It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
^ Back to Top
The MI6 Community is unofficial and in no way associated or linked with EON Productions, MGM, Sony Pictures, Activision or Ian Fleming Publications. Any views expressed on this website are of the individual members and do not necessarily reflect those of the Community owners. Any video or images displayed in topics on MI6 Community are embedded by users from third party sites and as such MI6 Community and its owners take no responsibility for this material.
James Bond News • James Bond Articles • James Bond Magazine
Comments
Its truly one of his greatest performsnces in my opinion.
In that film he showed how dark he can go and he was amazing, i never thought he could be that way.
Now his best Bondian performance outside of Bond is The Thomas Crown affair.
It was all about, charm, charisma and being good with the ladies.
I loved his chemistry with Rene in that film.
Brosnan's best "Bond" is The November Man
Exactly, great performance but yes he is more if an Anti Bond than Bond in a non Bond movie.
His most type of Bond performances in my opinion are
The Thomas Crown affair following the type of Bond he did
The November man is the type of Bond he wanted to do.
Then that would mean Craig isn't playing Bond at all.
I've been saying Brosnan's best Bond was TAILOR for over a decade now, and it shows that when riding a good script and properly directed, Broz could have played the right-bastard aspect wonderfully. I suppose you could take CROWN and TAILOR and give them a shake and come up with a pretty well rounded 007, but then we never got a mctiernan or boorman bond.
I have exactly the same view. I saw GE and hated it. Thought Brosnan was awfully miscast and directed. Then I saw TTOP and thought "is this the bl**dy same actor I just saw on the that steaming pile masquerading as a Bond movie"?
I think McTiernan would have been a perfect dierctor for Bond and yes Pierce could have done with no problem the darker Bond Craig is portraying right now and Timothy portrayed in Licence to kill.
I guess if mix Pierce's Part in the tailor of Panama with Thomas Crwon then we would have gotten the Modern Sean Connery in the eyes of everyone.
I still think he is the modern Sean Connery, at least thats how i see him but i guess very few agree with me on that point of view
His Bond is so boring and straight down the line. He's a wafer thin character with no edge, humour or danger.
I think Tarantino could have got a decent performance from Pierce. He really needed a director who didn't just treat him like a prop and actually demanded a dramatic performance.
He never (IMO) convinced in terms of being someone of a military background. He always lacked that air of inner steel/resolve. He plays it like the international playboy - Roger Moore light, without the witty scripts and great stunts.
I am not a huge fan of Pierce but I do think that he has the capacity to deliver a much better performance but was never given the chance. Or rather, it was never demanded of him - by the directors, by EON, nor ultimately by himself.
Of course we probably wouldn't have the Craig Bonds without Brosnan's Bond making Bond cool again.
And Brosnan wouldn't probably get the parts he did in Crown and Tailer withoutBond. Maybe ..idk.
Exactly.
Everything played out the way it had to. No need for thinking "it should have been such and such".
BP's Bond movies are absolutely ok the way they are. Sure, here and there a bit of nip and tuck (in DAD probably a bit more) and some things could have been better, but that really goes for a lot of Bond movies.
I don't know if Brosnan made Bond cool - definitely commercially successful though.
Agree with most of what you say though. Brosnan used his casting as Bond to build a highly successful career outside of Bond - I have always admired him for the way that he did that.
I find it increasingly odd how Craig's career outside of Bond seems to have tanked.
Well Pierce in so many recent interviews says that James Bond is the gift that keeps giving and helped him to create his own production company and from that company came The Thomas Crown affair.
He has said he wished his scripts would have been more character driven or had more chances go the Ian Fleming way but he is still happy with that he did and well actors tend to be too harsh with themselves.
