Best Daniel Craig era Bond flick

no that was the name of his dog, he was Henry Royale

I’m trying really hard to avoid spoilers since I’ll likely see this next weekend

casino royale is probably the most successful reboot i can think of, manages the very difficult task of giving bond a legit love interest and also a compelling villain (mads, who none of the other craig-era baddies better)

quantum is gorgeous but its story is meager and the action scenes are paul greengrass-incoherent. still a personal fave

i've discussed my issues with skyfall, and i obv barely remember anything about spectre, as i thought madeleine swann was a character invented just for no time to die, lol

no time to die is as gorgeous as quantum but the action is excellent, just check out that ava de armas scene, and bond's arc is far less about his murky history, which wgaf, and far more about his relationships with other people and his inability to maintain them, which gives me far more to chew on

idk, feels like this is much easier with the other bonds, much as i don't like the mendes films

creating a decent bond villain seems hard, of this crop i'd say it's mads, then bardem, then diving bell and the butterfly dude, then some far far distance below that, christolph waltz (who... well, one of the really nice things about no time to die is that it actually made me enjoy waltz's blofeld). idk where rami malek ranks yet, he's the one piece of no time to die i feel uneasiest about

Casino Royale is an actual Good Action Film. I have time for most of Skyfall too.

I can't deal with Christoph Waltz, who can't play a part without giggling and smirking over how cute he thinks he is.

Forgot about the incredible 2000s vibes in Casino Royale. Bond looks like he's on a secret mission to Coachella. pic.twitter.com/1CvyfVkCQQ

— Evan Hill (@evanhill) October 9, 2021

Casino Royale might be my favourite action movie of all time tbh. Def my favourite Bond

QoS is great, its brevity and having to follow CS were its only issues

Sam Mendes idk I don't like any of his movies and would prefer to never watch either of those two again. I remember enjoying parts of Skyfall but finding it a slog. I remember nothing of Spectre

I'm sure I'll love the new one, Fukunaga is a top-tier director imo

*having to follow CR, not CS.

QoS is great, its brevity and having to follow CR were its only issues

The brevity I don't entirely mind, but I'll say that having done the series rewatch, viewing that very soon after CR made it feel like much more of a piece. Calling it a diptych might be pretentious but the fact that one follows on immediately after the other, it develops the sense of mysterious paranoia (untrustworthy moles from the get-go), and ends the immediate arc of the Vesper Lynn repercussions is really well done. And while everyone celebrates the opera scene one of the best moments maybe of the whole damn series is one of the subtlest and quietest: that 'thank you' the Canadian agent says when she leaves the room during the final confrontation.

One thing I'm perversely impressed by is how, clearly without any real plan, the whole five-film Craig arc ended up succeeding in a kind of perfect mirror image -- two closely interrelated films each on either side of a standalone story, essentially -- and where every other film was a clear high point whatever individual flaws, and I'll take 3 out of 5 though as noted with QoS I'd say more a 3.5 if not more. And then said whole film-film arc...worked? Again, without any real plan or promise of one and certainly not in the sense of wall to wall success on all fronts! It's like just enough accidents of timing and input happened in the course of an enterprise with its own overriding logic -- there have been Bond films, there will be more Bond films, nothing else is more paramount than continuing entertainment and commercial success -- that within said commercial constraints and gambles they did something that hadn't ever happened in the series before, an actual multifilm story where the tangled plots mattered a little less than the themes and characters in the end -- and to pick up on that point again, every film essentially is about a compromised organization on the side of 'good' that's riddled with double-agents, untrustworthy allies, deep moles, where the 'good guys' are watching their back more often than not. Dench and Fiennes's Ms are left to give the heroic speeches or comments about queen and country and whatever, Craig's Bond is there to do the job, ever increasingly for his own reasons -- and that's what makes him more Fleming's original Bond in the end than all the others, even Dalton's.

Ppl who rep for Casino Royale

Do ye mean the whole whole movie or yknow the part of it until the car crash because if the latter i can see it but everything after that point just killed the movie dead for me tbh

Liked Casino Royale when I saw it in theatres, but wasn't as impressed when I caught it again on TV a while back. I still expect it to win here.

I remember Skyfall having some fairly elegant action sequences, so I'll go with that.

re: armas in 'no time to die'

her part was really fun and i spent the rest of the movie hoping she would show up again. nope!

The most memorable thing about Quantum of Solace is this bit from Ebert's review:

In "Quantum of Solace" he will share no cozy quality time with the Bond girl (Olga Kurylenko). We fondly remember the immortal names of Pussy Galore, Xenia Onatopp and Plenty O'Toole, who I have always suspected was a drag queen. In this film, who do we get? Are you ready for this? Camille. That's it. Camille. Not even Camille Squeal. Or Cammy Miami. Or Miss O'Toole's friend Cam Shaft.

Though I won't watch this latest film
quite enjoyed Osita Nwanevu going over Craig's time with the franchise. It was good to see a hardened political writer putting in a shift, as a break from the day job.

https://www.gawker.com/culture/hes-really-had-a-substantial-amount-of-time-to-die

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Just watched _No Time to Die_ yesterday. Being the summation of the Craig bond, and thinking Skyfall was a slog and Spectre slightly less so, very much enjoyed this one. <h>The conclusion, with Bond's sacrifice, unwilling to chance the Six Degrees eventuality that Madeleine and his daughter would die the nanobot death, I thought was well-earned over the course of the five films.</h>

argh. SPOILERS. sorry.

Casino Royale, very easily.

The first one, yes, the second one, kinda, the third one for the first half, the last two: hopeless.

Spectre remains my least favorite of these. The first 15-20 minutes were dope but then it becomes a joyless slog, two hours of fidgeting in your theatre seat waiting for the thing to end.

Super inert. Looks like a Guinness ad

Exactly how I feel, Chuck_Tatum

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.