To start with.....He really looks the part, and I think he's best as Bond when he's being sexy with the ladies. I don't like the scenes where he's trying to look tough with that scowl: it just looks like he's "acting" too much. The DAD Korean death march is awesome acting.....the emotions on his face are so perfect for that scene.
The reason Brosnan is being bashed so much is that he was the last actor before Craig to play Bond. This has always been the case. Whenever there is a new Bond actor, fans bash the previous actor. I could say that Connery is the only actor who has escaped bashing, but I would be lying. Even he has been bashed.
Whenever there is a new Bond actor, fans bash the previous actor.
1969 "Connery was getting fat."
1971 "Lazenby was really a hippie."
1973 "At least Moore has all his own hair!"
1987 "Moore was so dopey."
1995 "Dalton was SO serious!"
2006 "Brosnan was a pretty-boy pastiche Bond."
2018 "Craig was way too grumpy."
2025 "Cavill looked too much like Superman."
2035 "Bieber was too young & silly"
2044 "Smith was too much like his Dad in MIB."
ETC...... )
I was thrilled when GE came out. At the time, I thought Brosnan got the right balance the way Connery did with the suave playboy in the tux vs the cold spy with the gun. I was dismayed by the regurgitated satellite weapon plot, though making it a real Soviet weapon with real world potential damage using EMP made it more acceptable. I wished Trevelyan had been more menacing and angry and less smug and smiling. It was great seeing Bond actually in Russia.
I wasn't crazy about Brosnan's hair...it was too long for the role (should have been like Trevelyan's) - it made Brosnan look a little too vain to me (along with the elaborate Italian suits and ties). However, I agree with other members that the scripts were his downfall. They just would not think outside the old series formula and it shows (the worst being his last film...it starts off okay, then sinks back into the old sci-fi formula birthed by YOLT.
Unfortunately, I personally cant picture Brosnan in CR, as much as I like him. I think it's because I was used to the Remington Steele role he had inhabited so well for so long. Even had they started out with him in CR instead of GE, it doesn't fit for me. Dalton, yes. Brosnan? No. Still, given the films he was strapped in, he did his best, and that's fine with me. I still enjoy most of GE, TWINE and the first part of DAD.
Speaking of Dalton - I actually wish it had been him in Goldeneye.
Not because Pierce was bad, but that Dalton just needed one more film as a send-off - and all M's talk about Bond being a 'relic of the Cold War' would have had more feeling to it; Dalton, being born in 1944, would have been in his 20's in the mid-60's and more believable as a 'Cold War relic', IMO. And he wasn't too old for the part - anyone see him on 'Chuck' 2 years ago? I believe he could STILL pull off Bond!
I have all of it on DVD; yes, Dalton still rules!!
Hey, waitaminute. After years of browsing both TrekBBS and this forum, I just realized 'Chrisisall' is on both (I just finished re-visiting TBBS and reading some old threads I participated in - don't get over there too often these days). That you?
Small internet I guess. I'm Anticitizen over there. Was pretty active from 2009-2011 or so; not so much these days except to occasionally complain about the new films.
Small internet I guess. I'm Anticitizen over there. Was pretty active from 2009-2011 or so; not so much these days except to occasionally complain about the new films.
What? You don't enjoy the rape of our childhood?
Hahahahah!
That's a quote about Star Wars 1,2 & 3 I read somewhere....
Small internet I guess. I'm Anticitizen over there. Was pretty active from 2009-2011 or so; not so much these days except to occasionally complain about the new films.
What? You don't enjoy the rape of our childhood?
Hahahahah!
That's a quote about Star Wars 1,2 & 3 I read somewhere....
On the success of the Star Trek reboot films:
"They're not successful because they're respectable;
they're popular because they're a spectacle.
Star Trek used to make me think,
Now it just makes me want to drink.
For sci-fi that makes me think - and feel too,
These days I just tune into Doctor Who."
Wrote that a few days ago when I had a bit to drink, and thought better of posting it on the forums. Ahem, back on topic...
