Photograph: United Artists/Everett/Rex Features GoldenEye (1995) ★★☆☆☆īond returns after a six-year hiatus with Pierce Brosnan starring in GoldenEye.

After this, legal copyright rows caused a six-year production hiatus during which Dalton quit, having made less of an impression than Lazenby. This one is notable for the young Benicio del Toro as a humble henchman.

Without permission from his superiors, 007 pursues a murderous revenge campaign against a drug lord who killed Felix Leiter’s wife. ★★☆☆☆ Licence to Kill (1989)īond goes rogue, and Dalton stays dull. This was an Aids era of sexual restraint, so Bond only cops off a couple of times. He was supposedly there to give Bond a hard and gritty new seriousness, but always looked a bit humourless. This was the turn of straight actor and RSC stalwart Timothy Dalton. Christopher Walken was always destined to play a Bond villain and it came to pass in this film, as the evil electronics mogul Max Zorin. (It was also, sadly, the last hurrah for Lois Maxwell’s Miss Moneypenny). Quite unexpectedly, Rog pulled it back a bit for his last hurrah. He was never a six-pack guy at the best of times, but he’s out of condition now. The title is what Connery’s agent should have shouted at him when he was offered the comeback: (“Never”! Say “Never”! Again!) Sean lumbers back for the remake of Thunderball that no one wanted or needed. The stunts hold up, but Moore is on the exit ramp and his flaccid relationship with 24-year-old Carole Bouquet is a deathly embarrassment, with Bouquet in any case famous for her detached hauteur. You can hear a whistling and a crackling in the air as Rog begins to tune out. Photograph: Allstar/United Artists For Your Eyes Only (1981) ‘Looking a bit jaded’: Roger Moore alongside Lois Chiles in Moonraker. It’s all about the theft of a space shuttle but this excursion into space can’t conceal the fact that Roger is looking a bit jaded. ★★★★☆ Moonraker (1979)Ī whopping, mega-budget Bond in its day, clearly influenced by the Star Wars-led revival of sci-fi. The action opens with that staggering skiing-off-a-cliff stunt, just after Moore is seen supposedly skiing in front of an outrageous back projection. It also introduced us to the exotic henchman Jaws. This has a well-loved Bond song, Carly Simon’s Nobody Does It Better. It’s a preposterous 70s fuel-crisis drama about a solar energy device. I think this was Moore’s best Bond, despite iffy reviews at the time, perhaps because he had one of the very best villains, wonderfully played by Christopher Lee: Scaramanga, he of the creepy third nipple. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive/Eon Productions Ltd The Man With the Golden Gun (1974) ★★★★☆Ĭhristopher Lee in The Man With the Golden Gun: ‘one of the very best villains’ opposite Roger Moore’s best Bond. (Connery had started at 32.) This movie has a great song from Paul McCartney and Wings. Moore was witty, sprightly and a mature 46 when he took over. ★★★☆☆ Live and Let Die (1973)Īnd so began the reign of Rog, tacitly conceding the campness that many saw as unavoidable for Bond. Bond girl Tiffany Case was played by Jill St John, whose real-life boyfriend, Henry Kissinger, would have been better as Blofeld.

Ernst Blofeld, boringly played by Charles Gray, wants to use diamonds to focus his space laser. Connery was tempted back to the role with a big pay packet, now looking craggier and toupéed. They get married, before gunfire poignantly restores Bond’s eternal singledom. Diana Rigg played the woman who shows 007 is no commitmentphobe. Had he done more, Lazenby might have developed into a favourite. George Lazenby’s sole appearance wasn’t a bad Bond. ★☆☆☆☆ On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) David Niven saunters unsexily as the retired “Sir James Bond” in this chaotic film. Even a cameo from Orson Welles couldn’t lend lustre to this pointless and unfunny spoof Bond, a dire tongue-in-cheeker which slipped past the franchise control of the producers, Eon. Connery announced his intention to quit after this. This great action movie put Sean’s Bond right back on top, and introduced us to the horribly scarred, Nehru-suit-wearing, cat-stroking master criminal Spectre chief, Blofeld, played by Donald Pleasence. Good stuff here, but the franchise faltered a bit, with long underwater sequences. The evil organisation Spectre had its first appearance in Fleming’s Thunderball novel, and we’d got used to it by now. Photograph: Konig/Rex Shutterstock Thunderball (1965) Sean Connery and Honor Blackman in Goldfinger.

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