And i think he wouldn't mind if people tell him his their favorite Bond even if its not the eay he wanted to play this character
How is the character of Brosnan in The Tailor of Panama Bondian? Even remotely? The only thing he has in common with Bond is his face (at the time). Otherwise, Andy Osnard is back-stabbing, self-centered and self-interested, vulgar, scheming, overall he is as foreign to Bond as a character as one can be. Great character, but Bond he is not. Neither was Roger Moore's character in North Sea Hijack or William of Baskerville in The Name of the Rose.
I'm not surprised. Craig has little charisma or charm. He is the typical mean-looking somewhat unattractive bully villain kind of type.
Had he not been cast as Bond he would be playing the typecast henchman as supporting role in movies.
And he's not that good an actor either as many here claim him to be.
Still, he is good as Bond and fits the current style perfectly. At least EON gives Craig the movies he is able to do and shine in it. Something they should have done better for Brosnan.
I agree on balance. Not the great actor he is made out to be but suits this take on Bond perfectly - mainly because it's been built around him and he has a clear idea of what he wants to achieve with the role.
My view was always that Brosnan was desperate to be the anti-Dalton. He had bought this idea that Dalton was a failure and wanted to get as far away from his approach as possible. That's why he ended up as a poor man's Roger Moore. Had he shown a bit of respect to his predecessor and tried to learn from the mistakes and successes, he might have been a better Bond.
Also, it's not like Craig's scripts are amazing. But Craig has built a persona and character that is convincing. I think he's read at least some of the novels as well, like Dalton did. That is where an actor can draw inspiration from - not just the scripts, which have frankly never been works of high art. Brosnan didn't do his homework as an actor. By just bringing Pierce Brosnan/ Remmington Steel to the screen he failed to fulfill his potential as Bond. That approach worked for Roger Moore but Moore also actually had an idea about who his Bond was. A lot of the humour and irony came from Rog - he saw the inherent humour and was doing Bond self-parody way before Austin Powers was even dreamt of.
Ok i dont remeber Pierce to have lack of respect of Dalton or syaing he was a failure. He just wanted to give his best as Bond and his inspiartions were Roger Moore and Sean Connery and blended the best of them to make his won version.
Scripts may not be amazing with Craig but are better than the ones we had with Pierce and i still enjoyed his 4 films as Bond very much.
Now i think Pierce deserves more Credit as Bond than the one you give him and think Pierce had a great ability to play both version of Bond.
The darker gritty version we saw with Craig and Dalton or the lighter one we had with Roger Moore and to a certain extent Lazenby.
Only Three Bond actors for me are able to portray both versions of the character anf those were Dalton who by choice went the more fleming style, Pierce Brosnan and Sean Connery
Roger Moore wouldn't have been able to portray the more action man, Craig wouldn't be belivable in the more comedic bond and Lazenby was too sweet to belive him he would hirt a woman.
Ive always said my top 3 are Sean Connery, Pierce Brosnan and Timothy Dalton since they are the three most balanced portrayals of the character.
Dalton goes a bitt further into the darker version but he is not as dark as Craig. That's ehy i can't understand why his Bond wasn't that accepted when he did so.
He came after Roger Moore and maybe ahead of his times bit his darker version did't go as far as Craig's version.
Personally i had an easier time with the transition i had from Moore to Dalton than From Pierce to Daniel Craig.
The Brosnan Craig transition was really hard for me to accept and at some point i was into the Craig is not Bandwagon and i was quite sacred on how would recive Dalton and to my very plasant it was a very easy transition to me.
He was just a little more intense and draker Than Connery but not as extreme as Craig.
We get to see Brosnan play the darker colors here, which are a part of any successful Bond interpretation, and something he really did not get much of a chance for in his Bond films, due both to material and direction (Apted letting him holler while racing through MI6 in the PTS was clearly barely even directing traffic, not actors -- it looks like Broz is imitating -- badly -- Harrison Ford running away from an about-to-explode bunker in RETURN OF THE JEDI.) Those darker colors are the same things everybody seems to go gaga over Craig for, when in fact Craig doesn't convince me in the slightest he is 'the guy.'