Brosnan was a fine actor. His movies were faulty. Goldeneye was good but should have starred Dalton. Tomorrow Never Dies had great elements, but all the action scenes felt like video game action sequences - Brosnan running around getting high scores for the number of people he shot. Actually, Goldeneye was pretty much like that as well. Lots of stiff running-and-shooting-dudes. Lots of machine-guns spraying bullets everywhere. Remember the ridiculous multiple scenes in Goldeneye wherein dozens of Russian soldiers with AK47's manage to shoot everything except a running Brosnan. Now, try to imagine Connery running down a hallway firing a fully automatic machine gun - laughable, right? Now remember that Brosnan had scenes where he was running and shooting with a gun in each hand and just pumping people full of lead. At one point in the 90's Bond became The Terminator. I suppose this is just an indication of the attitudes toward action films at the time.
After Goldeneye and Tomorrow Never Dies, it started to really stink. For some reason which I can't fathom, The World Is Not Enough gets quite a bit of love on this forum. For me, it's the movie about Nuclear Scientist Denise Richards (ha!) and the most disappointing villain ever. Renard - a man who can feel no pain! He's a highly trained agent who CAN FEEL NO PAIN! HE'S UNSTOPPABLE!
So they build up Renard as this Ultimate Badass with no pain receptors, and... what? They fight in the film. When they fight, Bond hits him in the face. Renard recoils in pain. It's been a while, but I remember Bond pistol-whipping him and Renard being in pain. So, what was the point of all that anti-pain stuff?
The basic plot of the movie was okay, but it failed to register on an emotional level. It didn't help that 70% of the dialogue consisted of puns. The entirety of the pre-titles sequence was a mess of clumsy Swiss banker puns, for example: 'You've failed to take into account my HIDDEN ASSETS!' It's not a good sign when you're rolling your eyes in the first five minutes of a film. So, what was at stake? Some nefarious plot involving an oil pipeline. Yes, James Bond fights to the death to make sure oil flows through the right pipelines out of Russia or something.
So... okay movie, as far as acting and action goes. The plot doesn't seem important. The villians are disappointing. James Bond shouldn't be an agent sent around the world to make sure that oil pipelining is fair, or whatever, which is what happened. It's just not your typical Bond story.
Nobody cares about oil pipelines through Russia. It's just not a compelling story. It introduced a villain that could feel no pain but that ended up being an red herring - it didn't matter that Renard didn't feel pain. Bond and Renard hit each other in the face and it went down pretty much as a normal fight would go down, so what was the point of introducing all that no-pain-stuff?
Enter: Die Another Day.
This one burned me, BAD. I loved the first half of this film. As a guy who's read each of the Fleming novels many times over, I was delighted by the first half of this film. I'd been longing for the 'Human Bond' and the 'Bond who suffers' for a long time. Bond being tortured in the opening sequence? Very Fleming, as Bond suffered greatly in most of the novels. Bond wearing a tropical shirt and driving a period car in Cuba while smoking a cigar with a revolver tucked in his waistband? Holy moly, I remember being in the theater and thinking, 'THEY FINALLY GOT IT RIGHT!' And then.... and then. Die Another Day, when it came out, had some of the best of James Bond, and most of the worst. Halfway through the film, I was ready to proclaim it was best Bond movie ever; then it devolved into absolute garbage. To this day, I have no idea what the hell happened. It went sci-fi stupid after that. Invisi-car, ice palace, Robocop suit, etc, etc. Garbage.
So, recap - was Brosnan a success as Bond?
Yeah, he was fine. His acting was never bad. However, his movies were more bad than good, and, in the final analysis, more pitiable than enjoyable.
They are not good movies for the most part. Goldeneye is the best, certainly, but it's flawed (and I maintain that it should have been a Dalton film anyway). Tomorrow Never Dies was adventurous, but passionless - the action scenes of Pierce running around the stealth ship shooting people were as boring as watching your friend play a video game. Bond didn't solve things through cleverness or some quality that makes him special; he literally just ran around in a black assault suit shooting things until the bad guys died.
And I think that's the key, really. Brosnan's Bond wasn't particularly clever; he just shot people until they died, which stopped them from running oil pipelines or laundering blood diamonds or whatever other things you can't get interested in or care about as a viewer. I guess Die Another Day's space laser was supposed to clear the minefield between the Koreas, but that wasn't interesting, sorry. There are still lots of armies interested in the Koreas and a minefield isn't going to change anything.
Then Craig came along with Casino Royale. What was the plot? No nuclear weapons? No oil pipelines? No space lasers? What? What sort of James Bond story is this?
Everything it should have been - a simple story about a small-scale power play between two men that has severe ramifications. Fleming loved this 'small scale versus' stuff - that's why Bond ended up at the card table against Goldfinger, Drax, etc. Most of his stories were about how the relatively modest actions of one dedicated man upset the grand-scale mechanizations of grandiose villains.
