Every Pierce Brosnan Bond Movie Ranked Worst to Best
Ben Brewster is a filmmaker, critic, screenwriter, and actor whose work sits at the intersection of film culture, craft analysis, and storytelling.
He is a movie list contributing writer at Collider and a contributing writer for High on Films, where he covers contemporary cinema, independent film, and festival releases with an eye toward narrative structure, performance, and visual language.
Ben is an active film festival participant, having worked with Newport Film, the Nantucket Film Festival and as a screener for the Austin, Boston & Woodstock film festivals.
He brings to that work a programming instinct shaped by years of close engagement with independent and documentary cinema. This comes with a deep investment in the kinds of films that rarely find their way into the mainstream conversation without someone willing to advocate for them.
His background spans documentary and narrative filmmaking, film marketing, and production, including work with award-winning directors. This as well as developing his own indie production company, Lilac Creative Studio, through which he develops and produces original work across fiction and nonfiction forms.
His debut documentary, Diamond in the Rust, is an examination of economic redevelopment and displacement in the Queens area of New York City. The film was recently accepted to the Unisphere Film Festival, the Defense of Democracy Film Festival, and the Urbanite Arts & Film Festival. This would mark his first festival recognition as a director.
In addition to his writing and programming work, Ben hosts Beneath the Bloom, a film podcast exploring the work behind the scenes in cinema, and the struggles one can face to make a movie become a reality. The show reflects the same sensibility that runs through all of his work. A conviction that film is not merely entertainment but one of the most powerful tools human beings have for understanding each other.
Across mediums, his work is driven by a deep belief in film as a communal, transformative art form.
Amazon MGM hired casting director Nina Gold this past Spring, and the search for the next Bond has now reached final screen tests in London. Jack Lowden, Callum Turner, Josh O'Connor and one unnamed mystery actor are the alleged finalists, though the studio has confirmed none of them. Denis Villeneuve is attached to direct, and Steven Knight is writing the script. A decision could come by the end of the year, according to Deadline.
Waiting for a new 007 has always sent people back through the old ones, and Pierce Brosnan's four movies get argued over harder than most. His saga lasted from 1995-2002, a transitional period in cinematic history when movies got louder and more digital at a rapid pace. Brosnan's Bond films have the largest gap in quality and the widest variety in production techniques. GoldenEye still leaned on practical stunt shots, while Die Another Day leaned on, well, a computer.
Each entry covers the villain, the leading lady, and the biggest action scene, a formula that can dictate how most audiences would internalize a Bond movie. Brosnan was first lined up for the role in the mid-eighties, but his Remington Steele contract blocked the move, and Timothy Dalton took the job instead. A legal fight then shut the series down for six years after License to Kill. When Brosnan finally arrived in 1995, he was walking into a franchise that had to prove its relevancy. Four directors worked on the run, from Martin Campbell to Lee Tamahori, across seven years for Pierce's Bond, who went from comeback to punchline along the way. A rewatch marathon of all four takes about eight and a half hours, which fits neatly into a rainy Sunday.
4 'Die Another Day' (2002)
Lee Tamahori directed Die Another Day for Bond's 40th anniversary and the movie crams in so many nods to earlier pieces that it plays like a highlight reel of Bond's most famous sayings and biggest clichés. Bond is released from a North Korean prison after fourteen months looking thinner and bearded, and disavowed by MI6. He gets a hovercraft chase and a Havana detour with Halle Berry's Jinx, not exactly subtle, but that was never Bond's style anyway. Yet the invisible Aston Martin and the CGI screensaver wave para-surfing moment are the shorthand for what went wrong, and they deserve every joke they get.
Toby Stephens plays Gustav Graves, a diamond tycoon who talks like someone auditioning for the part of a Bond villain. Berry, arrived fresh off a Best Actress Oscar for her performance in Monster's Ball but the script gives her little to work with her NSA agent role. The best scene in the whole movie is the sword fight between Brosnan and Stephens at a London fencing club. Rosamund Pike also makes an appearance as Miranda Frost, an MI6 operative with a cool smile and a bad loyalty problem. The movie made enormous money and still was read as a massive failure for its incessant winking at its own history. The response to a project that chased trends opened the door for the Daniel Craig series reboot with the methodically produced Casino Royale in 2006.