Best example off the top of my head is how Connery's Bond and Kerim discuss the girl and the decoding machine in FRWL. You definitely don't like hearing Bond say a lot of this or even his expression as he says it, but it IS part of the character, and for me, part of the greatest Bond movie and performance we're ever going to get, because even though Dalton goes 'by the books' and is right in so many ways, he still doesn't have the Connery magic alchemy with the camera (no criticism there, as nobody else does either.)
You shouldn't ever lose that this guy is a killer and can be a bastard.
For me the transition from Dalton to Brosnan was hard to take. It felt like a backwards move, like they were trying to go back to Roger but were unsuccessful.
Brosnan to Craig was easy for me to deal with - a step back onto the right path. I've not been 100% happy with Craig but I'm a much happier Bond fan than I was from 95-2004.
Now maybe i didnt feel the huge transition since i wtached them in a Bonathon to know all the Bond films inmissed in so many years
Take in account that this is my very first year as a true Bond fan and i wtached 20 movies in one month or three weeks.
For me the huge change was from Pierce to Craig and even more because i went dierctly from
Die another day to Casino Royale.
And i loved die another day so for me it was a rule that Bond was supossed to be like Brosnan played him and most of my family members who had a longer time watching Bond told me that the rule was playing Bond like Pierce did it, so for that's why in part i easily jumped into the craig is not bond bandwagon.
Why they changed the rule i loved so much, with time ive learned about the other actors who played and how the majority's favorite was Sean Connery and how many described the way i saw Pierce.
So its not the same being warned that i will see changes in style and watching them all in a marathon.
Than in 2002 watching Die another day in theaters to latter in 2006 watching a whole different idea of Bond.
Incidentally, I also don't get the impression Brosnan read that many of the novels. He may have picked up one or two but I doubt he read many more than that.
Then again, while he was playing Bond, Connery only ever admitted to reading a couple as he said he found they lacked humour...and he's widely regarded as the best Bond.
I admire Dalton for putting in the effort but it seems to be that not many people these days care about how much an actor knows (or doesn't) about Fleming.
Sadly, Dalton and his films seem to still be regarded as a weaker period in Bond history by wider society. Certain media forms still like to like to take the occasional swipe towards him...I only heard one just the other day.
Yes, but I don't think Connery complained that the chAracter was wafer thin, unlike Brosnan, who has spoken about how underwritten his role was as Bond.
If Connery did feel the character needed fleshing out, he did that himself and by working with Terrence Young. Brosnan needed a director like Young to help him define his take on Bond.
Brosnan plays a darker character in The Tailor of Panama but that does not make him Bond. he's far more self serving scheming, cowardly than Bond ever was or ever will be. In other words he's not heroic. Great character and great movie. But he certainly did not play Bond.
He was not playing James Bond in that film, nor was he playing Bond in the Thomas Crown Affair.
Both roles were more suited to him than the character of James Bond however. I'm quite sure of that now.
His best Bond performance in my opinion was DAD. In certain parts of that film he finally gets the part down, after 7 years at it. He was awful to average in all the others, although he certainly always looked the part.
Brosnan is actually brilliant in TTOP. i just wish hed had a director for Bond who could have captured just a fraction of that quality for Bond
GE is one of my all time favorite films, and I love the first half of TND. However once the parking deck car sequence ends that film goes bad quick and TWINE/DAD continue to be poor. The scripts/casting decisions in his time as Bond were really too bad.
Right there with you, pal. I assume this is why Broz lobbied so much for Scorsese and Ang Lee, that on some level he knew he needed help that wasn't going to come from the writing end of things (unless they had a writer/director combo like QT.)
Would probably be a lot of fun to read stories about John Boorman battling Eon over making DAD in the alt-verse ... then again, we'd probably be in the QUANTUM boat of having DVDs that didn't include director commentaries if that did actually come to pass.