And that's the key, I think. The Bond franchise suffers when it thinks too big. Casino Royale, while it had a much grander feel than most of the Brosnan entries, dealt with a much more realistic and down-to-earth story. No space lasers or Russian space EMP's or space GPS-fooler's or... oil pipeline nukes or whatever. Just a grim, tight story about a desperate criminal who's hurting for cashflow and an Mi6 who strikes him where it hurts. Torture follows....
And at this point I've gotten carried away. Allow me to summarize: Brosnan was a fine actor. Most of his movies were bad, because they had bad scripts. Daniel Craig has enjoyed better scripts.
Skyfall was bad, but I've been avoiding talking about that particular movie on this forum since it came out. I haven't had the heart to address it for some reason. In fact, after seeing it, I avoided this forum for the most part for months just to avoid talking about it, I found the movie depressing in tone. Maybe I will post something about it at some point.
I think Brosnan's movies had passion in them, and I cared about the characters & plot.... the scripts were not top notch, but a lot was done with a little, generally. IMO anyway.
Small internet I guess. I'm Anticitizen over there. Was pretty active from 2009-2011 or so; not so much these days except to occasionally complain about the new films.
What? You don't enjoy the rape of our childhood?
Hahahahah!
That's a quote about Star Wars 1,2 & 3 I read somewhere....
On the success of the Star Trek reboot films:
"They're not successful because they're respectable;
they're popular because they're a spectacle.
Star Trek used to make me think,
Now it just makes me want to drink.
For sci-fi that makes me think - and feel too,
These days I just tune into Doctor Who."
Wrote that a few days ago when I had a bit to drink, and thought better of posting it on the forums. Ahem, back on topic...
Brosnan was a fine actor. His movies were faulty. Goldeneye was good but should have starred Dalton. Tomorrow Never Dies had great elements, but all the action scenes felt like video game action sequences - Brosnan running around getting high scores for the number of people he shot. Actually, Goldeneye was pretty much like that as well. Lots of stiff running-and-shooting-dudes. Lots of machine-guns spraying bullets everywhere. Remember the ridiculous multiple scenes in Goldeneye wherein dozens of Russian soldiers with AK47's manage to shoot everything except a running Brosnan. Now, try to imagine Connery running down a hallway firing a fully automatic machine gun - laughable, right? Now remember that Brosnan had scenes where he was running and shooting with a gun in each hand and just pumping people full of lead. At one point in the 90's Bond became The Terminator. I suppose this is just an indication of the attitudes toward action films at the time.
After Goldeneye and Tomorrow Never Dies, it started to really stink. For some reason which I can't fathom, The World Is Not Enough gets quite a bit of love on this forum. For me, it's the movie about Nuclear Scientist Denise Richards (ha!) and the most disappointing villain ever. Renard - a man who can feel no pain! He's a highly trained agent who CAN FEEL NO PAIN! HE'S UNSTOPPABLE!
So they build up Renard as this Ultimate Badass with no pain receptors, and... what? They fight in the film. When they fight, Bond hits him in the face. Renard recoils in pain. It's been a while, but I remember Bond pistol-whipping him and Renard being in pain. So, what was the point of all that anti-pain stuff?
The basic plot of the movie was okay, but it failed to register on an emotional level. It didn't help that 70% of the dialogue consisted of puns. The entirety of the pre-titles sequence was a mess of clumsy Swiss banker puns, for example: 'You've failed to take into account my HIDDEN ASSETS!' It's not a good sign when you're rolling your eyes in the first five minutes of a film. So, what was at stake? Some nefarious plot involving an oil pipeline. Yes, James Bond fights to the death to make sure oil flows through the right pipelines out of Russia or something.
So... okay movie, as far as acting and action goes. The plot doesn't seem important. The villians are disappointing. James Bond shouldn't be an agent sent around the world to make sure that oil pipelining is fair, or whatever, which is what happened. It's just not your typical Bond story.
Nobody cares about oil pipelines through Russia. It's just not a compelling story. It introduced a villain that could feel no pain but that ended up being an red herring - it didn't matter that Renard didn't feel pain. Bond and Renard hit each other in the face and it went down pretty much as a normal fight would go down, so what was the point of introducing all that no-pain-stuff?
Enter: Die Another Day.
