for the villain, and the ending is satisfyingly non-black & white ("that's detente, comrade: you don't have it, I don't have it"). It also features what is probably the nastiest scene Moore's Bond ever had (besides him practically raping Solitaire in Live and Let Die), when he pushes the car with the henchman inside down the cliff. And the rock-climbing finale was still a really exciting set piece, with little of the rear-projection corniness that mars many of the Moore era action scenes.

Also, Melina Havelock is possibly the most capable female lead in any Bond movie (and Carole Bouquet manages to convince the viewer she really is that tough): there's no real damsel-in-distress moments for her, and she ends up saving Bond more often than he saves her. I can't recall any Bond girl, not even in the 90s and 00s movies (I haven't seen Skyfall yet), being this skillful, which is a bit sad considering FYEO is 30 years old.

Basically, the only flaws in the movie are the totally unnecessary super-young-iceskater-has-the-hots-for-Bond sideplot (which would've been okay in some of the less serious Bonds, as Moore is quite funny when he's rejecting her advances, but it doesn't really fit here), and the fact that the romance is even more tacked-on than usually: there's literally no romantic scenes at all between Bond and Havelock before the final scene, where they just making out. I guess the idea was that a Bond movie has to end this way, but they could've at least tried to forehadow it in some way. Without those elements I'd say FYEO would easily be among the top 5 Bonds.

Here's my ranking of all the Bond movies:

The breakdown basically goes like this: 1-5 are essential. 6-11 are very good, but with some (increasingly significant as the rank decreases) flaws. 12-15 are stupid, but fun. 16 is only that high because of Christopher Lee. 17-22 are generally terrible but still worth watching because, you know, Bond. 23 is Quantum of Solace.

1. Casino Royale
2. From Russia with Love
3. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
4. Goldfinger
5. The Spy Who Loved Me
6. Goldeneye
7. The Living Daylights
8. Dr. No
9. Skyfall
10. Thunderball
11. For Your Eyes Only
12. Tomorrow Never Dies
13. Licence to Kill
14. Die Another Day
15. Octopussy
16. The Man with the Golden Gun
17. Moonraker
18. You Only Live Twice
19. Diamonds Are Forever
20. Live and Let Die
21. The World Is Not Enough
22. A View to a Kill
23. Quantum of Solace

Quantum really seems to be consensus worst, huh? Personally I found it bland enough that I barely remember it now, but View still strikes me as more screechingly bad.

Any movie with Walken and Grace Jones automatically is more exciting than the blandfest that was Quantum.

no Never Say Never Again? Best Bond performance of the eighties (guess why).

I don't really count Never Say Never Again as canon; if it was a better movie, maybe I would care more, but it isn't so I don't.

View to a Kill is really awful – even Roger Moore was like "I think I'm too old for this, guys" before they started shooting. That said, I can actually stand to look at View to a Kill for more than two consecutive minutes without having to look away, Unlike Quantum. Also, Bond doesn't make a fairly inoffensive villain drink gasoline in View to a Kill.

"I think I'm too old for this, guys" was Moore's M.O. since the seventies, no?

Yeah, but it wasn't quite as embarrassing until that one… That one shot at the race track with Moore, Patrick McNee, Robert Brown, and Lois Maxwell at the race track with them all lined up and looking about 1000 years old is just, quite literally, NAGL.

Just watched Goldeneye for the first time since it came out; actually, not even really sure I saw the whole thing back then either. Thought it held up pretty well, even on pan-n-scan VHS. The villainess is deliciously psycho, it's great seeing her in the background of shots where she's not part of the conversation and she's just like, licking her lips every time Bond threatens somebody and shivering when Sean Bean raises his gun, whatever. The ending kinda sucked - thought it was lame that Bond just purposefully lets the guy drop to his death, and was convinced that evil lady was gonna come back at some point after being left hanging in the tree (like the heavy in Die Hard).

But it basically pulls off its whole thing really well. Some awesome set pieces (the tank chase, the whole opener with the beautifully stupid "catching up to a falling airplane" stunt), good thematic hook where all the characters, good and bad, are still stuck in the Cold War, and an interesting idea of how to balance glamorous goofball Bond with "dark heavy serious spy guy" Bond. It swings very much towards the former but there are elements - like Sean Bean's "do all the vodka martinis silence the voices of the men you've killed" speech - that suggest the latter. Definitely way more compelling than the gray polygonal wasteland of the video game.

