Villainy (especially in the Bond franchise) is a real boy’s club, and I appreciate evil genius Octopussy’s breaking the glass ceiling for independent bad girls everywhere. Okay, I do think it’s really awesome to feature a lady criminal mastermind, not just a sexy double-agent-henchwoman to a male bad guy. And Moonraker, in which Roger Moore’s James Bond goes to space to destroy Hugo Drax’s moon-base-for-the-master-race, doesn’t have its feet on the ground enough for me. I don’t know why this particular detail is a dealbreaker, but it is.
I’ll say that if a James Bond film involves “going to space,” it automatically jumps the shark for me. So… pop your popcorn, mix your martini (that’ll be Gordon’s gin), and grab your broccoli: it’s time to rank every James Bond film to date, or my name isn’t…. Although how FUNNY is it that ’60s Bond doesn’t like the Beatles?! Do you think he’d prefer WINGS?) (He also adds “That’s as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs” but I’m a Beatles fan, so. There are 25 official films on here, and two extras. Are we going to exclude them? As our dear Sean Connery has said, “there are some things that just aren’t done such as drinking Dom Perignon ’53 above the temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit.” So, there you go.
Now, there are some non-canon James Bond movies: the first Casino Royale and Never Say Never Again. Now, the placement of some of these films might be a bit controversial, but we’re hoping that this ranking will, overall, leave you stirred and not shaken. And YOU thought Christmas only comes once a year, right? We’re going to be there for all of it, ranking all twenty-seven accessible Bond films from Worst to Best. Some of the surrounding actors (Lois Maxwell, my beloved Desmond Llewelyn, Robert Brown, Barnard Lee, and Judi Dench) have outlasted Bonds, while some others (the Blofelds, the Felix Leiters) change mid-Bond. Time and time again, he defeats agents from the organization SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion), rides off with an attractive woman named after a body part, and drinks his way across the globe. The movies circle back on themselves and re-tell the stories of Bond’s archenemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld, his relationship with his boss M, his friendships with gadget-man Q and American CIA Agent Felix Leiter, and his weird dynamic with his right-hand woman Miss Moneypenny. Sean Connery is bemused and hairy, David Niven is a daffy blowhard, George Lazenby is self-effacing and casual, Roger Moore is a blithe playboy, Timothy Dalton is one hair-trigger from going postal, Pierce Brosnan is a Shakespearean tragedian trapped a lesser series, and Daniel Craig is a stony, angry, semi-sociopathic loose cannon.
There have been seven actors to play 007 so far, and they’ve all got their unique takes on the role. But we’re going to do our level best, today. They play fast and loose with their source material, the novels and stories by Ian Fleming. They swing from hardcore action to camp to downright parody. These films are so hard to compare with one another, especially because their production has spanned six decades and many technological (and, ahem, social) innovations have arisen during that time. It’s always hard to decide on the best James Bond movie ( as those squabbling nerds from late-season Buffy can testify).
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