This one burned me, BAD. I loved the first half of this film. As a guy who's read each of the Fleming novels many times over, I was delighted by the first half of this film. I'd been longing for the 'Human Bond' and the 'Bond who suffers' for a long time. Bond being tortured in the opening sequence? Very Fleming, as Bond suffered greatly in most of the novels. Bond wearing a tropical shirt and driving a period car in Cuba while smoking a cigar with a revolver tucked in his waistband? Holy moly, I remember being in the theater and thinking, 'THEY FINALLY GOT IT RIGHT!' And then.... and then. Die Another Day, when it came out, had some of the best of James Bond, and most of the worst. Halfway through the film, I was ready to proclaim it was best Bond movie ever; then it devolved into absolute garbage. To this day, I have no idea what the hell happened. It went sci-fi stupid after that. Invisi-car, ice palace, Robocop suit, etc, etc. Garbage.
So, recap - was Brosnan a success as Bond?
Yeah, he was fine. His acting was never bad. However, his movies were more bad than good, and, in the final analysis, more pitiable than enjoyable.
They are not good movies for the most part. Goldeneye is the best, certainly, but it's flawed (and I maintain that it should have been a Dalton film anyway). Tomorrow Never Dies was adventurous, but passionless - the action scenes of Pierce running around the stealth ship shooting people were as boring as watching your friend play a video game. Bond didn't solve things through cleverness or some quality that makes him special; he literally just ran around in a black assault suit shooting things until the bad guys died.
And I think that's the key, really. Brosnan's Bond wasn't particularly clever; he just shot people until they died, which stopped them from running oil pipelines or laundering blood diamonds or whatever other things you can't get interested in or care about as a viewer. I guess Die Another Day's space laser was supposed to clear the minefield between the Koreas, but that wasn't interesting, sorry. There are still lots of armies interested in the Koreas and a minefield isn't going to change anything.
Then Craig came along with Casino Royale. What was the plot? No nuclear weapons? No oil pipelines? No space lasers? What? What sort of James Bond story is this?
Everything it should have been - a simple story about a small-scale power play between two men that has severe ramifications. Fleming loved this 'small scale versus' stuff - that's why Bond ended up at the card table against Goldfinger, Drax, etc. Most of his stories were about how the relatively modest actions of one dedicated man upset the grand-scale mechanizations of grandiose villains.
And that's the key, I think. The Bond franchise suffers when it thinks too big. Casino Royale, while it had a much grander feel than most of the Brosnan entries, dealt with a much more realistic and down-to-earth story. No space lasers or Russian space EMP's or space GPS-fooler's or... oil pipeline nukes or whatever. Just a grim, tight story about a desperate criminal who's hurting for cashflow and an Mi6 who strikes him where it hurts. Torture follows....
And at this point I've gotten carried away. Allow me to summarize: Brosnan was a fine actor. Most of his movies were bad, because they had bad scripts. Daniel Craig has enjoyed better scripts.
Skyfall was bad, but I've been avoiding talking about that particular movie on this forum since it came out. I haven't had the heart to address it for some reason. In fact, after seeing it, I avoided this forum for the most part for months just to avoid talking about it, I found the movie depressing in tone. Maybe I will post something about it at some point.
I understand your POV and agree with you on many of your assertions. I always hated it when they have the hero (and Bond most of all) running through scenes with two machine guns blazing (or one that never runs out of bullets), mowing down dozens of men who shoot twenty times the amount of bullets at the hero and never even nick them. I think Die Hard was one the those films (though not the chief instigator) that kept this trend going. Fleming's take on Bond was an agent who could defeat a small army like the commandos did - by stealth, stamina, surprise and outwitting them...not out shooting them.
I actually liked the oil pipeline plot because it was more realistic. Like it or not, global security has a lot to do with oil and has been since WWI. However, according to my memory (which is not always great), Bond was assigned to protect Elektra - the whole oil pipeline business did not enter into the story until later in the film.
Having her turn out to be one of the two villains and stealing a warhead to
destroy Istanbul and the Russian pipeline plan was more realistic to me than a villain using a satellite once again as a weapon.
The film fails when they used Richards strictly for eye candy and bad puns (and to have Brosnan bed at the end in the typical EON forumula). It also fails by making Renard sympathetic. Bond villains should not be sympathetic. It fails by having action scenes shoveled in strictly for the action.