3 'The World Is Not Enough' (1999)
Michael Apted opens The World Is Not Enough with a speedboat chase down the Thames River that ends at the Millennium Dome. It is one of the better pre-title sequences of the era and Sophie Marceau's Elektra King is one of the more complicated and better written antagonists in the whole franchise. King is an oil heiress kidnapped as a girl and whose father is killed in the opening scene. She is first introduced as the person Bond is tasked with protecting. Robert Carlyle plays Renard the terrorist with a bullet lodged in his brain that has left him unable to feel pain, and Brosnan plays much of the film with an injured shoulder. It adds some vulnerability to a character who is synonymous with the word untouchable. M sits closer to the core narrative in this one, which gives the great Judi Dench more to do.
Marceau plays Elektra with an equal amount of warmth and menace, yet the supporting cast unfortunately pulls the other way. Denise Richards plays a nuclear physicist named Christmas Jones in a casting choice that became its own punchline. The plot involves a pipeline, a plutonium theft, and a submarine until nobody can follow who is double-crossing whom. Desmond Llewelyn's final turn as Q gives the movie a bittersweet send off, with John Cleese arriving as his assistant. Garbage's theme song is a strong one, and the movie the piece opens never quite matches its energy.
2 'Tomorrow Never Dies' (1997)
Tomorrow Never Dies arrived in late '97, months after the real handover of Hong Kong, a plot about a war between Britain and China that landed very close to the news headlines of the moment. Jonathan Pryce plays media baron Elliot Carver, who arranges disasters, so his network can break the story first. He plays him with the shouting petulance of a toddler. Roger Spottiswoode directs it as a brisk thriller with a sense of humor. Teri Hatcher plays Carver's wife, Paris, a former flame of Bond who deserved more screen time.
Michelle Yeoh is the strongest co-lead of the Brosnan era by quite a wide margin. She made her name in Hong Kong action movies like Police Story 3, and her character Wai Lin does her own stunts and holds her own against Bond's inflated persona. Her chase through Saigon with Bond, handcuffed together on a BMW motorcycle, is the most inventive action sequence of the Brosnan run. However, the parking garage scene with Bond using a remote control to steer a BMW from the backseat earns equal praise for its humor and ingenuity. Tomorrow Never Dies mainly slots in at number two because it's the movie where Pierce is most comfortable as Bond, and it gives room for Brosnan to work his comedic chops.
1 'GoldenEye' (1995)
GoldenEye opens with a bungee jump off a Russian dam, and from that first shot Martin Campbell has made something clear: Bond is back, and bigger and more expensive than ever. This movie brought Bond back after a six-year gap and an alleged Cold War ending that was supposed to make the character and franchise obsolete. The fantastic Sean Bean plays Alec Trevelyan, a former 00 agent whose parents were betrayed by Great Britain after World War II. He shares Bond's history and skills and his backstory gives him a motive that easily makes him the best villain of the four. Famke Janssen plays Xenia Onatopp, a former Soviet fighter pilot who squeezes men to death with her thighs. Judi Dench makes her debut as M, and in her first scene she tells Bond to his face that he is a relic of the Cold War.
Robbie Coltrane as Valentin Zukovsky and Alan Cumming as the shrieking programmer Boris give the supporting cast a comic edge that waned dramatically across the later films. The St. Petersburg tank chase flattens half the city and is the most destructive stretch of any of the Brosnan movies. Brosnan straightens his tie afterward. Eric Serra's synthetic score aged poorly and is considered the one true complaint, although Tina Turner's theme redeems some of it. Campbell returned to direct Casino Royale, which makes him the director who introduced both Brosnan and Craig. GoldenEye takes the top spot since none of the other three films match its confidence. Every one of them borrows from GoldenEye and none improves on it.
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