Did think it was pretty lame the way they kept calling out Bond's misogynist boys' club shtick and then just letting it past - very have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too and it probably dates the film worse than anything else besides the cheap plastic-y look of Bond's spy-camera, which probably looked good then but now looks like something I'd expect to see at the thrift store.

But the videogame had a way more compelling soundtrack than the trainwreck film version.

The villainess is deliciously psycho, it's great seeing her in the background of shots where she's not part of the conversation and she's just like, licking her lips every time Bond threatens somebody and shivering when Sean Bean raises his gun, whatever.

In my opinion she was the worst part of the film; the character was interesting in theory, but Famke Janssen's terrible overacting and scenery-chewing made every seen with her painful to watch... Yeah, I know, she's a Bond villain, you shouldn't expect subtlety, but there's a limit how unsubtle you can be without looking silly. Scorupco's character, on the other hand, was surprisingly good, one of the best Bond girls of all time, except for the pseudofeminist lines where she criticized Bond's boys' club thing. Obviously I'm all for strong female characters and deconstructing chauvinism, but the movie was too eager to say, "See? This a new non-sexist Bond movie you're watching!", so those scenes felt tacked-on. Like, are you really gonna start denigrating a guy who just saved your life for his machismo.

"seen" = "scene"

Yeah, I get where you're coming from with the overacting, I just really went for it, in the same way that I loved, say, Helena Bonham-Carter's preposterous I AM CRAZY VILLAIN hamming in the Harry Potter flicks. Feels like if any series can go slightly beyond the danger line of campiness it's Bond.

Agreed about the tacked-on "boys with their toys" stuff - sort of felt like someone cooked it up in the script at some point and then they lost the scene where it made sense to use it, and kept it anyway...didn't really grow organically out of the scenes it was in.

ie leave it out ffs it's a bond movie

You can't talk about limits to over-the-top-ness in Goldeneye. It's as goofy as Moore's goofiest movies. Famke is the right kind of exciting over-the-top and matches the very entertaining and batshit insane action scenes well.

xps Nahh, it totally could have been cool if it had just made sense. Part of me wonders if an earlier version had a scene where both Bond and Trevelyan were pulling crazy MI6 gadgets on each other, Trevelyan with an old model laser pocket protector and Bond with the latest grenade foundtain pen, having some kind of standoff. Like, there are ways that "toys" fit pretty nicely in a Bond movie! But the whole deal with Trevelyan is that he's somehow over all the cool-factor spy-gadget stuff, so somehow it becomes just Bond and a Russian guy yelling at each other for no reason when they're on the same side.

ahh, famke's great. it's scorupco who's 100% forgettable. i was saying this in the skyfall thread but I rewatched G-eye on tgiving and it really didnt hold up for me in the slightest... its just a roger moore movie with a fresh coat of paint (not-so-fresh coat these days)

Roger Moore movies are pretty fun though! If nothing else, Goldeneye looks better than those, and a couple of the sequences (again, pretty much the tank chase and the cold open) seriously up the ante on action-packedness, cinematography, and a general sense of physicality and convincingness. For me anyway.

I am trying to think of a Bond movie that I outright disliked... maybe You Only Live Twice? Aside from that one, they've all been fun to ZOMG WAU

Roger Moore movies are pretty fun though!

some are fun, some are shit.

Oh, man, the introduction of Xenia Onatopp was mind-blowing to a 15-year old.

Yeah, also, file that under "puns that you had missed."

Also, one thing that bothered me about the tank chase was the finale: when Bond's about to reach the bad guys, they jump on a train, which immediately departs. The train is traveling at a high speed, so you'd think the bad guys managed to escape, but then they see that the tank is waiting for them in a tunnel ahead! How the hell did Bond manage to drive the tank there and place it in a tunnel well before the train got there? Even if it's a Bond movie and the laws of physics are malleable, it would've been nice to at least get some explanation how Bond got there before the train.

train had to stop at watford junction and abbot's langley

I am trying to think of a Bond movie that I outright disliked... maybe You Only Live Twice?

on a board that prides itself on insane challopry this is maybe the insanest thing i have ever read

YOLT out