All the puns, gadgets, girls and ludicrous villains you could wish for. Note: Never Say Never Again and Casino Royale (the first one) have been deemed “not canon”.
Die Another Day (2002).
Hardly the first time Bond jumped the shark, but this was definitely the first time he'd done so while having no fun. There is no way on earth this can be displaced from the bottom of the list.
Unsure? Ok: it's the film in which Bond drives an invisible car, manages to outrun THE SUN'S RAYS (illustrated with CGI that will make your eyes bleed), it almost caused a diplomatic incident by annoying both North and South Korea , it was dubbed "Buy Another Day" due to the ludicrous amount of product placement, it had Madonna giving an award-winningly bad performance, it somehow managed to make bad actresses of both Halle Berry and Rosamund Pike, it had a face-swap plot twist…
Good sword fight though.
Via en.wikipedia.org
Quantum Of Solace (2008).
There are a lot of problems with this film. For a start, the plot revolves around a villain who's attempting to take a majority stake in Bolivia's water supply. When this dastardly plan is revealed, you wonder if Bond shouldn't just refer him to the Latin American Mergers Commission and go home.
Basically, this is a film that isn't as clever as it wants to be. So we get lots of arty stuff:
Clever. Because oil's now more precious than gold. Except it isn't. Likewise, the fight scenes were apparently "based around the elements," for some reason.
It's almost like Marc Forster (the guy who previously best known for directing, um, Monster's Ball) wasn't a good choice for the project: there's room for creativity in Bond, but not when the editing on the action scenes is so bad it looks someone's trying to remake Bourne having drunk a bottle of vodka, the characters are tedious and the pacing's utterly abysmal.
The whole thing wasn't helped by the fact the draft script was delivered two hours before the Hollywood writers' strike began, and then they couldn't do any rewrites with, you know, actual writers. Believe it or not, parts of it were rewritten by the director and Daniel Craig.
Via blogger.com
Licence to Kill (1989).
And it's a similar complaint here: above all, License to Kill just doesn't feel right. History shows that Bond films come a cropper when they try to ape the prevailing culture of the age, and this film accordingly tanked at the box office.
Dalton's Bond is a witless hardman, the villainy revolves around coke smuggling of all things, and the whole thing's got that 80s VHS violence vibe, with people getting graphically squished in decompression chambers and shredders.
In short, it's an ok installment of Lethal Weapon. Some critics have argued that this makes it closer to Fleming's novels than many other films, but by the time this came out we knew what a good Bond film looked like, and this wasn't it. You can have some fun spotting Benicio Del Toro as a henchman though. And of course it's got one hell of a theme tune.
Via en.wikipedia.org
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