I also agree with you on DAD. Up to the invisible car debut, the film was realistic and interesting. They were using Moonraker's plot as the spine of the story - and that was fine...then they go to the ice palace and it turns into another YOLT/TSWLM/DAF sci-fi dud. Poor Brosnan deserved better.
I didn't mind Brozer being Rambo in a tuxedo to start with, even though it was wearing thin by the time DAD rolled round (which I thought was mediocre long before things nosedived further with the invisible car).
'Alright guard, begin the unnecessarily slow moving dipping mechanism...'
I personally feel Brosnan played the role of Bond very well. The problem though were his Bond movies which were not very good. I did not like The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day in my opinion is one of the lesser Bond movies ever made.
For me, only GE and TWINE were good Brosnan films but it can't be denied that Brosnan was excellent in all four of his outings even if the plots were not. Though I grew up in the 80's, Brosnan was the first Bond I saw in the cinema and because of that I will champion him as one of the best (behind Dalton of course.) The thing with Brosnan was that by DAD he was looking a bit scraggy around the neck and he was turning into a bit of a Moore style Bond. In fact I'd say that MR and DAD is the same film set in two different time frames.
I like my Bond to be serious so Dalton and Craig appeal to me more, however they don't make me laugh like Moore and Brosnan did (laughing with them more than at them) and I think Brosnan is probably the best Bond when it came to the one-liners. Anybody who doubts Brosnan should watch 'The Tailor Of Panama' where he hands out the one-liners and gives a great anti-Bond performance.
"Thank you very much. I was just out walking my RAT and seem to have lost my way... "
I personally feel Brosnan played the role of Bond very well. The problem though were his Bond movies which were not very good. I did not like The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day in my opinion is one of the lesser Bond movies ever made.
I agree with you, although I enjoyed TWINE more than you did. It's second only to GE as my favorite Brosnan Bond film.
Comments
...sorry.....
#1.TLD/LTK 2.TND 3.GF 4.GE 5.DN 6.FYEO 7.FRWL 8.TMWTGG 9.TWINE 10.YOLT/QOS
1971 "Lazenby was really a hippie."
1973 "At least Moore has all his own hair!"
1987 "Moore was so dopey."
1995 "Dalton was SO serious!"
2006 "Brosnan was a pretty-boy pastiche Bond."
2018 "Craig was way too grumpy."
2025 "Cavill looked too much like Superman."
2035 "Bieber was too young & silly"
2044 "Smith was too much like his Dad in MIB."
ETC......
#1.TLD/LTK 2.TND 3.GF 4.GE 5.DN 6.FYEO 7.FRWL 8.TMWTGG 9.TWINE 10.YOLT/QOS
#1.TLD/LTK 2.TND 3.GF 4.GE 5.DN 6.FYEO 7.FRWL 8.TMWTGG 9.TWINE 10.YOLT/QOS
I wish!
I wasn't crazy about Brosnan's hair...it was too long for the role (should have been like Trevelyan's) - it made Brosnan look a little too vain to me (along with the elaborate Italian suits and ties). However, I agree with other members that the scripts were his downfall. They just would not think outside the old series formula and it shows (the worst being his last film...it starts off okay, then sinks back into the old sci-fi formula birthed by YOLT.
Unfortunately, I personally cant picture Brosnan in CR, as much as I like him. I think it's because I was used to the Remington Steele role he had inhabited so well for so long. Even had they started out with him in CR instead of GE, it doesn't fit for me. Dalton, yes. Brosnan? No. Still, given the films he was strapped in, he did his best, and that's fine with me. I still enjoy most of GE, TWINE and the first part of DAD.
Not because Pierce was bad, but that Dalton just needed one more film as a send-off - and all M's talk about Bond being a 'relic of the Cold War' would have had more feeling to it; Dalton, being born in 1944, would have been in his 20's in the mid-60's and more believable as a 'Cold War relic', IMO. And he wasn't too old for the part - anyone see him on 'Chuck' 2 years ago? I believe he could STILL pull off Bond!
Have a look:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrG6nd05tI8&t=0m48s
#1.TLD/LTK 2.TND 3.GF 4.GE 5.DN 6.FYEO 7.FRWL 8.TMWTGG 9.TWINE 10.YOLT/QOS
Hey, waitaminute. After years of browsing both TrekBBS and this forum, I just realized 'Chrisisall' is on both (I just finished re-visiting TBBS and reading some old threads I participated in - don't get over there too often these days). That you?
