which is the best James Bond movie?

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

NV are you boggling at disliking #YOLT or only disliking that one?

"only" i think but ctfo disliking it more than any non-Connery flicks or Thunderball or Diamonds or even Dr No is just kerrrazy

i half-rewatched goldeneye recently and the tank scene bothered me in an odd way, kinda breaking my suspension of disbelief in the james bond universe (why this moment and not countless others, i don't know) - if you find yourself explosively plowing through the streets of st petersburg in a tank, then you have to admit that you're really a bit shit at being a spy.

Yeah he really is a woefully conspicuous espionage agent. Similarly it bothers me a bit how he so rarely uses an alias. Is there not some master criminal message board on which folk can be advised to shoot in the head anyone who introduces himself as "Bond, James Bond"?

Seems like most master criminals Bond comes into contact with end up dead so maybe it's not an issue for him. Really what he's saying when he introduces himself is "I WILL END YOU".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4gPBO0CM78

Not knowing much about lol Britishes pronunciation when I first saw "View To A Kill," discovering that what I was hearing as "Sinjin Smythe" was spelled "St. John Smith" really blew my mind.

Similarly it bothers me a bit how he so rarely uses an alias.

There is a feint at this in "Casino Royale" when Bond checks into the hotel under his own name:

Bond : "Look, if Le Chiffre is that well connected he knows who I am and where the money's coming from. Which means he's decided to play me anyway, so he's either desperate or he's overly confident. But either way, that tells me something about him. And all he gets in return is a name he already has."
Vesper : "And now he knows something about you. He knows you're reckless. Take the next one, there isn't enough room for me and your ego."

FWIW I didn't actually mean "You Only Live Twice", I meant "Never Say Never Again"

i half-rewatched goldeneye recently and the tank scene bothered me in an odd way, kinda breaking my suspension of disbelief in the james bond universe (why this moment and not countless others, i don't know) - if you find yourself explosively plowing through the streets of st petersburg in a tank, then you have to admit that you're really a bit shit at being a spy.

Yeah, this bothered me too... Also, he's plowing through the centre of the Russian capital, destroying statues and historical buildings and stuff, and all he gets after him is a couple of cop cars, instead of the army or SWAT teams or whatever. Okay, maybe I can live with that, but not with the fact that Bond, the master spy, couldn't come up with a better way to chase the bad guy. As thrilling as that scene was, it felt like it put there purely for the "HELL YEAH!" factor, they didn't much care whether it fits the character of James Bond.

Sorry, I got that wrong, it was not the Russian capital in Goldeneye (though it's still the former capital, and the second most important city); I guess I conflated it with The Bourne Supremacy in my head.

the tank chase has a ton of killer money shots, but overall it's pretty incoherent. it's also weirdly lacking in exuberance - i think that might be due to the scoring, which is some of the worst ever in a bond picture. still one of the highlights of G-eye tho

Man, I forgot how mean Live and Let Die is.

Watched it the other week, it's a pretty unhinged film. The most convincing Bond performance from Moore by some way though.

Also, the most assholish Bond has been in any of the films.

And that's saying something.

Exactly.

I recently caught up with two Moore's that I hadn't seen, or at least don't remember ever having seen before: For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy. The former is not especially memorable or clever, but I kind of enjoyed it anyway: I'm a sucker for both skiing and underwater footage, and the movie has plenty of both. The Thatcher gag at the end had my husband and I howling. I'm under the impression that this one is not a favourite among Bond purists, but it kind of seems like the best possible Bond movie from the early 80s starring an actor who was clearly starting to age out of the role. Plus, the Sheena Easton song is actually kind of pretty.

Octopussy pretty much sucks, though. If, arguably, not as bad as A View to a Kill, it is certainly a whole lot duller. The clown stuff is cringe-worthy, and the last hour of the film is brutally sluggish, not even delivering much in the big, climactic action sequence. That saw-blade yoyo thing was pretty cool, though.

for your eyes only is awesome, partially for how much it breaks with bond traditions and also reduces the plot to pretty simple espionage. the underwater scenes are v gorgeous

octopussy's first half is p good but it loses a lot of steam when they get to the circus

i'm a moore apologist though, and i like a view to a kill

Biggest disappointment re: Octopussy, though? That the theme song wasn't also called "Octopussy."