#1.TLD/LTK 2.TND 3.GF 4.GE 5.DN 6.FYEO 7.FRWL 8.TMWTGG 9.TWINE 10.YOLT/QOS
Hahahahah!
That's a quote about Star Wars 1,2 & 3 I read somewhere....
#1.TLD/LTK 2.TND 3.GF 4.GE 5.DN 6.FYEO 7.FRWL 8.TMWTGG 9.TWINE 10.YOLT/QOS
On the success of the Star Trek reboot films:
"They're not successful because they're respectable;
they're popular because they're a spectacle.
Star Trek used to make me think,
Now it just makes me want to drink.
For sci-fi that makes me think - and feel too,
These days I just tune into Doctor Who."
Wrote that a few days ago when I had a bit to drink, and thought better of posting it on the forums.
Brosnan was a fine actor. His movies were faulty. Goldeneye was good but should have starred Dalton. Tomorrow Never Dies had great elements, but all the action scenes felt like video game action sequences - Brosnan running around getting high scores for the number of people he shot. Actually, Goldeneye was pretty much like that as well. Lots of stiff running-and-shooting-dudes. Lots of machine-guns spraying bullets everywhere. Remember the ridiculous multiple scenes in Goldeneye wherein dozens of Russian soldiers with AK47's manage to shoot everything except a running Brosnan. Now, try to imagine Connery running down a hallway firing a fully automatic machine gun - laughable, right? Now remember that Brosnan had scenes where he was running and shooting with a gun in each hand and just pumping people full of lead. At one point in the 90's Bond became The Terminator. I suppose this is just an indication of the attitudes toward action films at the time.
After Goldeneye and Tomorrow Never Dies, it started to really stink. For some reason which I can't fathom, The World Is Not Enough gets quite a bit of love on this forum. For me, it's the movie about Nuclear Scientist Denise Richards (ha!) and the most disappointing villain ever. Renard - a man who can feel no pain! He's a highly trained agent who CAN FEEL NO PAIN! HE'S UNSTOPPABLE!
So they build up Renard as this Ultimate Badass with no pain receptors, and... what? They fight in the film. When they fight, Bond hits him in the face. Renard recoils in pain. It's been a while, but I remember Bond pistol-whipping him and Renard being in pain. So, what was the point of all that anti-pain stuff?
The basic plot of the movie was okay, but it failed to register on an emotional level. It didn't help that 70% of the dialogue consisted of puns. The entirety of the pre-titles sequence was a mess of clumsy Swiss banker puns, for example: 'You've failed to take into account my HIDDEN ASSETS!' It's not a good sign when you're rolling your eyes in the first five minutes of a film. So, what was at stake? Some nefarious plot involving an oil pipeline. Yes, James Bond fights to the death to make sure oil flows through the right pipelines out of Russia or something.
So... okay movie, as far as acting and action goes. The plot doesn't seem important. The villians are disappointing. James Bond shouldn't be an agent sent around the world to make sure that oil pipelining is fair, or whatever, which is what happened. It's just not your typical Bond story.
Nobody cares about oil pipelines through Russia. It's just not a compelling story. It introduced a villain that could feel no pain but that ended up being an red herring - it didn't matter that Renard didn't feel pain. Bond and Renard hit each other in the face and it went down pretty much as a normal fight would go down, so what was the point of introducing all that no-pain-stuff?
Enter: Die Another Day.
This one burned me, BAD. I loved the first half of this film. As a guy who's read each of the Fleming novels many times over, I was delighted by the first half of this film. I'd been longing for the 'Human Bond' and the 'Bond who suffers' for a long time. Bond being tortured in the opening sequence? Very Fleming, as Bond suffered greatly in most of the novels. Bond wearing a tropical shirt and driving a period car in Cuba while smoking a cigar with a revolver tucked in his waistband? Holy moly, I remember being in the theater and thinking, 'THEY FINALLY GOT IT RIGHT!' And then.... and then. Die Another Day, when it came out, had some of the best of James Bond, and most of the worst. Halfway through the film, I was ready to proclaim it was best Bond movie ever; then it devolved into absolute garbage. To this day, I have no idea what the hell happened. It went sci-fi stupid after that. Invisi-car, ice palace, Robocop suit, etc, etc. Garbage.
So, recap - was Brosnan a success as Bond?
Yeah, he was fine. His acting was never bad. However, his movies were more bad than good, and, in the final analysis, more pitiable than enjoyable.
They are not good movies for the most part. Goldeneye is the best, certainly, but it's flawed (and I maintain that it should have been a Dalton film anyway). Tomorrow Never Dies was adventurous, but passionless - the action scenes of Pierce running around the stealth ship shooting people were as boring as watching your friend play a video game. Bond didn't solve things through cleverness or some quality that makes him special; he literally just ran around in a black assault suit shooting things until the bad guys died.
And I think that's the key, really. Brosnan's Bond wasn't particularly clever; he just shot people until they died, which stopped them from running oil pipelines or laundering blood diamonds or whatever other things you can't get interested in or care about as a viewer. I guess Die Another Day's space laser was supposed to clear the minefield between the Koreas, but that wasn't interesting, sorry. There are still lots of armies interested in the Koreas and a minefield isn't going to change anything.
Then Craig came along with Casino Royale. What was the plot? No nuclear weapons? No oil pipelines? No space lasers? What? What sort of James Bond story is this?
Everything it should have been - a simple story about a small-scale power play between two men that has severe ramifications. Fleming loved this 'small scale versus' stuff - that's why Bond ended up at the card table against Goldfinger, Drax, etc. Most of his stories were about how the relatively modest actions of one dedicated man upset the grand-scale mechanizations of grandiose villains.
And that's the key, I think. The Bond franchise suffers when it thinks too big. Casino Royale, while it had a much grander feel than most of the Brosnan entries, dealt with a much more realistic and down-to-earth story. No space lasers or Russian space EMP's or space GPS-fooler's or... oil pipeline nukes or whatever. Just a grim, tight story about a desperate criminal who's hurting for cashflow and an Mi6 who strikes him where it hurts. Torture follows....
And at this point I've gotten carried away. Allow me to summarize: Brosnan was a fine actor. Most of his movies were bad, because they had bad scripts. Daniel Craig has enjoyed better scripts.
Skyfall was bad, but I've been avoiding talking about that particular movie on this forum since it came out. I haven't had the heart to address it for some reason. In fact, after seeing it, I avoided this forum for the most part for months just to avoid talking about it, I found the movie depressing in tone. Maybe I will post something about it at some point.
#1.TLD/LTK 2.TND 3.GF 4.GE 5.DN 6.FYEO 7.FRWL 8.TMWTGG 9.TWINE 10.YOLT/QOS
I understand your POV and agree with you on many of your assertions. I always hated it when they have the hero (and Bond most of all) running through scenes with two machine guns blazing (or one that never runs out of bullets), mowing down dozens of men who shoot twenty times the amount of bullets at the hero and never even nick them. I think Die Hard was one the those films (though not the chief instigator) that kept this trend going. Fleming's take on Bond was an agent who could defeat a small army like the commandos did - by stealth, stamina, surprise and outwitting them...not out shooting them.
I actually liked the oil pipeline plot because it was more realistic. Like it or not, global security has a lot to do with oil and has been since WWI. However, according to my memory (which is not always great), Bond was assigned to protect Elektra - the whole oil pipeline business did not enter into the story until later in the film.
Having her turn out to be one of the two villains and stealing a warhead to
destroy Istanbul and the Russian pipeline plan was more realistic to me than a villain using a satellite once again as a weapon.
The film fails when they used Richards strictly for eye candy and bad puns (and to have Brosnan bed at the end in the typical EON forumula). It also fails by making Renard sympathetic. Bond villains should not be sympathetic. It fails by having action scenes shoveled in strictly for the action.
I also agree with you on DAD. Up to the invisible car debut, the film was realistic and interesting. They were using Moonraker's plot as the spine of the story - and that was fine...then they go to the ice palace and it turns into another YOLT/TSWLM/DAF sci-fi dud. Poor Brosnan deserved better.
#1.TLD/LTK 2.TND 3.GF 4.GE 5.DN 6.FYEO 7.FRWL 8.TMWTGG 9.TWINE 10.YOLT/QOS
I like my Bond to be serious so Dalton and Craig appeal to me more, however they don't make me laugh like Moore and Brosnan did (laughing with them more than at them) and I think Brosnan is probably the best Bond when it came to the one-liners. Anybody who doubts Brosnan should watch 'The Tailor Of Panama' where he hands out the one-liners and gives a great anti-Bond performance.
I agree with you, although I enjoyed TWINE more than you did. It's second only to GE as my favorite Brosnan Bond film.